After the Fire

July 20 we could see a forest fire developing 3 kilometres away. It burned for 3 days and finally was extinguished by the professional and volunteer firefighters, helped by a night of rain. 
Jan and I decided to drive up behind the fire site and see how it looks today. I had walked up from the other side in August and thought it would be interesting to see how it looked now.
And this is what we found. Where the moss or vegetation survived the fire it seems to have started to regrow so there were more patches of greeness than in August. There were also a lot more trees that had fallen over. As all the bare rock shows the organic, peaty soil actually burned away in a lot of places, the roots of the trees also burned, and with no roots and no soil the trees simply fell over.
Where the edge of the unburnt forest looked singed in August it has completely greened up again, which means there is a weird boundary where completely destroyed forest and completely OK forest are right up against each other. One step and you have changed zones completely.
It's a mess, but it's an interesting mess. Hopefully I'll be keeping an eye on it for the next few years...