Flood

We had a little rain last weekend.   It was sooo exciting.   Especially because it was dark when we were fighting the worst of it.  We're in the hills and hollows out here and our floods are flash floods.  They happen right after big rains and usually go down within a couple of hours. Since this happened in the dark, we didn't get any big water pics,  but Lily got these pics of the damage the next morning.   You'll probably have to click them to see them in the detail that really shows what all that water did to our road.

These new gullies [pic above] on our big hill are about 12 inches deep.   Nature's way of providing us speed bumps.  You could get over them....sloooowly.  One guy in a big truck with a 4 wheeler in the back gunned it past our place and hit them at 30 miles an hour.   Bang!  The back of his truck went up.  The four wheeler went up and crashed back down.   Dude.  You can't do that out here.   

Eric's very watchful eye during the night prevented a big flood in the basement.   His immediate shovel intervention at a culvert diverted some of the water that had filled half of our back patio.  While he shoveled, I hauled the stepping stones out of the drainage channel behind the patio.   It was just enough to take the pressure off the area and in 15 minutes the water was way down.   Whew.   Only a couple of trickles of water in the basement.    Then we spent an hour enhancing the many drainage ditches we already had and digging new ones around the back and east side of the studio.   We'll widen those way out in the spring and put in some drainage tile and more gravel.

The lower garden was half full of water and there was water over a 30-40 foot section of the road where another culvert goes under the road at the small creek.    Once the water went over the road it covered a large part of our lower pasture on its way to the big creek - you can see the flattened grass in this large area of the lower pasture.  The small creek is at the tree line at the top of the pic.

Up the way from us, the big creek goes under the road a couple of times and it is common to get washouts in big rains.   This was no exception.  I've marked the pic where the edge of the road used to be.   There was another place not too far from this one that looked the same.  The water moves fast enough to dump those big rocks way down the creek on our place.   [Also tree trunks.]

The cross section of the road layers where the road washed out was really cool.   I'll show you that soon.