Smoky mountains

If the sky is clear enough, you can see Mount Baker in Washington State from Willows Beach in Victoria, so I recognized it immediately from the runway at Victoria International Airport.

The first leg of the flight back to Hades this year was to include a four-hour layover in Calgary, where all the traffic congregates in one wing while the other two are oddly deserted.

First, however, I had to get across British Columbia, so we flew north-east - and directly at Mount Baker.

We veered to the left of it.

I had never seen it so close -- which is a wee bit alarming, because as lovely as it is, it's a volcano.

And not far beyond lay other terrors.

The Interior of British Columbia has been relentlessly savaged by wildfire this summer. This first plume flowed like a flesh-coloured serpent across the horizon. I think it was somewhere near Harrison Springs.

Below us, smoke bubbled up like a cauldron of burning witch's brew, from some conflagration in a hidden valley.

And not long before we reached Calgary, we saw this rising somewhere out of the Canadian Rockies.

I had to explain to younger daughter, when she saw the photo, that this, unlike Mount Baker, wasn't a real volcano.

A pall of smoke spread hundreds of miles over Alberta. I saw it from the plane to Hades.