BY VIKI MATHER
A huge bolt of lightning cracked the red pine
as it streaked to the ground. It ran through the roots and
smouldered overnight. Last week I wrote about
the fire - this week it's about the
lightning. After the fire was out, and the adrenaline started
to abate, we explored the site.
A little dotted line of disturbed ground led
to the place where the fire ignited and a small rock had popped
out of the ground. These were just a very small
part of the mark left by the lighting.
The main conduit for the lightning was likely
a red pine that stood just a tad taller than its neighbors. The
bark was split in three or four lines from the crown of the
tree to the ground. It wasn't obvious from the bottom of the
tree that the lightning bolt had spread through the roots. But
a balsam fir tree nearby had all the soil within half a meter
of its roots disturbed.
As our search for evidence widened, we found
a spruce had also been hit by the bolt. It bore the telltale
fresh cracks in the bark, but not quite as severely. A line of
disrupted ground led to a log on the ground which had a chunk
missing where the bolt ran out. From there, the bolt had jumped
to a beautiful, large, double birch tree. This poor tree had a
huge chunk of bark blasted away.
The vegetation around the birch tree looked
like it had been steam-cooked. Large-leaf asters wilted in a
half circle around the birch that reached out one
to two metres. This was all 25 metres away
from the red pine.
From the birch, the strike line went back
into the ground and forked two or more times. We found one line
that extended another twenty-five metres into the bush! One of
the lines went through a large boulder, and cracked it in half.
In other places, it tossed chunks of soil 10 feet through the
air. Wow!
After following that lightning strike line,
we went back to the cracked red pine and looked for more.
Indeed, there were several. They led in all directions,
but none disturbed the land as much as the
first line we followed.
Thirty years of living in the bush, I have
never seen anything like this before. Awesome!
Viki Mather lives by a lake near Sudbry.
