Evaluating our understanding of smoke from wild and prescribed fires can benefit from downwind measurements that include both inert tracers to test production and transport and reactive species to test chemical mechanisms. We characterized smoke from fires in coniferous forest fuels for >1000 hours over two summers (2017 and 2018) at our Montana surface station and found a narrow range of key properties. DPM/DCO was 0.1070 +/- 0.0278 or about half the age-independent ratios obtained at free troposphere elevations. The average absorption Angstrom exponent across both years was 1.84, or about half the values available for very fresh smoke. Brown carbon (BrC) was persistent (~50% of the absorption at 401 nm) in both years, despite differences in smoke age and transport. DBC/DCO doubled from 2017 to 2018, but the average across two years was within 30% of recent airborne measurements. Switching from a 1.0 to a 2.5 micron cutoff increased the mass scattering and mass absorption coefficients suggesting super micron particles impact the optical properties of moderately aged smoke. O3 was elevated ~6 ppb on average over a full diurnal period when wildfire smoke was present, and smoke-associated O3 increases were highest (~9 pbb) at night suggesting substantial upwind production. NOx was almost entirely local in origin. NO2 spurred high rates of NO3 production in the presence of wildfire smoke (up to 2.44 ppb/hr) and potentially at least one nighttime BrC formation event that could have impacted next-day photochemistry.