Yeah... living in the Treasure Valley area (Boise metro region), it's been getting pretty bad out here. And they don't have 2021 data listed, which, IMO, was worse than 2020. It just settled in early and never left all summer long. Quite vile, and makes being outside a challenge. I did a lot of outdoor work in 2020 and I'm pretty sure I've not been quite the same since, and I seem far more sensitive to smoke than I was.

> ...“which means an increasing portion of the particulate matter that people are exposed to is unregulated.”

Forests, annoyingly, don't respond to regulations on if they're allowed to burn or not. And while it's certainly popular and at least somewhat reasonable to blame a lot of it on climate change, the reality is that this has been inevitable for quite a few decades - the question was just, "When?"

Starting in the late 1930s, the US Forest Service had their 10AM Policy of basically putting forest fires out as soon as possible. Starting in the late 1940s, after WWII, they actually had the mechanized equipment and airplanes to start doing that effectively - with a corresponding reduction in acres burned.

Unfortunately, "things that can't go on forever won't," and that approach to forest management can't go on forever. The forest ecosystems, especially in the west, need to burn. Lots of species of pine only seed after fire, and it goes through clearing the underbrush, killing weak trees, etc. But the "standard forest fires" of the western pine forests aren't the catastrophic crowning events that have been more and more standard for the past decade or two - because there's so much fire load from 70 years of not burning, when they do catch fire, they go off like a bomb. And that's before you find things like the pine beetle killed swaths of forest down in New Mexico, which means thousands of acres of wind-dried, long dead pine, waiting to catch fire. One doesn't fight that, one gets out of the way.

So, unfortunately, climate change or not, this sort of thing was inevitable, eventually. And there's really no chance to do much until the forests "reset" back to a more sustainable fire load.

And, yes, I'll agree with "extreme" pollution levels. I've measured PM2.5 into the 150s, and PM10 north of 250 out here before. It's... disgusting? Vile? Human-toxic? Just being outside is painful.

I've been dealing with it indoors with air filters - I have one of the "build a box of filters around a fan" style filters that does a fine job of keeping indoor air quality acceptable, at least on a fairly tight house. The furnace filter does a good job too, though I'm pretty sure I need to get the ducts cleaned.

For outdoor work, I've given up and gone to wearing a 3M painter's half mask with P100 filters. They do a fine job of it, and the newer-style P100s (white with pink grids, not the solid pink ones) breathe freely enough for just about anything with two of them on the mask. One could run with them, though I'm not sure that sounds a great idea.

I'm seriously considering a winter project of building something positive pressure, though. A filtered feed into a face mask would be very nice for outdoor work on the "really bad" years. It's not just breathing the air that's vile, it's the air in my eyes. Running down the road on a motorcycle in bad air is just... not enjoyable. And we don't have the surplus vehicles to all take cars when there's vehicle conflict. I'm seriously debating rigging the positive air pressure filtration setup to a motorcycle helmet as well. Just... get me something less-vile when riding.

All this to say, "Yeah, it's gotten really bad out west." I just don't see a path for it to change any time soon, so I'm trying to adapt to it as best I can.

Some writings of mine on non-internet-connected air quality sensors and details on the filters I've built: https://www.sevarg.net/2021/08/28/temtop-air-quality-sensors...