A little over three years ago, we walked the same trail. Last Saturday afternoon was breezy and clear, in the mid-50s, and the trail was a little muddy from the storms the past week or so.
My AllTrails app wasn’t cooperating for some reason, so I grabbed the rather low-resolution map from the park website. Naturally, it was colorful, but it was too hard to see the actual path of the Spicebush trail amongst all the other colors. Desaturation layers and the paintbrush tool to the rescue:
Looks like the blazes were redone recently; Spicebush is white. Nice and bright:
Here’s what looks like an old water pump, my shadow, and Son of Jay’s shoes and pants:
I’m assuming this big fella got struck by lightning, because there’s a new blaze on it, and in the second picture you can kind of tell the burn path of the lightning bolt. I looked around at the other parts of the tree to find more of the bolt path but I couldn’t see any. Maybe 10 years ago a large tree in our backyard was struck by lightning and the markings looked the same:
I like this photo:
Many of the higher-elevation parts of Spicebush run alongside the park area clearings like this. I forget this park name but it’s pretty big. You can see a small dot of a person with her dog, in the distance:
Hard to tell from this photo, but the path up ahead looked very steep. It wasn’t as bad as it seemed from far away but it was still a heft:
Thanks.
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Different types of trees manifest lightning damage differently. A church in Texas had a massive oak in the yard hit by lightning; there was no bark splitting and burning, but the whole tree was suddenly devoid of any moisture. It was desiccated in an instant. It took another two weeks to lose all the leaves. When I cut it down, it was dry as a bone.
That makes sense. I don’t remember what tree in our backyard was struck, but it was a big one. I took photos but they were on an old phone and before Google photos was a thing. There was a big streak down the entire length of the tree’s trunk, and one of the big branches near the top was knocked clean off.
I don’t know what kind of tree is in the photos in this post, either.
A completely dried out tree must’ve been easy to take down, no?
It’s harder to chop with an ax, but less work once it hits the ground. Without leaves, it’s a lot easier to chop it into smaller pieces for disposal.