A Furious Wind

 

 

The trees around Allenspark and Meeker Park have to be tough, because they routinely face winter windstorms of 40 to 60 mph, with gusts of 80 or higher. They have to survive in a climate with months of dry weather and have to anchor themselves in soil that can be loose rock.

So it must have been an incredible windstorm last week to bring down the large ponderosas, some 100 years old and at least 60 feet high. On my weekly walk, I counted at least 20 to 30 trees that had been blown down, their roots wrenched from the ground, leaving gaping holes in the earth.

One neighbor lost nine trees, and another neighbor has one ponderosa laying in the driveway, just missing the house. Another cabin down the road had two giants lying before its door.

It must have been a wild night, with trees crashing all over the valley, yet my neighbor who lost nine trees said he never heard the crashes. That’s because the wind is so strong, you can’t hear anything else over it, not even the falling of trees. Were there crashes all over the valley? Did the trees fall softly into the earth, into the snow and grasses? Or was it loud? Loud enough for animals to depart before the trees came down?

The felling of these trees could be seen as nature’s way of pruning trees that might have been weakened already by pine beetles, would have been burned by fires before wildfires were suppressed or were growing too close together so their root systems weren’t stable. Or it could be seen as a warning sign from Mother Nature.

The winds, with some gusts clocked at  over 100 mph, also knocked out the power for two days in Allenspark and Meeker Park. An Allenspark resident told me that he hoped he wouldn’t see another storm like that for a decade. But the wisdom about climate change is that our weather will get (and is getting) more extreme, so temperatures will be both hotter and colder, snowstorms will be more destructive, hurricanes and tornadoes more intense, and winds stronger. Will these strong winds become the norm and bring down more ponderosas all winter?

To see these giant ponderosas downed—resting on hillsides, against boulders, among last year’s pine needles—with their root systems ungainly stuck in the air is unnatural, like something you want to avert your eyes from. These seem like acts of violence to me and the result of our carelessness: not caring that we are polluting the earth, pouring carbon emissions into the atmosphere which alter the climate, so it becomes more destructive, creates windstorms stronger than anything we have ever seen.

If a tree falls in the woods, can we hear its message?

Comments

[shoney]

That's a lot of trees. I do think, from having lived many years in the redwoods, that the falling of trees is a natural part of the cycle---incredible, scary and sometimes sad, but natural. I'm glad you are okay and that the cabin was unharmed.