On a lunch hike today with Charlie we went up and around Quarry Hill. On the trip up the hill we found the trail littered with a bunch of fresh "splinters", albeit one foot to six foot long ones. You see old, dead trees being decimated by large woodpeckers, a pile of sawdust accumulated below, but this was huge hunks of wood, some of them over twenty feet away. The tree itself looked like someone precisely split the bark open on the lower ten or so feet, with big signs of explosion - jagged hunks of tree sticking out or missing altogether - above that. Opening the slit in the bark there was a vivid white vertical line on the trunk, with the bark itself loosened from the trunk a good three inches on each side. As if the lightning bolt traveled quickly down the inner bark, super heating the moisture and causing it to essentially burst open. At the base of the tree was a fist-sized hole from jettisoned soil.

Quite impressive. I kind of expected to see charred wood, but I think the tree was young and wet enough that all that happened was a quick boiling and steam eruption up and down the trunk. Would love to have had a ladder tall enough to see where the bolt hit.