Along Route 117, which runs from Montreal to northern Quebec, the landscape appears at first glance to be unchanged. Walls of dark green spruce, the conifer native to Canada’s boreal forest, stand like sentinels for hundreds of miles on either side of the trail. The only fantasy in this static spectacle is the movement of the breeze-moving branches of aspen and birch, those hardwoods also found in primary forest.

But at the exit of La Vérendrye Park is the largest nature reserve In the protected forest of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, a region in western Québec province, a detour of a few kilometers on a bumpy forest road is enough to reveal a completely different landscape. Everywhere you look, hills and valleys blackened and leveled, spruces and jack pines eaten away like matchsticks. Smoky logs lie on the ground. Huge blocks of pink granite shattered from the heat. The white of the intact birch trunks catches the sunlight at the end of August: they are the only survivors of the fire that devastated the region in the first days of June. Three months after the biggest fire of all time, blueberries, ferns, fireweed with purple flowers and hardwoods are already growing again in the loose soil.

After Alberta in western Canada at the beginning of May, the Atlantic provinces in the east of the country a few weeks later and before the flames hit British Columbia and the Northwest Territories – and thus even more – several tens of thousands of people had to evacuate their homes in the last few days – also Quebec has experienced an exceptional fire season.

Everyone here has the photos of this season in Hell saved on their smartphones – the flames rising from the back of the chalet, the smoke, “the smoke” It’s said in the disorienting region, the sun turning into an opaque disc in the bright orange sky, the lines of cars fleeing the fires – and the panicked messages exchanged with loved ones : “It’s the Apocalypse”a man writes to his wife.

Since May, 668 fires have devastated more than five million acres in Quebec, burning nearly a third of the area across Canada.

The areas affected are disproportionate to the immensity of the land. In the far north, the largest fire ever recorded in the province, covering more than a million hectares, was still raging at the end of August. It started on May 27th. But for once, the blazes didn’t just rage beyond the territory’s “northern border,” north of 50, this year^e parallel, where the boreal forest is regularly ravaged by summer fires. They have also attacked so-called “intensive protection areas” where many villages are located and where the forest is exploited by men. 1.5 million hectares of these populated areas have gone up in smoke, 100 times the annual average over the past decade.

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