The wildfire smoke was messing with the colors quite a bit that day (we were about 7 miles from the Wrights Spring wildfire at the time)

It looked almost like Venus the following morning when we packed up our camping gear to head out. (we were in a bit of a rush as one might guess)

I thought it was fallout with crazy high-def mods

I think that the sparsely scattered but large trees contribute to that illusion. As if the devs were lazy and just threw some of the same asset around.