This is about my all-time favorite “creek walk,” way back in August 2009.
It was in tourist country, the Adirondack High Peaks Wilderness Area that is not a wilderness anymore because it is severely overrun by tourists. As beautiful as the High Peaks are, they are not worth sharing a few miles of trail with fifty people trashing it and even actually crapping on it.
I thought of a hundred things to write here, and still have not come up with something to say that does not feel like feeble gibberish, but I’ll try to pass along some reflection and information. My thoughts are almost soulless compared with the pulse-pounding call of Australian soul today.
Fire scene in Blue Mountains. Photo by Ben Pearse
Fire refugees on the beach at Batemans Bay NSW. Photo by Alastair Prior.
Gospers Mt Firefighter. Photo by Dan Himbrechts.
Just not cricket.
I’m just an American typical nobody, mostly ignorant of Australia like most of us. It’s a horrid way to wake up to her, burning.
I live in the Adirondack Park of far northern New York, in a sort of box between Canada, Vermont/Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario. This “park,” a combination of public and private land, they like to call “six million acres of wilderness.” Since retirement, my whole world is here. I never go anywhere else these days.
Sharnie Moran & daughter. Photo by Dan Peled.
Kangaroo. Photo by James Ross.
Devastation on Great Alpine Road at Sarsfield.
Photo by Jason Edwards.
Photo by Mike Bowers.
As of this morning (Friday, January 3, 2020), far, far more than six million acres is gone, burned up in Australia’s fires. In Australia, about 5,800,000 hectares (about 14,300,000 acres) have burned or are burning. That’s much more than double my entire 6 million acre world. Unfathomable to me, but my heart knows what my mind can’t grasp or say.
Kangaroo fleeing in North Black Range. Photo by Mike Bowers.
The Balsamean 