After being thoroughly amused by this thread which seems to now have a life all of it's own, I must relate my recent tree incident.

I was flying at my club's field last Sunday afternoon as the heat of the day and haze was breaching it's most opressive point. We have a line of trees and pretty thick forest at the north end of our runway. The wind was coming out of the southwest. I took off in my recently restored Sig Skybolt. She flew beautifull if not a tad sluggish at gaining altitude due to the high humidity. It came time for landing and I set up for a long one, as I normally do. I headed straight towards the tree line and turned left onto my base leg in front of the trees. Ah this was going to be a textbook landing. Before I turned final, I apparently let my airspeed get to low as the plane dropped it's left wing and nosed down. I let her gather a little speed before instinctively increasing the throttle and wrenching her back up and to the right. Well I overcompensated and still did not have enough airspeed so now instead of seeing the top of the wing as she went down, I saw the bottom of the wing (we're still in front of the tree line here). I advanced the throttle all the way now, leveled the wings and yanked back on the stick. She shot skyward and headed out over the trees. Now all I needed to do was turn around and head back towards the field. Then, as if insult to injury, the engine quit! She started dropping like a brick. It was all I could do to keep the nose and wings level but there was no way she'd make the field. She settled into the top of a 100ft pine at the very edge of the tree line. When I went out to have a look it appeared as if she was on one piece. I immediately called a local tree climber who is sensitive to the plight of the avid aeromodeler. 48 hours later he had my beautiful skybolt lowered to the ground. The only damage being some ripped Monokote and a crunched leading edge on the tip of the top wing. I couldn't believe my eyes!!

Well, she WILL fly again. The moral of the story is....when you have trees that close to the end of the runway, give them a WIDE bearth. There is no telling what might happen. I will CERTAINLY be practicing shorter approches for the rest of the summer!