Despite many years of camping, backpacking (multi-week trips) and hiking, I saw something in the woods yesterday I’ve never seen before. Some of you folks who are more routinely in the wilderness might laugh at this, but it was a mild wake-up call for me, and I thought I’d pass on the experience.<br><br>I was on a short hike, had paused for 15 or 20 minutes on a boulder next to a stream just to admire the beautiful day. Sun shining, warm, slight wind on the ridges and none in the valley where I was, nobody anywhere around, I could easily have been persuaded to stay longer, even to take a snooze in the sun.<br><br>I got up and moved on, got maybe 200 feet further down the trail, and suddenly there was a great deal of noise behind me. I whirled around in time to see a tree, some distance on the far side of the creek, come crashing down for no apparent reason, making a great deal of noise in the process.<br><br>Well, obviously, it was dead. And that area of the forest is littered with literally thousands of fallen trees, so it shouldn’t be a huge shock.. but I guess I had assumed that almost all of them came down in wind storms. At the time this one fell, there was not even a breeze. I’ve seen new-fallen trees the morning after a storm, but I’ve never seen one fall just like that.<br><br>It was suddenly very quiet in the woods. I doubled back just to get a better view. I couldn’t get closer than a couple of hundred feet without crossing the stream, and there seemed no reason to do that, but I could certainly see that there was no one around. There’s something of a beaver population explosion going on a mile or two away, but I could see the break, and it wasn’t their doing. I'm guessing the tree was a bit over two feet in diameter, and it had been perhaps 100 feet tall.<br><br>This area is mature second-growth, and, as I said, the forest floor is littered with deadfall. I replayed the incident in my mind, trying to judge the timing.. my best guess is that if I had been close to it and on my feet when it happened, I could have gotten clear pretty easily.. but if I had been sitting relaxed, maybe cooking, or lying down, I doubt that I could have reacted in time. Inside a tent or sleeping bag, of course.... I think the time from the first noise until the tree hit the ground was about two or three seconds<br><br>For the rest of the hike I took more note of standing deadwood, and found that there were surprisingly few areas where you were completely out of range of all standing dead trees, in all directions.<br><br>When I was starting out camping as a teenager, I remember the “old timers” talking about looking for “widowmakers” when setting up camp, and I gathered from context at the time (I didn't want to ask stupid questions- stupid me) that they were talking about falling branches... but I have to confess I’ve set up a lot of camps in fair weather without paying much attention to dead or dying trees, so long as branches weren’t overhanging the site. <br><br>Just something to keep in mind when picking a spot for the night.<br>