350 kms of Grey

This covers our drive from Mallacoota to Canberra on 6 February 2020.  Mallacoota was quite smoky a couple of hours after sunrise.
Here is a zoom to the sun.
This shows our route imposed on a clip from the NSW Fires near me site.  The bit in Victoria could also be coloured grey but stupid State borders block NSW from showing that.  As close as I can work out the first 140 km of our route were through a fireground.
Welcome to NSW!  It was very puzzling how some signs had burnt completely to brown, others in a similar position appeared untouched and yet others were burnt to various degrees.
All the way along Imlay Rd (57 km) the forest had been cut back an extra 10 m on either side.  Thoughts about stable doors being closed sprang to mind.
This shows some burnt low vegetation and an example of piled rocks,  There are quite a few of these, which I assume is someone having fun with a log grabber.
Or a backhoe, when not cleaning out a culvert!
As we went into Bondi Creek (about 56 km) smoke was evident.
And there is no smoke without fire.
This was a Forestry/Roads horde cleaning up the sides of the Monaro Hwy above the intersection with Imlay Rd.

I think this was taken somewhere around Bibbenluke showing both the smoke haze and the dry country.
Somewhere between Nimmitabel and Cooma.

This sign annoys the squarrox out of me.  Check Live Traffic - and get a ticket for using your phone while driving.
I think the next two are approaching Bredbo and show the Southern end of the Orroral fire.

The climbing lane North of Bredbo where the Clear Range fire came across the Monaro Highway.

This shows the Orroral fire from Royalla.  It may be a backburn.
I'd hoped to include an image of the pink roundabout at ANZAC Pde where a plane accidentally dumped 2000 litres of retardant  but it had been cleaned up.  (Actually, given the ACT Government's propensity to put colours on roundabouts as an indicator of inclusiveness, I wonder if it wasn't an intentional effort.  Having it on the vista to the War Memorial would stir up the RSL!)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more