burn zone

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All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB.  May 12, 2013.

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I have a cold whose worst symptom is fatigue, so I've been napping a fair bit the past week or so. But this past Sunday, M was working, so I took the girl for a walk in the forest.

We did what M and I normally call the loop, which normally takes about an hour when I'm walking with him. It's our quick-and- dirty, don't-have-much-time walk.

(And it was lovely. I didn't have to chase her through the forest, telling her that it was GOOD for HER. I didn't have to threaten/cajole/distract her. She just walked and looked at things and, once, very quietly, asked if we were almost finished our walk...)

The site of a Keystone plane crash in 2006 is just off the loop. The trees knocked down by the crash had burned just enough to turn them into iron. Which is to say that they hadn't decomposed much in thirteen years but there would usually be a few mushrooms by this time of year. And there was one log that had a colony of slow-growing lichen on it that I would check every few months.

[As it turns out, the crash was on Chalfont but closer to Corydon than to Grant. The site I talk about here was the site of an earlier fire. I'm still tracking down the details...]

There was a fire there this past fall...and I wanted to have a look at what was left.

As we walked through the clearing, I noted that grass had begun to emerge from the ground. I saw that many of the logs had been burned through. (Anna dubbed it 'the burn zone' and said it smelled.)

I'm sort-of kind-of looking forward to seeing what grows there next.