Widow Makers

A little while ago we had a freak wind storm. It was a pretty calm morning when all of a sudden a wall of wind came across the cove and it blew for about 20 minutes. The destruction that happened in those 20 minutes was unbelievable. It was almost like a hand came down and slapped us around for a little while. I heard a bump and stepped outside to see a tree on top of the trailer, while I was standing there another fell on the wannagon. These were small trees, sometimes called peckerpoles, so they didn't do much damage, in fact Jonathan considered leaving one there so he could hang his deer from it. While I was still outside I heard a pop and a tree closer to the beach snapped in half at the trunk, it was about 4 feet wide(much like the photo above). That's when I had to make a decision: stay inside the trailer that felt like it was going to get launched or find a clear spot with no trees to stand in. I stayed inside channeling all the Judy Garland/Wizard of Oz energy I could muster up.
The next street looked like a spider web with trees down on power lines, there was something like 22 trees on the wires in about 1000 feet. Jonathan was further out the road near where our cabin is when he heard it come. He stepped out onto the porch and watched 5 huge trees at least five feet wide just go down like dominoes. These ones were easily 75 feet tall. They left a huge amount of open space in the woods above them , but an absolute mess on the ground around them. I am very cautious when walking in the woods now, because just one branch falling from the trees around here is enough to do some serious damage, I look up alot now, that is where the story is in these woods.
The pictures I have here were taken out at Luck Lake a few days later they give a pretty good scale of the power of this wind storm.
This picture of Jonathan next to a "wall" is really the root ball of a huge Sitka Spruce. The roots are not very deep, so this one just took the whole ground up with it when it went down. In the background of that shot, you can see another tree that is snapped part way up its trunk. We looked for the the rest of it to see where it fell, it was blown into the woods about fifty feet from where it broke.


This is a shot of an old trapper's cabin. We counted about thirty trees down all around it, but the old cabin made it through the storm. This day was very different without even a ripple on the slushy water. Nice enough for Ronny to get in and do some fly fishing and Jonathan and Dolly to wade around for sunken treasure.