Late Monday night, Sept. 14, a fire sparked alongside the winding mountain highway that leads to White Pass, a ski area about 15 miles east of Packwood, Washington.

The fire started a few miles east of White Pass, in steep terrain. A ski area employee traveling U.S. Highway 12 spotted the early flames and reported it.

When fast-moving fires spread through Washington's Okanogan and Douglas counties over Labor Day weekend, the flames threatened the town of Bridgeport, forcing more than 200 farmworkers to spend a night sleeping outside in a city park in nearby Brewster. 

Paula Soto, whose family lives in Bridgeport, says many were not prepared for a wildfire.

Last May, opponents of Gov. Jay Inslee’s stay home order staged a “Hazardous Liberty” rally on the campus of the Washington Capitol. Guns outnumbered masks as speaker after speaker – mostly Republican officeholders and candidates – decried Inslee’s response to the pandemic as monarchical and an assault on individual freedom.

The sign–and-flag-waving crowd cheered the speakers as they lambasted Inslee. But one speaker in particular seemed to have attained a kind of celebrity status among many in the crowd.   

“I think you know who’s coming, doncha,” boomed the emcee. “No introduction needed: Sheriff Loren Culp.”

Correction, Sept. 18, 2020: A word to describe the amount of apples brought by Gov. Jay Inslee has been changed in this story to better reflect the amount of apples. The word "box" is now used instead of "bin." A "bin" of apples is a more technical industry term that is much larger than the actual number of apples in question.

Gov. Jay Inslee’s well-intentioned gesture of western Washington apples sent a detective hunting down the fruit in three counties this week.

Well, the weather didn’t pan out as forecasters had hoped. That means smoke should stick around until the end of this week. And, it’s not only the skies that are choked with the unhealthy levels of smoke.

“The cleanest air in (Washington) right now is unhealthy, and everybody else is very unhealthy or hazardous,” said Lauren Jenks, Washington Department of Health assistant secretary for environmental public health. 

With at least two dozen Oregon dairies threatened by raging wildfires, farmers are grappling with the delicate task of moving them to safer ground — or staying put.  

Willamette Valley dairyman Brandon Hazenberg of St. Paul, Oregon, has been hauling feed and bedding, and offering up his dairy as a landing pad for those in need. 

Usually, fire season starts to tamp down in September. This year has been anything but normal. In an unprecedented fire event, at least 80 fires started in Washington over Labor Day weekend.

Strong winds and extremely dry vegetation made for extreme fire danger throughout the Northwest.

“It’s a brutal combination of all of the above,” Washington Department of Natural Resources fire meteorologist Josh Clark said. “If there was a box to check, I would just say all of the above.”