Swansenreport

Fair question, and there’s no tidy number to hand you. Depends what you’re actually asking.

If you mean “how long has this felt like a fixture of summer” — that’s recent. Three years running now, according to one report out this week, dating the current stretch back to 2023 or so. That’s the year Canada’s wildfire season went full historic, the worst on record, and the smoke drifted south in a way nobody could ignore. Since then it’s settled into a pattern. Almost expected.

But treat that as the opening chapter, not the whole book. Smoke crossing the border is old news, dressed up as new news.

Go back to 1950. The Chinchaga Fire tore through northern British Columbia and Alberta — up to 4.2 million acres, still the largest single wildfire ever recorded in North America. The smoke plume reached Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland. Turned late September afternoons into twilight. September 24-25, 1950, to be exact.

Then 1989. Another brutal season, fires burning in northern Manitoba, smoke rolling into Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois. Skies gone hazy and yellow across the Upper Midwest.

So sporadic incursions go back three-quarters of a century, easy. What’s different now isn’t that the fires are more numerous — the 1980s actually saw more individual fires than today. It’s the acreage. Hotter, drier summers mean each fire burns bigger, deeper, longer. More smoke per fire, even with fewer fires overall.