Among the Fallen Giants

The two primary agents for busting down an old conifer forest for recycling and renewal are wildfire and wind. Either of these can be jaw-droppingly violent.

Wildfires are the primary agents at work here. They are ubiquitous and lurid, given the clawing flames and billowing smoke. Some are utterly destructive, leaving nothing but charred bits smoldering in their wake.

But wind can do in moments what takes a fire hours or days. A microburst can leave nothing standing in its swath. Neither trees 20 years old nor 200 years old can withstand such powerful gusts. Whole sections of forest might be uprooted and laid flat to languish and die with root balls exposed, still clutching clumps of earth and stone.

For whatever reason, mathematical or otherwise, the forests all around my cabin have recently suffered a series of devastating windstorms. The property owner adjacent to my cabin had to chainsaw his way in to his place after a storm downed over a dozen huge fir trees several weeks ago. Yesterday, on a drive through the mountains, we encountered hundreds upon many hundreds of giants that were recently ripped from the ground and unceremoniously pitched down. For several miles we crept along, negotiating our way through places where huge trees had been wrenched from the earth and flung down across the road. Somebody had opened the road long before our arrival, but in places there was barely room for us to pass. I’m sharing images of two places where we were forced to squeak through fallen titans.

A Behemoth Tree in the Road

Trees Across the Road

—Mitchell Hegman