As some of you may have seen in another thread i started, I had a massive wood prospecting mission planned for the weekend..i was really looking forward to posting pics of my 4x4 fully loaded with nice hard wood. Unfortunately, you win some, you lose some.
Quick back ground, I normally get my wood from private property, or through scrounging areas where i'll be honest, its probably illegal to take wood from. (road side etc). So for the first time on the weekend I decided to do a proper legit, very legal wood scrounge. I looked up the department of environment and sustainability and downloaded maps of very specific areas you are allowed to collect firewood. wood must already be on the ground). I spent friday night preparing the tools, loading the car and reading these maps..I headed off before sunrise saturday and followed the maps to the first collection area....it was quite a large area on the map. I'm guessing 100 acres.....problem was it was 100 acres of the steepest, knarliest terrain ive come across...to make it worse there was a thick ground covering of prickly shrubs 6 foot high making it impossible to penetrate. Still feeling positive i hunted down the next spot which was 15 minutes away. Same thing....cliff faces and thick scrub...no wood...i repeated this process 3-4 times before i found a collection area that was flat enough to walk into...but heres the catch...the DSE had back burned the area to prevent bush fires so all the wood was charcoal already!
... i saw a guy chopping some of the burnt wood and some logs had a core that showed some colour, but i didn't bother...I ended up finding a few more collection areas but they too were burnt to a crisp...what a joke..
.fair enough you cant have people going into the forests and taking as much as they want, but its a slap in the face when they say "you can take all the wood you want from these areas" and those areas are either cliff faces, or have already been burnt...
thanks for listening....end of rant..
Quick back ground, I normally get my wood from private property, or through scrounging areas where i'll be honest, its probably illegal to take wood from. (road side etc). So for the first time on the weekend I decided to do a proper legit, very legal wood scrounge. I looked up the department of environment and sustainability and downloaded maps of very specific areas you are allowed to collect firewood. wood must already be on the ground). I spent friday night preparing the tools, loading the car and reading these maps..I headed off before sunrise saturday and followed the maps to the first collection area....it was quite a large area on the map. I'm guessing 100 acres.....problem was it was 100 acres of the steepest, knarliest terrain ive come across...to make it worse there was a thick ground covering of prickly shrubs 6 foot high making it impossible to penetrate. Still feeling positive i hunted down the next spot which was 15 minutes away. Same thing....cliff faces and thick scrub...no wood...i repeated this process 3-4 times before i found a collection area that was flat enough to walk into...but heres the catch...the DSE had back burned the area to prevent bush fires so all the wood was charcoal already!
... i saw a guy chopping some of the burnt wood and some logs had a core that showed some colour, but i didn't bother...I ended up finding a few more collection areas but they too were burnt to a crisp...what a joke...fair enough you cant have people going into the forests and taking as much as they want, but its a slap in the face when they say "you can take all the wood you want from these areas" and those areas are either cliff faces, or have already been burnt...
thanks for listening....end of rant..
