Vanishing Woodsman

Brian was working on the ski trails -- after the heavy snowfall, a lot of limbs and branches came down, and these all must be cleared so the trails are at their best! It's a slow process, becuase we have almost 20 km. of trails, and sometimes, as the evening approaches and dinner beckons, he begins to work on auto-pilot.

He was working his way through a stand of hemlock. These are big trees. Deer love them, because they hold the snow up off the ground, leaving an easy area beneath where the deer can congregate. That should have been a clue. Brian picked up a healthy branch, and slung it off the trail.

Right smack up against the trunk of the nearest hemlock. There was a silence, then a soft sound, like an exhalation. Brian looked up, seeking the source.

And, like Wiley Coyote in the cartoons, he vanished under the total snow load of the hemlock. Once the snow starts to come down from these trees -- whether by a sharp impact on the trunk or a breeze up in the treetops -- it comes in a domino effect bringing everything with it.

Nancy snapped this photo of a cedar tree letting go it's own snowload... it's a localized blizzard, a white-out, or (colloquially) a dump, to give you an idea.

Brian emerged, unharmed except for some snow down the back of his neck. Rocked the snowmobile free from the snowload, and carried on. Muttering. These big hemlocks can carry quite a load. We have trees along our trails that are well over 200 years old. They made it through the logging operations in the early 1900s that took hemlock bark for the Leather Tannery in Huntsville.

Heck, they were around when Napoleon was conquering Italy, and Beethoven was cranking out some light dinner tunes. They were here when the first French railline began to carry passengers , and the first horse-trolleys began to operate in New York. They were here for the first use of the word 'evolution', and Samuel Colt's invention of the Colt revolver. They made it through the two World Wars, and all the rest that followed, through the formulation of Vitamin A, the atomic bomb, and men walking on the moon. They were here when Martin Luther King had his Dream, and they were here for Barak Obama's election.

And they were here to dump all the snow they could on top of Brian. He should consider himself in good company.