September 2020 in San Francisco started with smoke. Lots and lots of wildfire smoke. By the 14th, we experienced 28 consecutive spare the air days - a record number. Many of the fires in the Bay Area had been mostly contained, but large fires as far away as Oregon and Southern California blanketed the entire West Coast under a blanket of toxic smoke on a scale never seen before. If 2020 was not already stressful enough, seeing evidence that the world around us was burning up added a whole new layer of anxiety.
During this time I was working long days, and with the all the smoke I had little motivation to get out and take pictures. I did take a few opportunities, and the first was on the weirdest day ever. On September 9th, we woke up to darkness. Something was definitely wrong. As the morning wore on, the sky lightened a bit, but became a deep shade of orange. It was unlike anything we had seen before. The first three images below are from that day.
The rest of the images are of various pieces of street art that I took walking back from the farmers market.