On Monday, an RTL film crew accompanied forester Yves Pieper around the 26km² zone, where fire ravaged the forest this summer. Peat burned for some seven weeks in the wake of the fires. Last weekend, the first of the autumn storms showed exactly how fragile the remaining forest is.
Numerous trees fell due to the high winds on Friday and Saturday, including mature trees whose roots were eaten away by the fire burning for multiple weeks. The rest of the forest is slowly dying. Around 34km² are affected, although the fire itself reached only 26km².
"You can still see the root plates here and these spruces were standing on a thin layer of peat. It has completely burned away. And you can see how these root plates are now on stilts", explains Verviers forest ranger Yves Pieper, showing the RTL team around a plot where the trees were cut down in July, shortly before the fire. The area displays the damage caused by the fire to the peat in spectacular fashion. A habitat which developed over centuries, lost in mere weeks.
Pieper explains: "The elongated stem doesn't decompose because it's too damp, too acidic, too cold. And this lack of decomposition very slowly forms peat. So peat formation is about 1 millimeter per year. So if you have a 1-metre-thick layer of peat, then you have 1,000 years of non-decomposition of this peat moss."
This summer, the fire destroyed peat that was between 400 and 600 years old, damaging the system by which water flows from the plateau down into the Weser valley, which caused dramatic floods in 2021.
"There were around 40 deaths here. All the water is meant to be slowed down here, in the upper part of the forest and the nature reserve. Now, of course, the ground cover in the nature reserve is gone. And that's very bad because the water can now flow freely and unimpeded into the valley", Pieper continues.
This is just one example of how the ecosystem has been disturbed at an altitude of around 700m.
Normally around this time of year visitors can see the heather in bloom, against a backdrop of autumn colours. Where the big fire was, fresh grass is now sprouting again, but the diversity of plants and small animals has suffered extremely. The herds of red deer have returned, however, so did the wolves.
"We have four packs here on the high plateau of the High Fens. The wolves have stayed here and they also follow the herbivores. So you very often see tracks of red deer and behind them tracks of the wolf following its prey."
Pieper and his team still have a lot of work to do. Forest paths need to be repaired. The heather needs to be re-sown. New mixed forests need to be planted.
"We had a huge fire in 1911 and the consequences were still visible in the vegetation until 1980. So it can take up to 70 years until the vegetation gets back to how it originally was", concludes Pieper.
Since last weekend, some of the paths on the plateau have reopened. Now that half term has begun in Belgium, tourists are returning. But not all of the paths on the High Fens plateau are open yet.
