Winter Wonders in our Woodland Home - Winter Storm Stuff

It seems that there are degrees to the old "if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound" thought experiment. We had quite a snow-followed-by-wind storm from Sunday night all through Monday afternoon. There were times when I looked out the window to see nothing by white, almost like the windows were frosted, because the wind was blowing the snow off all the trees and roofs. Interestingly, not so much off/around the ground and hardly any off the truck. But what I didn't notice was any out-of place noises, so you can imagine my surprise when I went out the back door to start plowing our driveway around 2:00 p.m. to this sight.

I believe the exact words I said out loud to the forest were, "Oh, shit." Because, as I mentioned, I didn't hear anything particularly loud or unusual from inside the house, which is probably about twelve yards from the fence (to the left).

Speaking of the fence, it got in the way of this dead Ponderosa Pine tree from the National Forest falling over! Luckily, the tree was not that large and it was apparently plenty-dead, so it doesn't seemed to have hurt the fence at all.

You'll notice in this last photo, that the branches are going the opposite direction of the branches on the trunk on the forest side of the fence. That has got to mean that when the trunk broke on our fence rail, that the broken-off top must have flipped over in the air before landing, right? SO now the top of the tree is pointed at the center of the case of the tree! WHOA.

And look just how close this is to the only power pole on our property! And the wires are not that high, by the way. There is not a mark on the power pole and we had no interruption of power to the house, nary a flicker.

All in all, we got pretty lucky. As did anyone whose power is tied to those lines on that pole, of course. Delia is feeling pretty lucky, too! It's a Stick Bonanza!

Trees, especially the dead ones, are made entirely of sticks, ya' know!