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Emile Ducke

July 31—Ekaterina Kondrateva, 43, her daughter Diana, 7, Tatiana Venzel, 39, and her daughter Anna, 1, spend a day at the beach as thick smoke hangs over Yakutsk. “We have a very short summer,” Kondrateva said. “In the winter, we have the fog. In the summer, it’s the smoke. Of course we’re tired of the smoke.”

Other volunteer firefighters take a break.

Firefighter Yegor Fedorov, 60, rests amid heavy smoke from the nearby forest fire.

Oleg Shcherbakov, 37, fights the fire near Kyuyorelyakh.

The local firefighters are mostly farmers who set out to extinguish the fire with mainly the tools, tractors, and clothing they would usually use to work in the fields.

Firefighters refill their water tank before returning to the blaze.

Volunteer firefighter Kim Konstantinov, 36, extinguishes a fire near Kyuyorelyakh.

The couple had completed harvesting hay from their fields for the winter, but then the haystacks were burned by the fire.

Galina Diakonova, 67, milks one of the seven cows and around a dozen calves she and her partner raise in Yakutia. But after a nearby wildfire, just three of 20 returned home from pasture, covered in soot, some burned, and the cows started to produce less milk after the experience, she said.

Blocks of ice lie in an abandoned permafrost cellar of Kyuyorelyakh’s butter-making plant.