Prehistoric Beast

Well, ahem: just a stump, but oh--what a stump it is.

I can’t stop looking at the animal qualities of that stump. It’s kind of mythical - many-footed, headless (courtesy of a chain saw if I’m not mistaken…), it’s got the skin of a dragon, and a belly that could only belong to some hellish beast.

And at the same time, it’s calmly at peace in its surroundings.

I have no idea what kind of tree this was, but the most common trees near the water are alders and poplars. Even in defeat, as it sits now, it is putting out shoots and trying to make a comeback. Bwa-ha-ha! (as the comic villains used to say, once upon a time)

Shot with a new lens, the Fujifilm 500mm f/5.6 on the Fuji GFX 100S II camera.

Here is is with a slightly wider view.

Looking at similar trees on that side of South Prairie Creek, they all have slowly gotten under-cut by the currents. But this would have been the biggest of them all, and by a large margin.

There are other trees in that area that have had to fight to make a living, including this stand with multiple trunks, all of them mature and marked by their adventures.

These last trees are well above the mean water level of the creek, and were probably battered every few years by trees traveling at high speed in heavy flood conditions, which scared them with the force of those blows. Having lived in the area for about five years now, I’ve seen flood conditions a couple of times, and the difference between the normal trickle of water - typical normal flow is just a foot or two deep at the middle of the creek; in a flood, the water rises a good twenty feet and the flow rate and speed of the water rises by several orders of magnitude.