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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

BLOODY ARSONISTS

Since I have lived in Zaragoza, we spend most weekends in my wife's homevillage, a small place in La Rioja called "San Asensio", famous for its excellent Rioja wine.

Once I had to stop cycling, due to a hernia in my back, I started to walk and later on mountaineering in the beautiful mountain paradise of La Rioja. I will come back on this subject with an extensive post in the close future.

Normally I use to go alone or with people from my mountainclubs but most times with my mountain-mate and one of my best friends Pedro. So we planned to go for a walk on saturday August 29 and two days before I started to check an itinerary.
It was already quite a long time ago we visited "La Sierra de la Demanda", one of the greenest and most beautiful areas in the western part of La Rioja, where the river "Oja", that gave birth to the name of the province flows. You can see the beauty of the area in the following representative picture, taken during one of our excursions.


We arrived the day before in San Asensio, more or less at the same time, and I was just going to explain Pedro the trip I had planned starting in Posadas, 13 kms. from Ezcaray, the most important village in that part of La Rioja, when we saw the horrible notice on television that a coward, mentally ill person, had fired the forest at five different points, just at the places we were going to visit next day.

Last week we visited the affected area to see the damages (45 ha). Fortunately, it was much less than we expected, it could have been a disaster, but anyway, it will take years before the forest will be as it was.

See it for yourself on the following pictures.











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Our friend strikes again:

September 15 2009 - 50 ha
October 5 2009 - 60 ha
November 21 2009 - 20 ha

Same area, probably same bastard.