What a crazy day! It started out as any normal Sunday.....rushing around, running late and trying to get to church on time. We were sitting in Church and Avery, the little stinker, was acting up and bugging her brother. So Peter took her out and when they came back in Peter said "it is looking very nasty out side". Then a 10 minutes later it started to hail so hard that we could hardly hear the closing prayer. After sacrament was over I was chatting with a friend when Peter came in and said there was a tornado. We ran outside and saw the tail end of it, I could not believe how close it looked. We had no idea if it had even touched down, little did we know it was right in our neighborhood.
I took this photo off of 9 News.com This tornado is pretty scary looking and it hit only a few blocks away from our house.
Here are what the clouds looked like after we got home. We decided to drive around and see the damage and if our neighbors were all right.
About half of the signs by my house look like this.
Here is a house where it looks like the roof and shingles started to lift off. For those that live here this house is just down Gunclub a bit past Southlands Mall.
This poor Trampoline. This house is right next door to Dan and Jessica Mortenson's. I am pretty sure that this trampoline is not always in the front yard, if it was I am sure Jess would have something to say about that.
The Townhouses right across from the Lowe's had all the front windows broken, probably from the hail. We had between marble and golfball size hail.
This is Lindsay McDowell's beautiful hands holding the HUGE hail that hit our area.
And here is part of their poor fence. The other side of their fence was torn down too, I mean just that the winds were strong enough to do that....yikes! I am soooo sorry guys. Michael just give Peter a call when you are going to fix it.
We saw so many trampoline's that are just mangled like pretzels...so scary.
There are also quit a few garage doors that were damaged. I am still in shock that this was right at our back door.
This trailer was picked up and dropped right beside this families house. I can not believe how close that is.
You can see the garge doors here look like they were almost torn right off, and the windows are broken as well.
This Lowe's only opened,I think, 6 weeks ago. The parking lots was just demolished, the shopping carts were thrown as far as 4 blocks away.
When we drove past the Lowe's they had bobcats that were starting to clean up the parking lot. A lot of there sheds were torn apart and scattered all over the place.
This is one of those backyard play-sets. We saw tons of those tossed across yard or even in other peoples yards.
Here is one that was thrown over the fence and took out a few trees. I am so sad at how much damage was done to our community, Southland and the Lowe's.
This is probably an 80 ft tree that is over 100 yrs old. There were tons of trees that were taken right out of the ground roots and all or snapped off at the base from the strong tornado winds, it is a real heartbreak.
Here is Weston walking down the side walk where the tree landed, so you can really see how huge it is.
We are just so glad that there were no reported major injuries from the tornado. Southlands Mall had some major damage done, they had every entrance blocked off so we could not get in and see. They said that Monday some of the stores might be up and running later in the day.
We only had an few branches and screen's that were broken at our house, so we are counting our blessings.
All along the way they have these big boulders that kids loved to climb on. This, I think, is the biggest one.
This little squirrel actually ran and jumped into Emerson's hand and then ran away. It did it so fast I missed it, but here is the shot just before the squirrel jumped.
Here is my little man Weston, who is a little close to the edge for my comfort. Just on the other side of that rock he is sitting on is a drop off.
Can you spot Peter? Hint.... dark blue jacket top of the falls
I like this picture of Emerson. To me it looks like I cut her picture out and glued it onto this background. But nope this was along the hike.
You can see Weston was having fun in the water
WOW.... just a little too close haha
Nothing like an ice cream cone after a good hike.
