(Continuing the saga of the Great January Ice Storm of 2004).

On Sunday, January 11, we hiked up through the woods behind the house to check on the spring which supplies our water. I took the camera along to document some of the damage from the storm. Although I was expecting to see a lot of wood down, it was still a shock to find that the ice had literally opened up whole new vistas.

Oddly enough, nowhere was our usual path blocked by fallen trees bigger than we could easily step over (with one exception). And while there were several trees down in the vicinity of the water tank, the tank itself was unscathed, with only two or three small branches resting on the cover. For this I was truly grateful!

This first set of pictures is a clockwise pan taken from the base of the path that leads up to the water tank. This area used to be a lovely grove of mostly alder, with salmon berries and elderberry bushes filling in the understory in the summer.

Looking south - the house and pond are out of sight to the left.


Looking southwest


Looking west - that's the path up to the water tank


Looking northwest


Looking north


Looking northeast across the little footbridge (lower center)

The next set of pictures is another pan, this time taken from a viewpoint just west and a little bit south of the pond behind the house. It is about fifty feet south of the spot where I was standing for the first set, and the first shot is looking in the same direction as the last shot of the prior group.

Not all of the down trees in this area are a result of the storm. The last week in December, a clump of four alders, whose rootball had been undercut by the flow from the culvert which drains the pond, finally overbalanced from their own weight, snapping off a fifth alder as they went over. Only one of these trees can be seen, in the fourth picture.

Looking north from just beyond the pond


Looking northeast.


Looking east across the pond to the back of the house.
It's a bit more visible than it used to be! Note the dark
green trees behind the house and to the right. These are
western red cedars, which suffered very little if any damage.


Looking southeast at the ravine into which the culvert drains.
The snow-covered trunk lying at an angle just to the right of center is
part of the cluster that fell in December. Nearly everything else on
the ground is new from the storm.


Looking south - the view here was opened up considerably

One thing to remember about these pictures is that they show only what is down on the ground. Between ten and twenty percent of the standing trunks you see in these shots are just that - trunks with their tops completely snapped off. Those trees will probably not recover, because alders in close spacing like this have no lower branches. (While a few may send out new sprouts, they will be very unsightly trees.) Since alder decays quickly here, these trunks will need to be taken down and converted to turning stock or firewood within the next few months. The small debris can be left to rot.

My last set of pictures shows a situation which, for a woodturner like myself, could prove to be either a great boon, or a heartbreak. Up on the hill behind the house, just a bit above the spring, we found these three big-leaf maples and one alder. The entire cluster had simply toppled over, tearing out the rootball.

Only the week before New Year's I had been up here admiring these very trees as potential future woodturning stock. Now they have literally been dropped in my lap. So why could this be a heartbreak?

The location, only 600 feet from the house, is nearly inaccessible. (It is amazing how rough-surfaced a mere forty acres can be!) The ground in the immediate vicinity is soft muck except in summer. The hill above is very steep, the land drops sharply down again just beyond where the tops of the trees are lying, and the easiest approach involves scrambling along the side of a small spine of land after ducking under a huge windfall Douglasfir that is precariously hung up on the branch of an old maple.

The only way I see that this wood can be salvaged is to cut it up in situ and carry it out by hand as bowl blanks. And speaking from experience, green maple is heavy stuff and that is a *LOT* of bowl blanks!

Three bigleaf maples and an alder, blown down in one swell foop.
As you can see in the background, the hillside here is pretty steep.
The slope (not shown) up to the right of the rootball is even steeper.


The bottom side of the rootball, with the trunks extending to the left.


I took this shot standing on the top two maples. That piece of
closet pole is 48" long. I estimate the trunks at 20" to 24" diameter,
at least. And from the look of the bark, possibly some curly figure
is present in the log on the left. This would be prime turning wood
if I can just find a way to get it down the hill to the house!