Прогноз погоды... ЖАРА!

So, I've been contemplating the spate of recent news concerning the ongoing heat wave in European Russia. The average daily high in Moscow has been EIGHTEEN DEGREES ABOVE SEASONAL AVERAGES! Multiple days of 100°, with high humidity (for Europe) and not a cloud in the sky. Moscow has broken every record on the books since tsarist times.

Conditions have been gravely worsened by pervasive peat fires--Moscow is surrounded by bogs, and peat (apparently) spontaneously ignites when its moisture content is below 40%... right now, it's so dry that the bogs' moisture content is 28%. These fires burn underground and are all but inextinguishable. (We've had some in Florida during droughty years, and they are blacken the skies and smell like burning rubber tires. Unpleasant.)

So there are now underground smudge fires around Moscow, worsening its already serious smog problem. Outside Moscow, gusty winds have fanned firestorms: The peat fires burning underground flare up and ignite the parched grasslands and forests on the surface. Villages in the Nizhny Novgorod region (to the south-east of Moscow, bordering the Tula area, where we're hiking) have been burned to cinders in a very short time. Putin has announced, essentially, "There's nothing anyone can do. You must leave the area."

Clearly, no one in his right mind will walk one hundred and twenty miles in 100° weather with unbreathable air.

I've spent the last three weeks preparing for this trip. Ran 10K a day for more than a month. Spent a fair amount of money on gear. My pack is ready to walk out the door. But discretion is the better part of valor... and I'm no fool.

I'll wait until Moscow forecasts are posted this coming Monday at several sites (weather.com, Accuweather, Wunderground and GISMETEO (Russia's Wunderground)) for the following weekend, August 6-8, during which we'll walk through Moscow oblast and into Tula oblast (Podol'sk to Chekhov, Chekhov to Serpukhov, Serpukhov to Dvorianinovo). I'll add the high temperatures, average them out, and if it's hotter than 90°, I'm canceling my hike. Right now the highs are all in the mid-90s to 100°. There's a cooling trend predicted, but it's later in the week, and likely is due to predictive models returning to historical norms, not to any hard meteorological data.

It's a tough decision, but there are enough variables in the equation that really bad weather all but assures a miserable experience.

I'll reschedule the hike for May, after classes are out. Tolstoy did it in the spring, and so can I.