Gold Bar Fire May 13th 2016

View of the smoke plume at about 4:45 pm May 13th as I was driving home.

I've never seen such a red sunset.  All the smoke rose from the east and rushed at high altitude to the west until it cooled off and formed high altitude cirrus clouds that began to drift back east.  Weird.

The smoke got thick and you couldn't even see the sun anymore, just the glow

View from our house of the smoke rising from the SE over the river and rushing to the west

View to the southwest as the westbound smoke rises, cools, and turns into cirrus clouds that begin to drift northeast.

We could hear the helicopters going back and forth from the river to the fire about 5 miles upriver to the east.  While they were dumping water we began to see breaks in the smoke plume but the fire continued to burn.

Sorry for the picture quality, night shots are hard!  The orange splotch is the moon in the southwestern sky, which was a brighter and darker orange than I have ever seen because of all of the smoke particulates in the air.  The white splotches are the low voltage lighting in our yard.  The sky was also glowing to the southeast, but it was mostly blocked from view by Mt. Haystack and it was too low intensity to capture with our camera.