Controlled Burn

About a mile down the road is the Hilda Young Conservation Area that belongs to the state of Missouri, maybe around 500 acres, with two manmade fishing ponds (the second pond very remote and hard to find, and I won't reveal where it is; what you see in the pic is the easy-to-find one the state stocks with bass). La Barque Creek runs through here, and it's got some nice family-friendly trails, and archers can hunt deer on the land in season. Recently smoke came from here and today I went to look. They had performed a controlled burn to get rid of absolutely unbelievable fields full of dark red rip-your-skin-off briars five feet tall that blocked views and blocked passage. The land was burned in tightly defined square sections and some of the better-developed young trees were allowed to survive. So what you see in the photo is the aftermath of a controlled burn. Wish I had a "before" picture, but I never took a picture of a five-foot solid wall of thorny buggy briars good for gallon bags of berries in June but nothing else.