Fire in the sky.

Sunset last night at 11:35pm. The fires burning on the Kenai Peninsula have gotten bigger, up to 30,000 acres and the smoke gets worse by the day. The Sterling Highway, the only road down to Homer, is closed on and off as they fight the fire. People are having to wait 2-3 hours before a pilot car takes them through one direction at a time.

Here in Anchorage, the smoke is filling the bowl the city sits in and the Chugach Mountains are holding the smoke in. You wake up in the morning with a headache and terrible taste in your mouth. We need wind to push out the smoke and rain to help knock the fire down. It is giving us some amazing sunsets, though.

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Definitely not a Disney kind of night.

Mama and baby moose were back in the yard around 11pm last night for a visit and feeding session. At 1am, there was a loud noise in the backyard and Devany jumped up in time to see a grizzly bear race past the house after the moose. We could hear what we thought was the calf—but might well have been the mom—bleating loudly in the thick woods across the road from our place for about one-half hour. It was a terrible sound. I’m not about to hike in there this morning to see if one of them became part of the food chain. Sometimes Nature is hard.