![]() ![]() All the trees within 50' were draped with fiber that looked like spaghetti, with about a 6' tall stump out in the middle. As I ascended, I started finding more and more wood, until finally I came to the tree. I'd been circling a little mountain peak, so decided to short-cut by going over the peak. I picked it up scratching my head in wonder about how it got there. Yet a few miles up the road, I found a piece of fresh raw oak out in the middle of the road. Late Spring, the gravel was soft from heaved freeze thaw cycles, and no auto tracks yet for months. Of course, if it goes down the cambium layer, the bark gets blown away, revealing bare wood.īack when I was a runner, maybe 30 years ago, I was out of a remote forest road which was blocked off. If it goes down a little stream on the outside, the instant steam explosion on the outside, can damage the bark like hitting the outside with a sledge hammer. All electricity looks for a path of least resistance, and while pure water is not a good conductor, impurities like road dust, and the tea from weathered bark etc. The flickering we perceive, comes from a bunch of little finger size arcs of plasma dancing around in a general area, but our eyes and mind sees it as one big flash. Usually the lightning just dances around the outside edges of the bark, probably using the little streams of water that form by grooves in the bark, and limbs sending more water into certain channels. Lots of critters were thriving in the gap. It must have been a "lower voltage" strike as all of the bark was separated from the trunk but still in place. Carolina and we dropped an 80' pine killed by lightning. One was a Douglas fir, about 36" diameter that was hit on top and split top to bottom but left just enough to hold the tree together. I’ve seen several lightning events strike trees around the way, pretty impressive. I live in NW Oregon and spend many days in the woods, walk 'em every weekend if they're not closed to fire danger. Does anyone else have a good tree and lightning story or pictures?Ĭlick here for higher quality, full size image Though I can't be 100% sure of what happened, I figured the lightning had hit the pine, super-heated the sap and blew the thing up. There were large pieces of the tree fifty to sixty feet away from what was left of the trunk and the whole area smelled like green pine. But this morning, on our walk, I came across what looked like a formerly healthy 18" diameter white pine that had exploded - there's no other word to describe it. I saw nothing out of place and figured a stray dog or whitetail must have passed by the sliding glass door and gotten her riled up. When I got to the house our little cattle dog was nearly bouncing off the walls. No wind, no rain, just a bolt of blue and a thunderclap. Yesterday afternoon while driving toward my house in Dummerston, VT I saw a single lightning bolt about two miles away that seemed to be close to my property. ![]()
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