Frost Cracking

A couple of years ago on a trail which circled Sasajewun Lake at the Algonquin Wildlife Research Station, we came across a few trees that I thought had been struck by lightning. I saw fissures in the tree, some shallow, some deeper. These fissures wrapped in a long loose spiral around the trunk of the tree from fairly high up most of the way down. Many different tree species had these fissures and many were near the path. This is when I started to think again about lightning strikes. How did so many trees along a single path get struck by lightning? Turns out they didn’t.