Smoke Gets In Your...Well, Everything

So right on the heels of the Tamarack fire, which burned to within 4 1/2 miles of us, comes the Caldor fire!

We had lots of smokey nastiness from the Tamarack fire, then the Dixie fire...but Caldor seems to want to up the ante and show what it can do.

Just for reference, normally our backyard, coop & skies look like this: 

Today, our air quality went to shit and by 2PM it looked like this:

It only got worse from there.

At 4PM the air quality climbed into the dark purple 'Hazardous' range (the worst it can get) at 488.

And at that point things took a turn for the surreal. Our normal time for full dark this time of year is 8-9PM. Today it got full dark at 4PM--all due to the Caldor fire smoke. Bear in mind that this fire is 35 miles away from us. The light flecks in the photos are raining bits of ash. The same view as above, out my back door towards the chicken coop at 4PM.

You can almost see the chicken coop, below. The chickens were so addled at this point they didn't go to roost in the coop as they normally do when it gets dark, they just sat down wherever they were in the yard. The kid and my husband went out and picked them up one by one and stuck them in the coop.

The view from my front porch, looking across the street at 4:45PM. Full dark at this point, the flash fired. Fairly heavy ashfall.

It stayed like this, only lightening a bit at 6PM. This is the same shot as the one above. My daughter said it looked like the sun went down and then came back up...except it was rising in the southwest.

All of this is absolutely unreal, never in my life have I seen anything like this, and hope I never do again.