A couple of phone calls this week--well before fire season--confirmed that when people see smoke in the hills, they worry.
But the smoke they saw (on May 10th) was from a controlled burn in the Ashland watershed, part of AFR, the Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project.
There is a science to getting forests to burn ONLY where you want them to burn, and agencies share information on that science through Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges. We learn about what the training involves from Chris Chambers of Ashland Fire & Rescue and Jeremy Bailey of the Nature Conservancy.