Family Photos

Being both an architectural photographer and an international skating judge, my cousin Brett Drury gets to travel a lot.

Recently, he was flying over his old digs here in Colorado, and managed to snag a couple snapshots of the Hayman fires.

If you’re a flatlander, let a more experienced eye tell you what you’re seeing. In this first picture, what you should see is an endless view of jagged granite, so seemingly huge that the entire planet must be made of shear cliffs and the occassional icepack. Above, a sky so blue you’d think your L.A. sunset had been turned upside down.

In the second picture, the huge gray-white smear on the left side isn’t clouds; it’s smoke.

Normally, that line of cloud running horizontally along the top would be just that — a horizontal line. Everything under that bottom edge is nothing but smoke.

Now, assuming the plane is at 33,000 feet, and the mountain range runs from 8,000-14,000 feet, you’re looking at anywhere from 19 to 25 thousand feet of smoke.

That’s more than three or four miles of soot and ash, straight up.