FAVORITE TREE

      One of my favorite trees came to an accidental end this week. 

      This tree was a gigantic poplar . It was probably 70 ft high and had a trunk of over 2 ft . Lower branches were about 1 ft thick and I'm not sure what the branch coverage would be. And yes , this was a good looking tree...nicely shaped. This tree showed up in many of my photos but I couldn't find many of the photos. 

     So for this area the tree is exceptionally large. 

     A freak wind went through a few nights ago and the wind probably went between two trees and the giant was not strong enough to remain standing. About half of the trunk was rotten so the tree , while looking great, was probably not going to last too much longer. 

    This tree was  favorite of the bohemian waxwings so I just have the top of the tree in the photo.

      When I asked Karen to have my picture taken, I wanted to be up on the trunk above my head. She just said with great emphasis, "You're not going up there! " It's a good thing somebody  takes care of the fools!

WIND STORM

     A week ago we had a wind storm and some rain with it.  The wind blew all day but the highest winds were from 4:00PM to 6:00 PM.  We had gusts up to 100kph which for this location is a very strong wind.

    Needless to say there was damage. There was little damage to structures but trees suffered a lot of damage. Some trees blew down in the residential areas. The dumb trees chose power lines to fall on. As a result, there were some power outages.

   Out in the bush the story was different. Quite a few trees went down. Trees with some defects in the trunk broke off above the ground. Some trees were completely uprooted. It's amazing how large the root balls can be. The spruce seemed to suffer more damage but many poplars blew down as well.

   This is the worst wind storm I've seen since I moved here in 1969. There was a windstorm in 1978 that took the tops off many spruce trees.

    The city has worked hard to clean things up. First, they made sure that the roads were cleared. Then they cleaned off paved paths and then shale and gravel paths. Later on they will come back and haul away the debris.