Paul Spike Shows Me What A Hurricane Looks Like In The Woods...

These are pictures of trees that fell during hurricane Juan, here in Nova Scotia several years ago. Paul Spike is one of our neighbors here at the Oyster Pond, and was a forester for his great career. He took me to one of his wood lots to look at the long term impact of a category three hurricane, where we don't usually look. We hiked in for an hour, and had areas where we had to crawl to get through the huge trees that had fallen and looked like the Jolly Green Giant's Pick-up Sticks Game.
In the lower picture, Paul is atop several trees that fell and crossed over each other... he is about twenty feet in the air. In the upper photo, he is leaning on one of the trees, showing that Spruce don't have tap roots, and in Nova Scotia they grow on the rocks... a little rain in advance of the hurricane softens up the ground, and the winds simply blow the trees over. We measured some of the trees... over nine feet in circumfrence, up to a hundred feet tall.
This was a powerful lesson to me... the storm isn't over, just 'cause the wind stops blowing!

BTW, you can click on my blog pictures to enlarge them...