Today was the day to get out there and see what the fires have done to the Blue Mountains. The 'Gospers Mountain', 'Grose Valley', and 'Ruined Castle' fires are finally out, and the recent rains have been and gone.
I headed on up the Bells Line of Road, out past Kurrajong, through Bilpin and beyond.
The volunteer firies are the nation's heroes, of course. Funny that nobody seems to be thanking the Government for anything. Wonder why!
The fires were so hot that the soil is likely to be totally sterilised. Much of the native vegetation needs fire to regenerate. But that might not work when the soil is completely dead. And with a billion or more vertebrate animals incinerated, many whole species driven to likely extinction, and an expected explosion of feral predator numbers, things are not looking good in the native animal department.
I wasn't the only photographer out there today. In fact there might even be a photography-led-recovery going on in the Blue Mountains' economy. There were very few visitors for quite a while there.
There's a certain beauty in all this devastation. But there's been huge suffering too. And it may well never recover its old beauty.
