Well - super cool discovery, kind of a bummer and a blessing.
So, I went out the next morning to begin chopping the tree away from the broken "trunk" in the pics. I started with my re-profiled NMSFNO, it was making some chips, and I was just really figuring out the best way to get at the tree. I then noticed some charring. I had it in the back of my mind that it was odd that this tree would have blown over so easily given we have had mostly rain and not any significant wind. I just figured it was a combo of big rain weighing this tree down and wind did the trick. I did not think too much more about it, just that a tree blew over and I needed to get rid of it. The more I examined the tree, and the closer I looked I realized that the tree had been struck by lightning. In the pictures you can see where the lighting struck. If you were to reconstruct the tree, this bolt struck almost perpendicular to the ground/straight down on top of this tree section.
I was meeting with a guy I work with in our program of recovery and gave him a heads up that we would be chopping up a tree while we had our regular get together - knife chopping and recovery go well in my book.
He texted me back "consider it done". I got off work to meet him at my house later after work, it was a downpour evening, so tree chopping was out of the question. Low and behold, when he said "consider it done" he was in the process of cutting it up with his chainsaw in the middle of the day.
So, no knife testing on this tree, although it needed to move pretty quickly before it started killing grass (not that it would not have come back in a micro-second down here).
So, instead of epic chopping tests, all I have are these stinkin' pictures and the piece of wood where the lightning struck in my garage!
I was like a little kid when I discovered that fresh strike-point. I do not know if I will ever see something that fresh off of a lighting strike again in my whole life. It is just fascinating to me that the strike point is so vividly clear and obvious.
