Posts Tagged ‘fallen limbs’
Spontaneous Trip
With only the briefest of forethought, yesterday afternoon I decided to drive up to the lake with the fire-pit benches I built last fall. It was windy and a little wet at home, but I didn’t give much consideration to how different it might be a hundred miles north. I drove right into some serious falling snow that occasionally dropped visibility to nothing but the car in front of me.
In addition to the wild weather, I rolled up to a road closure that offered very poor signage about a detour option. A simple trip to the lake place became an adventure I hadn’t anticipated.
Ultimately, I made it to the intended destination safe and sound, but as I traveled up the gravel entrance toward the house there were branches down everywhere on the ground. Then, limbs. Then, trees! There must have been quite a wind event up here recently.
Between the snow and branches, I decided not to bother immediately placing the benches I brought. They can stay in the garage for now, if I can even get them out of the car. It took me four tries to reverse Jenga® them far enough inside that the hatch could close.
They were built for the fire pit, not to nest inside of each other cleanly. The increasing width of the legs combined with the lower cross supports makes navigating the opening an exercise in advanced geometric problem-solving.
Or, in my case, trial and error.
It worked to get them in there. It’ll work to get ’em out again. No matter how many tries it takes me.
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No Sound
Was there a sound made when the large limb of one of our oak trees snapped and tipped to the ground sometime yesterday? Cyndie didn’t hear anything.
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Right now, I’m feeling inclined toward leaving it as it is. The upper portion is well above my lumberjacking abilities. Maybe after all the leaves are down it will become easier to assess the tangle of small trees that were victimized by the crash. I’ll gladly delay a decision on what to do until some time in the future.
Especially if it continues to make no sound.
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Storm Results
I haven’t covered the entirety of our trails yet, but in a partial survey near the house and barn yesterday, I found more trees fell victim to the storm winds than Cyndie noticed on her morning walk with Delilah.
The first thing that caught my attention was a significant branch lying beside the trunk of the large poplar tree near the shop garage. I asked Cyndie if she had moved it there, but she said she hadn’t even noticed it.
Apparently, that is where it landed when it snapped off the very top of the tree. Pretty good placement.
I’d liked to have seen how that worked.
The next thing I found was on the way to the barn. Several dead trees that I should have cut down already had snapped off or simply leaned over into the branches of trees around them. They are now labeled as “widow makers,” a term loggers use to describe, among other things, felled trees that get hung up in the limbs of other trees.
I will probably resort to trying to pull them down with the tractor. I’m not interested in trying to chainsaw a tree that is under tension such as these are.
Beyond that, the most visible evidence of Saturday night’s drama is the amazing number of leaves, sticks and small branches that litter all surfaces that were downwind of the trees.
Upwind, you can’t see any disturbance whatsoever.
We had our bedroom window open when the ruckus happened and I awoke to the forceful sound of the wind. I was prepared to hear a snapping sound at any minute, but never detected one.
It was intense enough to cause me to pull up the radar image on my computer to see if it was just the beginning of something that might get worse, or whether there were any storm warnings for our specific location. We were actually under one of the less intense looking areas, north of the most significant portion of the storm system.
I elected to go back to sleep and let the storm pass without further worry, but not without noting the sound of those gusts.
I’m hoping to combine the intensity I heard with the visual evidence collected of the aftermath to use it as reference for risk assessment in the future.
This won’t be the last time a high-wind storm pays us a visit, that’s for sure.
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Relative Something 