I spent a week in the Tuolumne Meadows area, camping with members of the Yosemite Association, about 8,600 feet above sea level. On our last evening, smoke from a fire raging to the west of Yosemite National Parka slowly ambled east, spilling darkly past the surrounding peaks of the high country and out into the Great Basin Desert. The light from the setting sun, fuliginously orange, glittered in reflection in one of the creeks feeding into the nearby Tuolumne River.