'tis only a flesh wound

Well, apparently the wind and the rain were more vicious than we realized, as this is what greeted me when I got home today:

This is the view from the top of the front yard, looking backwards through the side yard towards the back yard. One of the 150+ foot fir trees went down today, probably about 10:00am or so, as Chris vaguely remembers hearing some noise shortly after he went to bed this morning. The tree extends from its rootball up on the road at the main entrance to Maderas, down the hill, over part of the yard, and into the blackberries and almost into the driveway of the people who live behind us.

As near as I can tell, the fir tree fell south down the hill and landed on the major branch of the maple tree. The trunk of the fir rolled down the edge of the maple trunk, finally taking out the major branch which fell out and to the side. This caused the fir tree to finish rolling a bit more to the same side, pulling the remaining rootball out of the ground, as it crashed all of the way down. Four feet more to the right and it would've crushed my pink dogwood, as it is the little tree lost one of its major branches. Four feet to the left and it would have probably stayed caught in the maple tree, being supported by the three major trunks.

And of course, if the angle of fall had been 30 degrees to the right, our deck would be splinters.

Here is a video I took of the entire trunk, it shows the size of the tree much more clearly than a few pictures can manage.

I'm now going to be looking up tree companies, as this is far too large to take care of by ourselves like we had planned with a smaller one that went down in November. I'm also now worried about the dead tree about twenty feet away from the one that went down, and want it gone as well. Finally, I need someone to tell me if that maple has any chance of living through its injury, and if not then it will have to be taken down as well.

Like I didn't have enough expensive things in my life right now with car maintenance and the new furnace last January. Bah. I will be thankful that my house was not harmed, but I think I am going to grumble about this just a bit. Plus we now have a giant hole in our "tree wall" blocking us from that new development, which is pretty annoying. Oh well - perhaps time to invest in some fast-growing shrubbery.