Bushfire Fairytales

Simon was the designated tour guide and was in charge of the topographic maps; however, I had taken a quick peek at our planned route as we were packing up. It looked as if the dotted line of the trail passed perpendicularly across numerous contour lines on the map with barely a deviation…hum, I thought, maybe the marked trail was just an approximation. We set out down the trail…or maybe ‘up’ the trail would be more accurate. That map wasn’t kidding. The trail went straight up the mountain. Straight up! In Canada, we have something called ‘switch backs’, where whoever built the trail took the time to reduce the incline by making it loop back on itself, slowly gaining elevation. Not in Australia. I could just picture the trailblazers…rough, tough, sunburnt ex-cons bushwacking straight up the mountain, none of this sissy switchback stuff. Were you going up or not? So up we went, huffing and puffing with our big packs.Because the going was slow, we had plenty of time to take in our surroundings.


The forest was much different from our forests at home. For one, the majority of the trees were eucalyptus. Eucalyptus shed their bark annually. Simon described the process…the outer bark of the tree hardens to protect the inner bark, but the tree continues to grow from the inside until it is too big for its shell. The bark then begins to crack, peel and shed, resulting in strips of bark hanging from nearly every branch and littering the forest floor. Secondly, almost every tree shows evidence of being burnt at one point for another. Charred logs peek through the grass and the dirt is a mixture of red earth and burnt coals, evidence of a fiery past. At one snack break, we stood out on a rocky clearing, overlooking the surrounding mountains. Massive arcs of land overlapping each other in various shades of green as they faded into the distance. A plume of opaque smoke rose from one of the distant mountain tops. Forest fires.

Simon explained that the accumulated bark on forest floors was the perfect tinder for a blaze. That, combined with the multi-year drought Australia had been experiencing meant the entire state of Victoria could go up in one heck of a bonfire.This made me nervous. If a fire was burning just over the hill and the entire state was virtually littered in matchsticks, wouldn’t that mean that flames would soon be licking at our heels?Simon seemed unconcerned as we made camp for the night about an hour below the summit.



As I climbed into my sleeping bag I was more concerned with the inferno in my quad and calf muscles than the one in the far-off bush.The early morning air was heavy with fog and a thick frost covered the grass. We headed off, sorry…up, towards the summit climbing on all fours this time and glad we had left our big packs down where we had camped the night before. The mist seemed to be hanging around, stubborn to being burnt off by the suns warm rays. As we neared the top of the mountain however, we realized that the haze was not entirely due to the moisture in the air. From the summit we could see the real culprit. Dense, dark ochre coloured smoke hung like a blanket over the surrounding valleys as far as we could see to the south. Bushfires were burning. It turned out that the fires were actually controlled burns in surrounding areas and we were in no danger. Forests are burnt regularly, on purpose, to decrease the amount of ‘tinder’ and therefore risk of a real uncontrolled fire starting in the bush. That night, as we nursed different sore muscles from trudging straight down a mountain, we were graced with one of the most spectacular by-products of bushfires- a brilliant sunset. As the sun went down, the sky ignited in hues of mauve, crimson and burnt orange, creating a backdrop for the silhouettes of the mountain ranges covered in eucalyptus trees.