A good friend of mine was hiking in Colorado a few months ago. He stopped for a few minutes to use his phone to look up a local brewery he wanted to go to after the hike, then started walking again. He said a large, dead tree fell over shortly in front of him right where he would have been walking had he not stopped to look up the brewery. He said it happened so quickly that if he had been walking there he would have been crushed because there was no time to react and there were no signs it was going to fall over like the trunk crackling or making noises. It just kind of toppled over in the span of seconds.

He jokes about how that brewery saved his life! It's crazy to think that a tree could fall on you just that quickly with no warning and it definitely makes me a little more nervous while hiking in areas with dead trees. There's actually kind of a lot in parts of Colorado right now due to disease and pests.