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This article was published 24/5/2016 (1579 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FLORENCE LAKE — The whims of the wind, Ian Baragar said quietly, as he looked across Florence Lake Tuesday at the not-so-far shore, where the rock was charred and the tops of trees singed.

Fire crews were still back there among the trees, searching for and snuffing out hot spots, helicopters buzzing overhead.

"There was a strong north wind, or this whole area would have been gone before they got to it," said Baragar.

This whole area meaning the dozens of cottages built along the south shore of Florence, a well-trodden path over rocks and roots on the water's edge connecting everyone by a natural communal sidewalk. His grandparents built Baragar's cottage in 1927 — he's come for 56 years, his dad for all 89 years the cabin has stood.

And but for the wind on May 5 and into May 6...

Florence and all-but-contiguous Nora Lake have been at the heart of the wildfire that's burned across 14,400 acres of the Whiteshell and northwestern Ontario since May 5. Cottagers were finally allowed to return this weekend.

JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Florence Lake cottager Ian Baragar surveys the burnt out shores of neighbouring Nora Lake for the first time Tuesday.

It's only a short jump across the rail tracks from the parking lot at Florence to the parking lot at Nora to the immediate northwest, where the flames raced along the shore and blackened the woods right up to the very edge of Nora's parking lot. Not a single cottage was lost, but the effect on a major part of the shoreline at the eastern end of Nora has been devastating.

This is the wildfire that came so close, so very close, to destroying dozens of cottages on Florence, Nora, Caddy and West Hawk lakes, the wildfire that took an enormous human effort of ground fire crews and water bombers flying endless missions to keep from Baragar's doorstep.

You get to Nora and Florence along a 13-kilometre narrow pitted-and-scarred gravel road off Highway 44 whose first gate is practically atop the tunnel that connects Caddy and South Cross lakes.

Within the first two kilometres, from one breath to the next, the magnificence of the boreal forest is suddenly gone — hundreds of metres of black toothpicks sticking where trees had been on May 4, the rocks of the Canadian Shield blackened, a deep black powder covering everything just as snow had covered that same ground two months back.

It's like that most of those remaining 11 kilometres to Nora and Florence — and it's surely like that beyond the roads and into northwestern Ontario.

And yet...

The wildfire covers an enormous area on the maps, but on the ground, it's not continual. There are places that the devastation reaches the north side of the narrow gravel road, but not the south. There's suddenly a patch of greenery, 200, 300 metres, and then once again everything is gone except the skeletons and the ash. When you step into the cold ash, there's a dust storm you'd best not breathe in.

IAN BARAGAR PHOTO Only ashes remain of the Winnitoba railway station near Florence Lake.

There are areas of grass along the road and the gravel shows no blackening. Incongruous dandelions shout a defiant yellow, rampant on a canvas of blackness that's utterly bleak as far as the eye can see.

It's difficult to tell, when you look to the right, just how close the wildfire got to Caddy Lake. Fire officials say as close as a kilometre to parts of the Caddy shore.

"When I saw where the pictures were taken from, I knew that spot very well," said Baragar, who knew immediately on May 5 how much trouble Florence was in.

His grandfather was a geographer who sectioned off the cottage lots in the 1920s, said Baragar. "The fire came into the bay on the other side. The north side, it burned down to the lake, but it stopped at the water's edge."

Baragar and his family would come in by train for the entire summer, he recalled. "Most of this side of the lake was settled by teachers. Half the lake is related and married to the other half," he chuckled.

Graham Stratton laughed that he's considered a newbie because he's only been coming to Florence Lake for 45 years. "My wife's been coming here since she was born," he said.

When Stratton heard the first news of the wildfire, "I knew it was maybe a kilometre and a half away. I was so surprised it jumped the islands."

IAN BARAGAR PHOTO Ian Baragar found a wood stove among the ruins of the Winnitoba train station Monday. But the grass right behind the station had been untouched by fire.

Those first photos, said Stratton, "That had my heart going. We had the wind on our side for the first night."

Baragar went Monday to photograph the ruins of the Winnitoba train station, finding the wood stove sitting amid the ashes. Even so, it was green right behind the station.

"It's amazing," said Baragar's cousin John Robertson. "The path (to the station) is fine, then it's burned both sides."

Robertson, 73 on Wednesday, has been coming since he was five. He and his wife Barb drove in from Calgary Thursday fearful of what they would find.

As he came up that private road, said Robertson, he was hit by "the sheer blackness, black trees and green trees, (distant) trees you could never see before."

The cottagers marvelled at what was spared — their salvation, they all agree, was epochal human effort — and what was lost, the ways the wind moved the fire back and forth, off one wide swath and onto another.

"It's just the whims of the wind," said Baragar.

Robertson has seen wildfires before and knows how long it takes for the forest to grow back. But as he walked in a sea of ash along the edge of Nora Lake Tuesday, he confidently predicted, "This area will be full of blueberries next summer."

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca