Maggie Slepian

If there’s one thing we can say about summer 2021, it’s that while it was extremely hot, it wasn’t a Hot Girl Summer. Or a Hot Boy Summer, or a Hot Nonbinary Summer, or a Hot Vax Summer. For those of us in the west, our summer was spent in a haze of smoke, checking the Air Quality Index before going on a run or bike ride, and nervously tracking fire status and locations as we tried to plan trips. We waited months for the higher elevation regions to melt out, only to have an early, vicious start to fire season. Once it began (in JUNE!) it never stopped.

If we were able to take our trips, they were smoky as hell. Sometimes we changed itineraries and locations, and sometimes we just cancelled and sat at home, gazing out towards mountains we knew were on the horizon, but were obscured by a layer of brownish-grey smoke. My buddy in Tahoe has spent the last month choking on some of the worst air in the entire world, and I just opened an email to see that my five-day backpacking trip in the Sierra is officially cancelled. 

The east saw wildly varied weather, including everything from relentless humidity to devastating flooding. Mask mandates made a comeback as hospital beds filled up and Covid numbers spiked again. The one concert I was going to this year was just cancelled because of the band’s resistance to Montana’s lax vaccine requirements, but on the horse job I just got back from I was surrounded by people who injected horse dewormer into their mouths instead of getting vaccinated.

I was so lucky to get a thru-hike in on the Colorado Trail, but my heart was in my throat every time I checked the conditions in the few weeks before leaving. While the fires were minimal—my friends in Montana were getting the brunt of the smoke at this point—Colorado was hit with the worst monsoon season that many locals had ever seen. Instead of the expected one-hour showers and thunder around 5pm each day, the storms were violent and earth-shaking, sometimes starting as early as 11am and raging for 12 hours. Lightning struck trees near my tent on two separate nights, and another ground strike left a crater near my campsite, still smoking as I walked past the next morning. I spent hours huddled in my tent, flinching at the explosions overhead and the hail pelting my tent so hard the material sagged onto my head. This too, was not normal. As I write this, parts of Tennessee are drowning while the west burns. Our drought is so bad that ranchers can’t get hay for their livestock and our rivers are at records lows.

These violent weather patterns aren’t a fluke, and they aren’t getting better. Each change has a butterfly effect, from the erosion to the mudslides to the tens of thousands of acres burned to the ground across the west. The 2021 IPCC report said that even if we halt carbon emissions now, the earth will still warm for the next 30 years because of the buildup in our atmosphere, likening it to a runaway train that can’t brake immediately.

Sometimes it feels like we are living in the season finale of planet earth, and I’m not the only one with these heavy feelings. I don’t take for granted what we have now, and I’m hoping as the impact spreads to every corner of the country and all parts of the globe, collective action will be taken. Not by individuals—we’re already biking to the store and recycling our cans—but by the major corporations profiting from the fossil fuels with no regard for how they leave our only home planet for future generations.