My jaw dropped when I received this from Chris Tangey of Alice Springs Film & TV - a clip of a 100-foot ‘Fire Devil’. He filmed it near Mount Conner in Australia just a few weeks ago.
Watch the clip below.
Watch the clip below.
Setting for a fire dance
I visited Mount Connor, or Attilla, with Chris in 2009 whilst filming for How Earth Made Us (you can see part of the sequence here). It's one of my favourite sights in the Australian outback, a flat topped mountain that suddenly rises 300 metres out of the endless flat landscape. It's a sight that rivals Uluru and the Olgas but because it sits at the heart of a huge cattle station it's rarely visited and it lacks the fame of its fellow monoliths. So what luck, and what a backdrop against which to witness one of the worlds most incredible natural spectacles - a fire devil.
Photo: Chris Tangey, Alice Springs TV & Film
Mount Connor on a calm day (Photo: Paul Williams)
The Fire Devil
A fire devil is essentially a dust devil that travels over hot spots from preexisting wildfires, this causes the fire to travel up the dust devil’s already hot vortex transforming it into a fire devil. Fire devils are rare sites that usually last less than one minute but Chris watched as a series of towering infernos danced in front of him for 40 minutes.
"We were mesmerised" he said "It was a once in 10 lifetimes experience, the gift that kept on giving, just as we thought it was about to end another devil appeared, it just kept changing its shape and flickering furiously. Most of the time it was rooted to the spot and everything around it was eerily static - there wasn't a breath of wind".
Here's some of the raw footage that Chris captured.
