I haven’t been posting since the April windstorm for a variety of reasons. I hope this collection of photos and text makes up for that. We’ll begin a few days before the storm at Sock’s frog pond, a favorite location to take photos in the spring.

When I took this photograph it was raining lightly. I love the nearly abstract blends of color and shape.

Amongst the chores are periodic maintenance and repair of our ATV and the MSU, a 4×4 side-by-side UTV. The MSU has two seats (thus side-by-side), cabin roof and windshield, and a bed great for hauling groceries and firewood. This is a shot of the passenger side of the engine that I took before I replaced the fan gears, part of the linkage between the gear shift and the transmission. The cover for the gears is just to the right of the black oil filter. At a certain point, the gears wear out making it impossible to shift. This was the third time I’ve done this so that’s about once every three years. Earlier this year I had to replace the one-way bearing in the drive clutch for the transmission, an all-day job. The one-way bearing provides engine braking when going down hills.

Mid-summer foliage provides full shade for our home and the forest floor. We are perhaps 10 degrees cooler in our woods than the ambient temperature ten miles away towards Charleston where there are few trees and much pavement.

Once leaves appeared on trees the impacts of the April storm became less prominent. Here a pine was twisted by the storm until it fell across the road following the county line between Putnam and Kanawha.

This summer beginning in June until the beginning of autumn we were in an area suffering from severe drought. In September some trees had their leaves turn color and immediately go to brown and fall. We expected the worst, though normal fall colors with leaves lasting longer on trees occurred in October. In September we feared our blaze of fall gold wasn’t going to occur. It was nice that our fears proved wrong, though we’ll see next spring how extensive tree mortality from the drought will be.

This photo shows the canopy over our buildings. The house is to the left, the shack is to the right and the shop roof extends to the left of the shack.

More pretty colors.

I love finding that single red leaf on the ground surrounded by leaves of differing shapes and colors.

Taken in the garden with a tall white oak in the foreground and the moon a tiny dot overhead.

Taken in the garden but I can’t remember where I shot this photo. I think this is a felled beech tree now a bush to the west of the garden fence.

We’re in winter now. Several snows have fallen and melted away leaving leaves on the ground matted down and less a fire hazard until spring. There’s a light snow on the ground with a clear blue sky as I write this. It’s cold so we have both wood stoves burning with cats in front of each.

Heavy rainfall was predicted for April 2. We had the rain but there were also extremely high winds. I was in town for a doctor’s appointment. Patients and staff sheltered in the basement there. Molly was on the ridge and experienced the worst of it.

Bands of high wind crossed our ridge from west to east, like tines on a rake, toppling or breaking oaks, hickories, maples, and pines. Fortunately our buildings were mostly spared (a branch punched a hole in a shed’s roof). The garden and solar panel were also spared. The neighboring camp was also spared. These areas were the gaps between the tines.

I’m showing a few photos and the commentary will begin south of the garden and move northwards. South of the garden there was a stand of tall pines that shaded the solar panels in midday during winter. Those pines are mostly gone leaving a couple of stragglers. One of the pines when it fell lightly brushed the southern fence of the garden.

A large maple fell into the garden area with its top just brushing the frame for a pair of solar panels. Power for our neighbors was out for days; power lines lay on the ground in the hollow. We’ve been lucky and still have power. This had been one of the maples we’d tapped for maple sap in the past.

The county line road between the garden and the group of buildings that make up our home is filled with downed trees. This large pine snapped off about 12 to 16 feet from the ground.

I’ve been cutting a path to the road from the ATV shed following the trail we normally use. The branches are from fallen oak and maple trees. There’s a lot of cleanup still to do clearing the branches.

A few trees fell to the north of us but the tines dug deeply into the hillside to the north of the camp. This is a relatively flat section of road along a hillside. Trees fell across the road and a path for our ATV and UTV has been cleared (thanks Tom for helping). This large oak’s trunk shattered from the force of the wind. A large plank-like section from the trunk lies about 20 feet away further north.

There’s a lot of cutting and clearing required. My plan is to first clear a path through the trees across roads on our property. Further south there is less clearing involved. Once the path has been cleared I need to go back and widen the space for larger vehicles. Cut oak, maple, and hickory will be split and stacked. These roads are important if there’s ever a fire out here. Keeping them clear would help control the spread.

It’s going to take some getting used to the changes in our forest.