Gale-force winds brought down the forest in the High Tatras National Park on November 19, 2004. Winds were clocked at more than 170 km/hr. While the Slovaks were still determining all the reasons for the disaster, I went to take a closer look at this rare spectacle.

It was really an alien scene. The pictures on the television had not prepared me for the magnitude of this disaster. Trees were not just down on one side of a mountain. It was not anything like the damage from tornadoes that I had seen before. Trees were down everywhere, and the ones that were left were stripped of limbs. It was as if the forest had just recieved a very bad haircut.