growing back ...

I was driving home, "the back way" from somewhere on the other side of town, the other day ... I got lost in thought and missed a turn off (it is an easy one to drive right on past if you are not looking for it) ... but I found some nice yummy gum leaves for my pet stick insects, and the view was worth the half a km detour ...
This is looking toward Canberra, from some of the areas that were burnt in the bushfires 3 years ago ...



That big black tree has lots of green leaves sprouting from it too (most are out of the top of the photo, but there are a few you can see on the side of the trunk) if you click on the photo and look at the full size version, you can see the Telstra tower on a distant hill (near the middle of the photo)
They have also built a bushfire memorial near there too (this is actually not far from the worst hit part of town), but I only found out about that a couple of days after I drove past (I think they probably had the opening of it on the 18th ... which I think was the day I drove past ... I noticed some makeshift sign actually, but didn't pay any attention at the time ... but I did get a not so close up look at it on Sunday - from the back of DH's motorbike as we whizzed past it on out way out to Tidbinbilla Tracking station (a favourite place for his group of mortorbike riding mates to ride out to for coffee/etc - lots of nice "twisties" in the road out there - lol)

On the way home I also stopped at the creek where I took that photo of the dog impersonating a drowned corpse, that I posted here the other day (the turn off I missed was the one to that river crossing ;-) ...
It had been raining, so there is a LOT more water flowing ...



I think the rock that the dog was lying on in that other picture ( see http://aykayem.blogspot.com/2006/01/this-is-not-what-it-looks-like-lol.html ) is under the water somewhere at the bottom right hand corner of this picture ... lol
During the bushfires the vegetation around this creek burnt right down to the waterline (and I mean that litteraly - it was a few weeks after the fires when I took that dog photo there - and the only bits of green were a few blades of grass that had just re-grown right next to the water) ... but, as you can see in the photo, it is slowly growing back ...

This is a photo of some of the logs that are piled up on the upstream side of the causeway, from when the river must have been flowing even faster some time (they are piled up on the other side of the cement causeway that the road goes over - which was behind me when I was taking the other photo) ... it had been raining and the colours and textures of that wet, and partly burnt, wood are amazing ...