Where in BC can you actually breathe during wildfire season?

One bar per community: the average number of smoky days it gets each summer. Read top to bottom and the province sorts itself almost perfectly by geography — the coast and the islands fill the clean end, the interior valleys the smoky end. The real surprise is Metro Vancouver. For all its traffic and its two and a half million people, it sits comfortably in the clean half. On smoke, an ocean beats a small population every time.

Hollow bars marked with an asterisk are estimates. Those towns — Nelson, Revelstoke, Fernie, Creston and the rest — have no government monitor, so their figures come from PurpleAir sensors residents put up themselves, over 2023–2025 rather than the full nine summers. Their rough tier is trustworthy; their exact position is not. There's more on why further down.

Pick an air zone below to narrow the ranking, the map and the year-by-year grid to that corner of the province. Press Escape, or choose All of BC, to bring everything back.

The same numbers, placed on the map. BC's smoke is made in the dry interior and then trapped by mountain valleys, while the Pacific keeps pushing clean air onto the coast until the ranges stop it. What you can see below is where those two forces meet.

Every summer on record, averaged day by day. The interior climbs steeply from mid-July and stays high into September. The coast barely has a smoke season at all — its line is nearly flat. At the height of it, in mid-August, the interior averages more than three times the coast. The clean places aren't just better on the bad days; they get far fewer of them.

Each row is a community, each column a summer, shaded by how many smoky days it got. The darker vertical bands are the province-wide fire years — 2018, 2021 and 2023 — when almost everywhere took a hit at once. If you're weighing up where to live, the rows worth finding are the ones that stay pale even in those columns.

Most BC communities have no air quality station at all — Nelson, Revelstoke, Fernie, Osoyoos and dozens more. The only readings those towns have come from PurpleAir sensors that residents bought and mounted on their own houses. Handled carefully, they still answer the question.

Carefully is doing a lot of work in that sentence. These sensors don't read on the same scale as government instruments. Four towns have both, and in the three where the sensors actually track the monitor, citizen readings run from about the same as the official number to nearly double it (0.95× to 1.86×) — so a town could sit a few places higher or lower than its asterisk suggests. In the fourth, Victoria, the surviving sensor barely correlates with the monitor at all — see the caution further down. Kamloops and Kelowna appear below in grey because we can check them against a real monitor; they show how far the drift goes.

Each town is the median of up to three sensors across the summers of 2023, 2024 and 2025. Using several sensors matters: a single one can fail silently for months, and often does.