On Sunday, the power went out from 7 am until 5 pm across town, so we cooked breakfast over a braai fire and headed out for a 4 hour hike. We parked at the Pinnacle Point clubhouse and walked about 8.5 km to Mossel Bay. It was a good warm-up for the field. A section of the hike was burned in the recent wildfires. Fynbos is the dominant vegetation type along this coast - a biome that includes some of the highest diversity of flowering plants in Africa. These are mostly short bushes. Fynbos is also fire-adapted. As you can see from some of our photos, the fire was extensive and severe, but plants are already beginning to regenerate. In fact, Fynbos is typically thought to do ok if it burns every 10 to 15 years. The bushes this year are certainly tinder-dry and very susceptible to fire.
We walked across the burned areas to see if any sites had been exposed (they had). There is so much archaeology along these high areas - even on the trail. Hannah found a handful of rand cent coins that had exploded into layers from the high heat. Quartzite outcrops across the surface were fractured and brittle. A few sad dassie skeletons attest to the impact on local fauna, but I also stumbled across (literally) a very lively whipsnake.
For more photos and details of the day, see Hannah's blog at:
We walked across the burned areas to see if any sites had been exposed (they had). There is so much archaeology along these high areas - even on the trail. Hannah found a handful of rand cent coins that had exploded into layers from the high heat. Quartzite outcrops across the surface were fractured and brittle. A few sad dassie skeletons attest to the impact on local fauna, but I also stumbled across (literally) a very lively whipsnake.
For more photos and details of the day, see Hannah's blog at:
http://postcardsfromanarchaeologist.blogspot.co.za/2017/06/survey-on-st-blaze-trail.html