Month: March 2020

Raspberry Lookout. One of my favourite places to go and have a picnic and chill for a while. I have featured the lookout in past posts but never in a whole post.

We went from my place up the Gibraltar Range to see what had happened there since October 2019. The fires had burnt through there and eventually came down the mountains to my place. As it is a wonderful place to see, I could not bring myself to drive along the highway to Raspberry as the memories of such a special place for me would have had me in tears I reckon. Couldn’t go there anyway as the highway was closed until late January. The amount of very big trees that had burnt down and fallen across the road was amazing. They are still removing trees and fixing protective road barriers.

It has taken me until now to be able to write and show you the photos from the lookout. This is just Raspberry Lookout not the drive up or down the mountain. As they were working there wasn’t the opportunity to stop. I was very heartened by the recovery that had taken place so come on, lets have a look around Raspberry Lookout.

This is the view from Raspberry Lookout. You can see where the fires had been. Some parts of the countryside were patches of rainforest
In case you were uncertain what to look for, here’s a bit of a close up. Usually this is lush forest and you cannot see the bare ground. Some of the gully lines contained species of rainforest plants. There weren’t many birds to be seen or hear. It was eerily silent.
This ridge line is showing signs of recovery. The ridge behind is what it will look like again.
One of the first to appear after a fire are the fungi. There were a number of these tiny orange fungi dotted through the bush.
This fungus was sending a message of love and hope
The colours of the new foliage is amazing. From a burnt stump life springs forth.
Everywhere flowers appeared. I must confess we did go over the fence and scramble about the gravelly soil looking around at the wonderful flowers and whatever else we found. Most of the flowers are quite small up to 15mm or half an inch.
This was the first flower I found as it was right beside the car when I opened the door.
So many varieties of Pea Plants that seemed to grow out of the rocks.
Along with flowers come the insects. Not only bees pollinate flowers, wasps do as well.
A Blue-banded Bee really enjoyed getting right into the flower
A Teddy Bear Bee was moving from flower to flower quickly.
Another wasp on a Billy Buttons flower. It was lovely to see small clumps of Billy Button flowers scattered throughout the lookout.
A wonderful find was a Nobbi sunning on a rock. This male has his breeding colours on. They are distantly related to Bearded Dragons. Not long after I took this shot he was off a great speed. When I looked in book to try and identify who he is, the book said that Nobbi’s run fast. Well they certainly do!
As there was a good amount of rainfall in February, the sound of water rushing was an unusual sound at the lookout. Normally you can’t see this waterfall cascading down the mountain and plunging into the stream below.
I was so glad that this old tree stump survived the fire with a little bit of scorching. The “mouth” is the notch they cut with an axe to slot a board in and cut higher up the tree. It would take four or five people holding hands around the tree to gauge the size of this old beauty.  I would miss his spooky face when I head up the mountain from my place to Raspberry Lookout.

Thanks for coming with me and having a picnic at Raspberry Lookout.
The featured photo is from 2017