Colorado Writer Argues Smoke Has Replaced Summer

The smoke doesn’t just sit on the horizon; it settles into your lungs. It coats the back of your throat and turns a sunrise hike into a chore. For Nicolais, who has spent decades navigating the high country, this is no longer an occasional inconvenience. It has become a new season.

In a recent opinion piece for the Colorado Sun, Nicolais lays out a grim reality that many of us have felt but perhaps not fully articulated. The traditional four seasons — Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter — are gone. Or rather, they have been reorganized. We now live in a cycle of Fall, Winter, Spring, and Smoke.

It is a sharp observation that cuts through the marketing fluff of outdoor gear companies. Summer, the season we moved here for, has been hijacked by haze.

Nicolais describes the shift in his own routine with a quiet, weary precision. He prefers long-trek backpacking trips, seeking the "relative solitude" of mountain forests and valleys. He calls it his own form of Zen retreat, a place filled with bird calls and babbling brooks rather than the ping of email updates. But that retreat is fractured now. Hiking 20 miles at elevation with a 30-pound backpack becomes a slog when every breath sucks particulates into your lungs. The view from the summit, once a reward for the climb, is now often blurred by a ceaseless haze coating the vista.

This isn't just about aesthetics. It’s about physiology and logistics. Even car camping loses its luster when the Forest Service has to put the kibosh on campfire-toasted s’mores. The ritual of the evening fire, a staple of Western camping culture for generations, is increasingly at the mercy of air quality indices.

Nicolais, a Colorado native closing in on 50 years here, remembers a different kind of summer. He recalls tracking 90-degree heat waves as the extreme, not 100 degrees. In his youth, afternoons in July and August brought thunderstorms that swept through in 20 minutes. As a high school lifeguard in Lakewood, he and his colleagues would take bets on what time the "storm break" would arrive. Those storms broke the heat and cooled evenings just in time for cookouts and Little League games.

That rhythm is broken. Now, summers are defined by water restrictions, fire bans, and the hum of air conditioning units running round the clock. Newscasts include regular updates on forest fires, and checking air quality before going outside has become standard procedure. Sometimes the smoke gets so bad that the mountains disappear from sight in Denver entirely.

The behavioral shift is stark. Just as skiers check for powder days in winter, hikers now check for no-smoke days in summer. Nicolais has taken to "hate-following" the National Interagency Fire Center, scrolling through maps detailing current large wildfires in the U.S. and Canada. He calls it "doomsday scrolling for the climate-change apocalypse." The graphics make it look like the entire American West and much of Canada are aflame.

He notes that former Gov. Bill Owens should perhaps not have been so publicly lampooned for his claim that "all of Colorado is burning." In a way, the smoke makes it look exactly like that.

The change hits close to home for outdoor enthusiasts who made Colorado their primary residence for the sake of access to nature. It changes a primary reason for making this state home. When you stand on a ridge and expect to see the next range, but instead see a gray wall of particulate matter, the magic drains out of the landscape.

Nicolais doesn’t offer a solution in his piece, only an observation. He watches the change happen year by year, the seasons blurring into a singular, hazy experience. The smoke is not a visitor anymore. It’s a resident.