Anybody notice lightning strikes around Stevensville?
Took a week after a lightning strike ignited the top part of the north end of the barn, until I started to connect the obvious dots. I heard a very, very loud lightning bolt around 9:30 p.m. on August 9.
A few weeks before the big barn burned down, a neighbor reported a lightning strike about a mile south from the Middle Burnt Fork intersection with Logan Lane. Lightning strike to flatland. Flatland with groundwater maybe two or so feet below the surface. All around the barn, groundwater is about two feet below the surface.
A few days after 2-1/2 hour barn burning inferno, a friend reported an odd lightning strike about a mile north. Lightning had struck not some nearby trees, but in open sagebrush hillside below a broad flatland bench.
Then it started to dawn on me. A few months ago, right out my picture window, I saw lightning strike a forest-surrounded meadow west of Stevensville. And a few weeks later a lightning bolt again struck the same meadow!
Then I remembered, seven years ago in September, Christine and I were shocked to see a big bolt of lightning hit in the bottom of Kootenai Canyon. We had been watching lightning strikes proceed up the Bitterroot Mountains like usual. No lightning to St, Mary’s area. Why did lightning strike near the bottom of Kootenai?
Last week, I finally got around to searching for what might have happened. There were two cracks of lightning. The second was very, very loud. It lit up my distant window shade. A 120 foot tall tree had been split apart from 20 feet to 30 feet above the ground.
Some 65 feet away the north end of the barn was in flames from 30 feet down to 20 feet above the ground. Less than ten minutes after the very loud lightning bolt.
Maybe the strike was like ground-to-cloud lightning bolts. Very, very large and hot and loud.
Maybe lightning bolts around valley have happened directly under the core of a turbulent mass of air traveling up the Bitterroot Valley.
Maybe the lightning strikes are local, and over with.
Could well be that I just sensed that the bolt was very loud because it was so close to the house.
If you have seen lightning bolts regular or large size around the hillsides, benches, flatlands or bottom lands of the Bitterroot Valley, please consider looking into the subject deeper than I can.
Surely there’s no sequence of lightning bolts traveling up the Valley, because we would have known that.
Lightning strikes proceed south to north, along the Sapphire Mountains and the Bitterroot Mountains.
Bob Williams
Stevensville