Camping and woodcraft - Scoutmastercg.com

-CAMP MAKING 215poplars, Cottonwood, catalpa, butternut, yellow locust,silver maple), and anj^ with unsound branches.Dead trees are always unsafe. Every woodsmai?has often known them to come thundering downwithout the least warning when there was not sqmuch as a zephyr astir. A tree that leans towardcamp from a steep hillside hard by is a menace, andso is any near-by tree with a hollow butt.Trees and Lightning.— I have never seen, noiheard of, a beech tree that had been struck by lightning, although beeches are plentiful on many battlescarredmountains where stricken trees of otherspecies can be noted by the score. Miss Keeler sayson this point: " There was so firm a belief amongthe Indians that a beech tree was proof againstlightning that on the approach of a thunder-stormthey took refuge under its branches with full assuranceof safety. . . . This popular belief has recentlyhad scientific verification. . . . The general conclusionfrom a series of experiments is that trees*poor in fat ' like the oak, willow, poplar, maple,elm and ash, oppose much lessresistance to the electriccurrent than trees ' rich in fat ' like the beech,chestnut, linden and birch."In this connection I may note that there is notruth in the old adage that " lightning does notstrike twice in the same place." At Takoma Park,a suburb of Washington, on July 19, 19 15, a bolt oflightning struck an oak tree standing in the gardenbefore the administration building of the SeventhDay Adventists. After the storm had passed, severalpeople w^ent out from the building to view thedamage done to the tree. Three of them lingered.A second bolt, from a clear sky, struck the sametree, killed two of the people under it, and knockedthe other unconscious.Electricity follows not only the trunk of a tree butalso the drip that falls from it in a rain.Shade.— In summer it is well to camp whereone's tent will be shaded from the afternoon sun.