Saturday 7 May 2022
Photos by Amanda & Karen
It has been a few years since the Club visited the Monga cool temperate rainforests. This walk was planned to see what damage the 19/20 fires had done. Initial third party reports suggested the resulting undergrowth might be “manageable”. Five Club members decided to check it out.
On the drive up the valley to the starting point on Milo Road, the first impressions were not good. Only the Monga village did not burn. The bushfire had ripped up the valley, killing trees outright in many areas, removing the crowns in others and, at best, severely scorching the tall understorey even in the moist south facing gullies. The Penance Grove is completely gone. It is now a gully of dead trees and few remaining tree ferns. Only a few metal stirrups in the ground remain of the boardwalk.
The walk off the road to the top of the first rainforest area was a strenuous bush bash. The wheatfield eucalypt and wattle regeneration was 2-3 metres high, often with thick grass of over a metre. The visibility was so bad we could not see where our feet were landing and we frequently encountered the large grounded logs only when we parted the vegetation. Fire vine, including lawyer vine is starting to run through the mess.
We persevered to the first, and smallest, rainforest area where we paused for morning tea. The fire had also moved through it but the resulting understorey was now a herb field so the walking improved. Many of the Pinkwoods have been killed outright, some are crown killed but are throwing low level epicormics shoots. Very few survived relatively unscathed and, remarkably, these are lightly flowering. This fire was catastrophic.
After some consultation, the leader literally walked off the job, back to the cars. Exhaustion, and the prospect of the bush bashing over two more ridges to the other rainforest areas, was a major reason to abandon the visit. We then inspected the entry/exit of the third, and largest rainforest patch. The fire damage did not seem so severe there so we vowed to return at a later date and have another go.
We lunched back on River Road then checked out two upcoming prospective walks in the vicinity of Monga Mountain which, due to the undergrowth (it’s everywhere!), proved to be unattractive. On the way back down the Kings Highway we inspected the rock walled original 1850’s Clyde Mountain Road in the vicinity of the Western Distributor intersection.
Ian