Nature

One of the stately giants I wrote of recently has met up with Mama Nature and came out second. We had a noisy and bright lightning and thunder storm, and rain and wind, several mornings back, starting at about 3 am.

As I was holding my little Misha tight in my arms, telling her I'd protect her, there was one particularly bright flash of lightning, followed immediately by a huge crack of thunder. I knew that one hit very close by!

Walking later that morning, we found out where. Just a couple very short blocks over from us, maybe a couple hundred yards as the woodpecker flies, one of our lovely old saguaro cactus took a direct hit!

The top is charred where it was hit, and many arms simply exploded off, leaving burned marks there too. There is probably a couple thousand pounds of debris around the poor old giant.

The amazing thing about these tough old beasts is that it will probably survive, should the park allow it to stand. It doesn't look mortally wounded! It just lost about eight arms! Just. So very sad to see.