EPISODE 96 PARADISE LODGE…CAUGHT IN A SUDEN CYCLONIC STORM…LIGHTNING, KNOCKED OUT
alan skeoch
august 2020
Serge Lavoie and I were completing a magnetometer survey on an anomaly a few
miles south of our base camp at Paradise Lodge. Seemed to be a sunny day. Stayed
that way until we looked at the sky about mid-afternoon. Black storm clouds moving
our director. Moving fast. The forest seemed unusually quiet for a spell and then
all hell broke loose.
Great swirling winds tore into the forest. Winds strong enough to uproot whole clumps
of trees. Particularly clumps of cedar that whipped over shoving their tangle of roots and dirt
skyward.
Usually we toughed out storms by just hunkering down. This was different. The wind was
cyclonic…moving in circles. Rain, thunder, lightning. Noise as loud as a ACR freight
train.
One of us was carrying the magnetometer while the other carried related gear.
We were trying to reach the ACR roadbed, perhaps a mile or two east of
our survey area.
We never made it until later.
I remember a crack. Like an axe splitting a birch block. Sudden.
And that is all I remember until I woke up. Same with Serge. When we awakened
our gear was strewn around. The Magnetometer with its tripod was a good ten or
fifteen feet from where we lay.
We were fine. But we had no idea how long we were knocked out. Was it five minutes
or an hour. What had happened? We guessed it was a lightning strike nearby…close but not close
enough to kill.
The storm was still happening but the ferocity had eased. I seem to remember several clumps
of cedar ripped from the ground. Overturned on their sides. Were the trees like
that before the storm.
“What happened, Serge?”
“No idea…knocked down”
“Let’s get out of here…maybe a freight train coming.”
Sure enough we were able to flag down an ACR diesel and load
ourselves and the mag into the open doors of a freight car. The engineer
must have known us for he stopped at Mile 71giving us a minute or two to
jump down with our gear.
Bottom line? We had no idea what had happened to us in that cedar swamp.
But something knocked us down and out. Later in the fall when Serge visited
us at home in Toronto we remembered that storm. What knocked us down?
PERHAPS someone reading this has an answer.
1) caught in big cyclonic type sudden storm (circular winds with high velocity)
2) suddenly we were knocked out for a few minutes or longer
3) the magnetometer was ten feet away from us when we both woke up
4) seem to remember clumps of cedars down with roots in air
5) storm may have ended as fast as it came upon us
6) only Serge and I had the experience … we were several miles from camp
alan skeoch
august 2020