Telluride Times, August 6, 2026

For the majority of my life, I have lived in clear, clean air in two basic flavors, low humidity and high.

That being said, during a couple of four-year stints when I was young, I breathed very badly polluted air on a regular basis.  In Southern California in the late 70s, largely during summer, the air was so mustardy-brown and acidic from vehicles idling in LA that the foothills a mile away from my college town were not visible, as offshore winds blew the smog our way. In New York City in the early 80s, literal soot, black carbon and sulfur dioxide (older diesel motors and low-grade heating oil) made the winters particularly bad.  

Like many, I think I have always been both grateful for and have taken for granted the delicious smell and feel of the air in the forest, the desert, and at the ocean; and so when things go south, as has been the case in Ridgway this summer with the Gold Mountain Fire, I am taking stock again of the privilege of air in all its pristine and natural glory.

On July 13 the air quality index (AQI) in Ridgway reached 281, which resides in the Very Unhealthy category (200-300). To put that, which felt strangulating and post-apocalyptic, into perspective: because of Canada’s wildfire situation, Toledo registered an AQI reading of over 800 and Detroit over 500. In July, because of this wildfire smoke in the northeastern portion of the US, air quality alerts applied to over 150 million Americans.

Wildfire pollution contains yet another complex mix of toxins. I can attest that it causes headaches, dry eyes and sinus issues very quickly. What is more dangerous, however, are the ultra-fine PM2.5 particles of ash that penetrate deep into the lungs; and the VOC’s or Volatile Organic Compounds that react with sunlight to create massive amounts of ground level ozone, a reactive and oxidative gas that “sunburns” the lungs.

With temperatures reaching an unheard of 95 degrees here this summer (unofficial, and one friend said 96), life has been a dance of keeping blinds and curtains closed, opening windows but only when we can be vigilant about wind changes, cranking the air purifier, and staying inside. On clear days, we have counted our blessings while knowing that close by, where the firefighters were doing their work, the air was not clean at all. Which put them – if it were possible — in even higher standing for the staggering job they do.

Meanwhile, we are lucky enough to have an air filter, which bought at the beginning of COVID.

And, with our N95 masks at hand, we have done the best we could to protect our lungs – even while others could be heard playing pickleball at nearby courts!

Those of us lucky enough to have breathed fresh air all our lives sometimes forget the mystery of the 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of air we take in each day. We live immersed in an invisible ocean of atmosphere, one pressing on us constantly with a force of 14.7 pounds per square inch—yet we are blissfully unaware of it until something changes.

Of course, air quality alerts – and the effects of bad air quality — are nothing new to many of us who remember Telluride in the 80s, when particulate issues due to the use of wood burning stoves earned us a designation of having worse air quality than Denver. This was handled in the only real way possible: to ban wood burning, with a few exceptions.

In high school, several billion years ago, I had to take the Seattle city bus for an hour to get home, which required a transfer downtown. Every day I would see the same characters on the sidewalks near Nordstrom and The Bon Marché department stores, which, at the time, were primarily Moonies and Scientologists plus this one omnipresent and unassuming man who would sort of mumble the following to anyone passing by, in a completely peaceable way: “The air is moving; it may be alive.”

Years later, I learned he was a familiar downtown fixture. Some thought he stood there because swirling maritime winds funneled through that particular intersection. Whatever message he meant to deliver, I understood then viscerally and now more generally that the air is always moving—carrying scents of forests, the sea, the city, or smoke. Carrying sounds from birdsong to sirens – and carrying the thousand things borne on the wind.

And certainly this moving ocean of air is worth appreciating every time we breathe clean air deep into our lungs.