Going on a hike in a forest on a hot summer day, with temperatures rising to 30 degrees Celsius, is an excellent opportunity to enjoy the cool air and the much-needed shadow of the trees while also doing physical activity, which otherwise would be hard to do at high temperatures during daytime, so when I was invited to go on a hike to the top of a hill on a Sunday afternoon in July, I gladly accepted the invitation.
It should have been a rainy Sunday in my region, but fortunately, the weather forecast turned out not to be very accurate
that time, but it had rained heavily the night before. As a matter of fact, I had been awoken by the deafening sound of thunder in the middle of the previous night; there had been a violent storm which had come after several days of extreme heat, a furious outburst of nature which seems to take revenge on humans who cause so much damage to the environment by subjecting them to all kinds of extreme weather conditions.But not only humans have to suffer from nature's fury, as I could see during my forest hike. I was still close to the foot of the hill when I came across a spectacular, but also frightening view, which you can see in the photo above, of several bent trees forming a natural roof over the road as the contact
with the trees from the other side of the road prevented them from falling to the ground. As I continued my hike up on the road I saw several fallen trees, some of them old and massive, with their roots simply snatched from the ground, but luckily and rather surprisingly none of them had blocked the road, they were in the ravines, right in the middle of the forest.It was sad to see those trees knocked down, even if it wasn't man's hand, but nature's anger that finished them off, but it's an unpleasant sight I should be more used with. As humans, in their ever-growing hunger for profits, destroy the environment in an accelerated pace, they also have to suffer the consequences of their reckless acts, and violent, thunderous rainfalls are probably going to get more and more frequent in the region where I live, so I expect to see more and more and fallen trees, along with massive floods, and other devastating effects of heavy storms and other extreme weather phenomena, in the upcoming years. There is no other choice but to get used to these changes because it's obvious to me that our planet won't heal very soon, on the contrary, it will grow sicker and sicker and its suffering will only make our lives worse.
