SEATTLE - A Seattle woman had some good luck while camping at Lake Kachess on Friday the 13th. She and her camping partner happened to be away from their camp site when a storm blew through, and a massive fir tree fell on their tent trailer, crushing it.

Sarah Howell and her friend had left the campground just after 8 a.m. and headed to Wenatchee to have lunch with her friend's parents. That day trip likely saved their lives.

At about 1 p.m., Howell got a phone call from someone who asked if there was anyone in the trailer.

"She said 'We had a windstorm and I don’t know how to tell you this but we had a few trees fall and one of them fell on your tent trailer,'" said Howell.

Howell rushed back to the campground, which looked as if a tornado had blown through.

"Everything was down, and there was nobody in there and when we left there was families, there was kids running around, people having breakfast," she said. "It was a fun, normal day at a campground and then no one's there, there's stumps and branches down everywhere."

The shock came when she got to her camp site.

"You couldn't even make out that it was a tent trailer," said Howell. "There was this huge tree. I'd say it's probably 150 feet tall and it was three feet wide. It took my breath away."

She found out from friends that the tree had fallen about 20 minutes after she had left the site that morning.

If she and her friend had been there, they would have been sitting at the table.

"So one of us would be dead and the other one would be severely injured," she said.

Sarah Howell

Sarah Howell and her friend had left the campground only minutes before the storm blew in.

Pam Novitzky, recreation manager at Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, said it was determined that the trees that fell were healthy.

"They did have a good root structure to them, they were not dead trees," she said.

Novitzky said it was simply the work of Mother Nature.

"Some thunder cells will have exceptionally strong winds with them," she said.

Howell said she's just grateful that she was away from her camp site when the tree fell.

"More than anything I feel that it was a bizarre event and we really dodged a bullet," she said.

An SUV parked nearby as also hit by a tree. No one in the campground was injured.

KING 5's Deborah Feldman contributed to this report.