Monday Monday

So I've been a bad blogger lately. Time for some catch up.
Monday I had a nice day off. It wasn't windy enough to do any kite flying, so I had made up my mind to go for a walk in the woods somewhere.
The "somewhere" was decided for me when I saw a new geocache published. I grabbed my gear and bolted for the door. I knew I had to be fast if I was going to beat the local cacher "ramsey63" to be the first one to find that cache. Ramsey63 is a retired gent with over a thousand finds to his name. He also has many first to find tallys. I have less than a dozen. This was my chance!
I got to the State Forest land where the cache was hidden and found no other vehicles and only one set of tracks in the new snow. The new tracks were from the cache "hider" so I was in good shape to be the first to find! Four hundred some odd feet later and a little ducking and weaving through the woods and I had the cache in hand!
This State Forest land is newly acquired and being logged because of the huge amount of blow-downs from the tornado that nearly hit St. Peter two years ago. I had been scoping the area as a potential caching area and planned to wait until the logging was done. This day, after making the geocache find, I explored a lot more of the area.
It's neat the way the tornado ripped it up. You can tell which way the tornado rotated by walking from one edge of the destruction path to the other. Pretty neat! The power involved is amazing.
The picture below shows the edge of the path of the tornado. The density of trees is not due to the logging. They are only harvesting downed, damaged trees.
Below you see the logged area, and some of the "living" trees left behind. The area not logged looks the same, but the downed trees are not nicely cut up in to log truck size pieces.
Another shot of the destruction, to the far right is the fringe of the un-touched trees.
And the finale! Including yours truely. Self portrait by one of the blow-downs. The top has been harvested, but you can see the size of the tree trunk. See how this monster just splintered in the whirling power of the twister? Do you know how far you have to chainsaw through a tree like this to make it fall. The WIND did it with no cutting at all! Sweet! It would have been awesome to be up on the hill to watch this tornado spiral through the valley.