Burned Bog

Utikuma Burned.  It very nearly made me cry - my eyes welled with tears.  I wasn't quite prepared for how attached I was to that bog or my reaction to seeing it burned.  Seeing something so green and vibrant with life turned into burned and charred just makes my heart big and sore. I could be plunked down almost anywhere in it and know where I was before.  If you know Alberta bogs - which I'm fairly confident you probably don't - you would know that that is pretty impressive with all the trees being black spruce.  Today I walked through it and nothing was as it should have been and the smoke was fresh in the air.  I knew where everything was because I know the layout so well and our paths are still ghostly remains, but that didn't matter because the burnt trunks were the only thing blocking the views from plot to plot.  This site was very dense with veg and it is now sooty and black and full of standing dead black spruce trees. While I was moderately prepared for it and there are a bunch of ways to make it a positive thing in terms of the science, it is still very sad to me.

Fort McMurray tomorrow.