Cross Section of the Road Bed

In case you missed the post a couple of days ago about our Big December Flood, here's a pic of part of the washed out road.   It looked like this in a couple of places.  


What was really cool was the cross section of the road layers that were visible after the washout.  Lily climbed down and took the pic.

You can see the very old road bed [pre-culvert] near the bottom.   They poured concrete over the rocks to stabilize them and you were careful as you drove through the water.   Eventually they filled it up and put the big culvert in and topped it with lots and lots and lots of gravel. 

They grade the road and dump new gravel once or twice a year. 

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.

Flood

So, we've had a little rain.

Every freakin' day.

For years.

Ok.  Fine.  I'm exaggerating.   It only feels like years.  Really it's just been weeks.    Our water table is very happy.    So is our well.    If our well is happy, I'm happy.

Once in a while we get flash floods that fill up our low spots.    The other night we had one and when we woke up, things had been rearranged a bit and there were big piles of sand where there hadn't been the day before.

K2's area suffered the biggest transformation.    You might have to blow the pic up to see the notes.

The log bridge is usually wedged between two willow stumps.   The water had to get high and fast to loosen it and move it.

This is just across the road.   See the grass where it looks like someone drove over it?   That's where the water was flowing from one side of the road to the other.

Here's a closer look.   Notice where the girls found the other half of K2's footbridge.

This is the flood path we found in our squishy meadow.

The creek is behind me and curves off around the left side of the pic.   K2 is standing in it.

Further up, we found a new dam.

 

We named it Turtle Dam because at the bottom of it we found a box turtle treading water.  Poor thing must have been picked up and swept in by the flood.  Probably had been there all night long.  He was so relieved to be rescued.  

 This is what the flood waters did when they hit the new dam:

We found new sand deposits everywhere.    We don't mind much.   The sand keeps the Virginia bluebells [mertensia virginiana] happy.

And the ducks don't mind the new arrangement at all.