Tornado?

Thanks to my photo shoot assistants!

Where were you when we experienced our "wind damage event"?

If you were in Mount Gretna today, you know that we literally had just a few minutes after the emergency weather broadcast to secure our things and persons before the 70+ mile an hour winds raced through here. Huge, healthy trees were twisted where they stood, and ripped out of the ground like they were little toothpicks in a fluffy cake. Whole root balls, some with huge boulders incorporated in them, were plowed over like beach balls under a snow plow.

But, the most phenomenal expression of nature's free spirit can be seen in the pattern of this destruction. It literally took a straight path through Mt. Gretna, with the worst damage concentrated in a 10 or 15 foot wide path! Apparently, this type of damage is called "Microburst (or "straight line") Wind Damage"

Just go to the pond at the back of the Campmeeting, and look up hill towards Pinch Road, and you can see the path--it came through Campmeeting, over the little pond and up the hill, and crossed Pinch Road and snapped a path through the few remaining trees in those lots.

But, if you go into the woods now, please be very careful as this wind damage has uprooted or snapped many trees and a number of them are precariously perched over footpaths and elsewhere, hidden out of the view unless you make a habit of looking up, sometimes WAY up.

It got dark pretty fast afterward, but I managed to get a few pictures.
This is the tree that fell on Pinch Road, crushing the Port-a-Potty there.

Here is where that tree's root ball used to live. You can see that it didn't just fall over, leaving one side of its root ball looking like a hinge. It literally was raised up and dropped about two or three feet off center from its hole! That whole is pretty deep, like a cave...

The next two pictures suggest that the trees were twisted via some massive forces, as this type of splinter is usually caused by the tree canopies being literally twisted/rocked from their trunks by massive wind force. Yes, lightning can also cause splintering. But, when it is lightning that causes a tree to splinter, usually the damage is isolated to that one tree, and the splintering looks more like a explosion. And, if the trees just snapped in the wind, there would be more of a fracture type of break. It also looks as if this type of wood structure lends itself to splintering, when pushed to an extreme.