Smoke from the coastal Woodside Fire drifted up the Russian River into Guerneville during Lazy Bear Week's 30th anniversary, canceling a pool party and pushing air quality into the "very unhealthy" purple band — while the LGBTQ+ bear festival, a fundraiser, mostly carried on.

Along the Russian River in Guerneville, the last days of July smelled like a barbecue nobody lit. The town wasn't burning — the Woodside Fire was some 30 miles west, on the Sonoma Coast near Timber Cove and Salt Point State Park, where it ignited Thursday afternoon, July 30. But smoke has its own geography, and it drifted inland and up the river corridor to settle over Guerneville just as Lazy Bear Week — the LGBTQ+ "bear" community's weeklong festival of pool parties, dances and campfires — reached its 30th anniversary.

Attendees renamed it fast. "We've started calling it hazy bear," one visitor from Southern California told KQED, adding that he'd woken up with "the dirtiest boogers I've ever encountered in my life. But you know what? The bears are making do."

The numbers behind the smell were real. Around 8:30 a.m. Friday, Russian River air-quality readings spiked to roughly 700 — more than four times the EPA's hazardous threshold of 300 — sitting the whole valley in the purple, "very unhealthy" band. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District extended a Spare the Air alert through Saturday. On the coast, the fire grew to about 151 acres and 40% containment by Saturday, August 1, with some 320 personnel on it; the Sonoma County Sheriff had already lifted all evacuation orders and warnings around 6 p.m. Friday as fire activity eased. Guerneville itself was never under evacuation — only under the smoke.

The festival bent without breaking. John Ledwith, the Lazy Bear Fund's creative director, told KQED that at least one pool party and several other events were canceled Friday because the smoke was too thick, but that people were still lining up when the air let them. "The smoke is steadily improving as the day continues," he said. Only one attendee, he said, had contacted organizers about health concerns.

The event is a fundraiser, which shaped the choices around it: no refunds for those who left early. Lazy Bear Week has raised $100,000 for the LYRIC Center for LGBTQQ+ Youth and $50,000 for Positive Images of Sonoma County. Some guests weighed that against their lungs and left anyway. One Los Angeles attendee, Ari Halevy, arrived Thursday, decided the air quality was "off the charts," and drove out to stay with a friend. "It sucks not to be able to get any of my money back," he said, "but I don't need to suffer anyway."

Someone walking the two-lane through downtown Guerneville this week would have found the redwoods still there, the river still there, and the light coming through it all a little orange.