Day: September 21, 2020💾

The Big Blowdown brought heavy rains and winds in excess of 100 mph. In a single day – November 25th – more than 800,000 acres of timber was heavily damaged. The storm caused a complete shutdown of the roads and trails across large swaths of the park, a historic suspension of the State Constitution, a temporary glut in the spruce market, and a political impact that continues to this day.

Despite several days of rain that preceded the storm, hundreds of hunters were out for the last weekend of the season, including Adirondack conservationist Paul Schaefer, hunting in heavy rain near Eleventh Mountain in western Warren County. “When the top 40 feet of a great spruce suddenly cracked and blew almost over our heads,” he remembered, “we knew it was high time to get home.”

Hikers huddled at Johns Brook Lodge thought it safer to leave the area altogether, but a number of hunters rode the storm out alone, already separated from their parties for the day’s hunt. Ronald “Bud” Brownell was sixteen at the time and hunting with his father at Russian Lake near Big Moose Lake. He cowered alone under a large tree for what seemed like forever and considered it a miracle when he was finally reunited with this father and uncle.

The Adirondacks is prone to powerful windstorms, isolated tornadoes, and occasional hurricanes, derechos, and microbursts. Perhaps the second most destructive of these in modern Adirondack history (next to the 1998 Ice Storm) occurred in November, 1950.

The Big Blowdown brought heavy rains and winds in excess of 100 mph. In a single day – November 25th – more than 800,000 acres of timber was heavily damaged. The storm caused a complete shutdown of the roads and trails across large swaths of the park, a historic suspension of the State Constitution, a temporary glut in the spruce market, and a political impact that continues to this day.

Despite several days of rain that preceded the storm, hundreds of hunters were out for the last weekend of the season, including Adirondack conservationist Paul Schaefer, hunting in heavy rain near Eleventh Mountain in western Warren County. “When the top 40 feet of a great spruce suddenly cracked and blew almost over our heads,” he remembered, “we knew it was high time to get home.”

The Great Appalachian Storm of 1950 in the Adirondacks.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called the Appalachian storm one of the most ‘meteorologically unique’ storms ever because it produced both record high and record low temperatures. At 6:30 pm on November 25, snow battered Pittsburgh and temperatures fell to 9 degrees. But in Buffalo, 200 miles away, temperatures reached a balmy 54 degrees.

As a result, the Appalachian Storm was called ‘perhaps the greatest combination of extreme atmospheric elements ever seen in the eastern United States.’

The monster storm formed on Nov. 24 as an extratropical cyclone in southeast North Carolina. It brought warm Atlantic air northwestward even as an Arctic front moved to the southeast through Ohio. The storm caused high winds, heavy rains and coastal flooding from Maine to Florida.

It stretched as far west as Ohio. Blizzards struck the western slopes of the Appalachians, dumping the most snow ever on the mountainsides.

One of the oddest features of the storm was that it moved from east to west. But more than 99 percent of cyclones move the other way — from west to east.

The storm blanketed Ohio – including Columbus, where Ohio State and the University of Michigan played their annual game despite the weather.