What experiences have you had with falling branches or trees?

I was crushed to death by one, a few times.

When I was a kid (about 7) we lived in a house with large apple trees in the back yard. I climbed one about 20’ up, crawled out on a branch, facing out, when the branch broke under my weight, but didn’t break off of the tree completely. So there I was, looking straight down at the ground (about 15’ up), holding on for dear life! I had to turn myself around without falling and climb down the branch. Reaching the ground, I decided the climb down wasn’t so bad so I went back up and climbed down again, picking apples as I went.
Later, I took Mom’s best butcher knife and hacked off the branch where it had broken. Mom wasn’t too happy about me using her knife…

Way to go @kritiper!

When I was about 3 I was climbing a tree in our front yard. I ended up hanging from the lowest branch and I was stuck. I was screaming bloody murder for my Mom. She never heard me. Or maybe she did, stuck her head out the door, shrugged and went back in!
I finally let go. The drop wasn’t so bad, maybe 5 feet, but I’ll never forget the terror I felt and screaming for my mother, who never came.

I had a tree branch fall with me on it, once. It was only a five or six foot drop, but I was tiny and it left me pretty shaky.
I lived by a wooded area once where we could hear crackling every time there was a good wind. Sometimes we watched and would spot some fall.

In the first pictures I posted in the details, those are all down from one insane ice storm we had. It was so weird. It was 29 degrees for literally 24 hours. The thermometer didn’t budge. We had a slow, steady rain for 24 hours. It froze as soon as it hit the branches, which developed about 4 inches of ice on them. EVERYTHING, including round, red berries that had started to bloom, were encased in ice. It was like an enchanted world, full of glitter and diamonds.
That first evening the trees started breaking. Every few minutes you’d hear a CRACK and a branch would come down. It went on and on, like gun shots in the night.
Every tree in town was devastated. It was so weird to be so discombobulated driving down my own street for several weeks after. Every tree had become unrecognizable, with jagged bare branches sticking out. It was weird to realize how much I used them as land marks.
That was 16 years ago. You can still see the affects today.

Back in 2007 or 8 I had a giant, I mean HUGE, old growth Oak tree topple over across from my deck. The monster just uprooted and left a crater in the ground about 12 feet wide and 6 feet deep. It was amazing as I had just walked by my front window during a big storm and then, not 2 minutes later, when I walked back through my living room the entire view was the bushy, brushy canopy of the tree right up against my deck rails! It took me a minute to compute what I was looking at. haha

It was perfect in the sense that another couple feet in length the tree would have ripped my deck off. It fell from across the ravine and seasonal creek below my deck and I estimated it to be abut 60–70 feet tall. I was super lucky it missed doing any damage. The trunk on that beast was a monster.

Whoa!