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>

Thanks for the tip<br>I wouldn't want to wake up and find pancakes for breakfast - namely me!

...so, if you hadn't been there... anyway, to reply to your question, yes, I have observed that same thing (three times), but now that I think about it, only in deciduous woods. Once was close enough to me that a smaller tree could have hit me as it was crushed down by the falling tree. The three that I have seen have been large (old) trees. But this makes me wonder - often there are dead "leaners" in the coniferous areas I haunt - held aloft merely by the neighboring tree(s) they tipped over onto - occasionally I use the smaller of those as fire wood as they tend to be nice and dry - and with no obvious reason for why they toppled.<br><br>Two of those three occasions were on flat ground in the middle of the woods - not on the edges of the forest. Once was on a hillside. Like you said, no wind, even aloft. All three were during the warm months - not my favorite time of the year to be in the woods in the midwest or south. I do not know why they fell, but they had all been dead for some time. Root decay + static imbalance? No termites or carpenter ants in the three I saw fall - I think the wind gets those before gravity does, but I could be mistaken.<br><br>In this part of the country, "widow-makers" are large dead branches that are (temporarily) hung up in the branches above, awaiting the right breeze to send them crashing down. I think the exact meaning is regional, as I've seen other "suspended wonders" (like leaning trees) called "widow-makers" in other parts of the country. Same intent, I guess.<br><br>It was "out of the clear blue sky" each time I've witnessed it - a real " <head whip> what's that??!!" surprise. FWIW, they have all been in the last 8 years, but I think that's a coincidence.<br><br>Glad you mentioned it. Pretty startling, isn't it?

Nature is full wonder, suprise and a sence of humor. I was on my first upland game hunt in winter. My shotgun skills were non existent and my party were the classic slob hunters. I had fallen behind when a Pheasant literally fell on my head. the hen had been winged , nearly frozen and apparently deceased. I put her in my jacket's game pocket and proceeded with the "hunt". Suddenly I felt a slight rustling and realized she was very much alive! I took her to my DVM ( an avid hunter) who bemusedly cleaned the wound in partial trade for my shotgun. The shotgun? a model 12 16 guage solid rib :O(. Every region has it's suprises, and "old timers" are worth listening to. For instance, old logging regions may contain virtual quicksand bodies of old sawdust .

The sobering thing is to realize that entropy is gradually morphing one into an "old timer" and despertely wondering if one really knows anything like the "old" "old timers" knew <grin>.

Yes, this was deciduous woods. The ground in that area was somewhat sloping. It wasn't a partucularly large tree, not a huge oak or anything, but it seemed about as mature as they get in that particular stand. It was not at the edge of a forest, being at least a dozen ranks back from the stream.<br><br>The more I think about it, the more I realize how silly my assumptions were. I had absently assumed that almost all of the thousands of fallen trees in the valleys fell during windstorms.. but many of those valleys are so sheltered I doubt if they ever get much wind. Obviously, just as many trees fall in the areas with little or no wind as in the areas with high wind.. they just may be dead longer before they do... and in the sheltered areas, it would naturally be less predictable.<br><br>It was very startling. My city-boy reaction was telling- my first assumption was that there had to be people over there that caused the tree to fall, somehow. I think it's because, in the woods, I just associate loud noises with people.<br><br>Something similar happened on a longish backpacking trip to a true wilderness area in the East. I had made it to the banks of a beautiful stream with steep, cut banks, it was the first sunny day after about 5 days of rain, and I set up a bivouac in the sun just back from the creek bank. When setting up for dinner, I heard this huge "KER-PLOOSH!". Again, my city-boy instincts, I froze and assumed that I had failed to hear people, kids... someone come very close (I hadn't seen anyone in at least 5 days), and they were throwing rocks into the creek. I actually crept around for some time trying to spot them before they spotted my camp, so as not to be taken totally off guard. Nothing.<br><br>An hour and several more "KER-PLOOSH"es later, I was introduced to the notion that, well away from people, even pretty small streams can have REALLY BIG trout in them... :-)<br>

No question in my mind, the answer is "no". Hopefully somebody better qualified is preserving their knowledge.<br><br>When I was young, I just knew that age and experience didn't add up to wisdom. Now that I'm considerably older and more experienced, I see how right I was- I don't know nearly as much as I knew then. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a young person is to help them know less.<br>

Ha ha ha - still chuckling - I had the same reaction - "Who's over there?!?!". Getting away from the human noise is important to me, and I really resented the intrusion of a tree-felling (or so I thought).<br><br>Avalanches have never provoked that instinctive "people-noise" in me, so it's a learned response, I supose - both are "natural" sounds...<br><br>And to add to my mirth at your post, I have a similar stream experience, but it was a Georgia beaver that was especially perturbed that I had the effrontary to camp where IT wanted to do some nocturnal tree work...

You don't even have to be out in the woods for this to happen. A good friend of mine was cutting his grass one day and heard a loud crash behind him. The only tree in his yard came down, an oak tree that was almost two feet across. And no it was not dead, we were having quite a bit of rain and apparently the ground had softened up and the roots just let go. The grass was much greener in the spot where he stopped for several months.

"If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"<br>"Yes."<br>"If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?"<br>"No."<br>- - Patrick Havran