melannen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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common_nature2010-10-01 07:11 pm
melannen) wrote in common_nature2010-10-01 07:11 pm
Flood
It's October First! And where I live we just got about 8 inches of rain in 24 hours. Which is a lot, for where I live.
I decided to go down to the creek to see how the floodwaters had changed it.
Here I am, walking on the path. Well, what was the path. The water never got over a foot deep, as long as you tested for shallow spots with a stick first, and I had some new galoshes to try out anyway...
Here's a higher spot on the path, probably about four feet above the current water level. It had about two-three inches of freshly laid sand ripples on it:
Eventually I got to where the path splits into a low road (along the creek) and a high road (along the top of the ridge.) The low road was just *gone*, someone's going to need to cut a new path there this winter. The high road was a swamp, and all the plants in it were covered in a thin coating of pale dry mud, so that it looked like it was full of ghost ferns:
Up near the bridge over the road, the floodwaters had formed massive vortices and eddies that cut potholes. Here's the deep almost crater-like hole (still with about a foot of water in it) that cuts through right where the trailhead was, with the bent vegetation all around it:
And the water had tried to undermine the road; near the guardrail's posts you could see dark markings that showed they had been dug out about two feet overnight:
Finally, just for fun! I am working on IDing my wild solanaceae (the family that includes everything from potatoes to tomatoes to peppers to eggplants to deadly nightshade.) This is a solanum that was growing around the bridge, my best guess is Silverleaf Nightshade, but with all the leaves gone in the flood I can't be sure.
I decided to go down to the creek to see how the floodwaters had changed it.
Here I am, walking on the path. Well, what was the path. The water never got over a foot deep, as long as you tested for shallow spots with a stick first, and I had some new galoshes to try out anyway...
Here's a higher spot on the path, probably about four feet above the current water level. It had about two-three inches of freshly laid sand ripples on it:
Eventually I got to where the path splits into a low road (along the creek) and a high road (along the top of the ridge.) The low road was just *gone*, someone's going to need to cut a new path there this winter. The high road was a swamp, and all the plants in it were covered in a thin coating of pale dry mud, so that it looked like it was full of ghost ferns:
Up near the bridge over the road, the floodwaters had formed massive vortices and eddies that cut potholes. Here's the deep almost crater-like hole (still with about a foot of water in it) that cuts through right where the trailhead was, with the bent vegetation all around it:
And the water had tried to undermine the road; near the guardrail's posts you could see dark markings that showed they had been dug out about two feet overnight:
Finally, just for fun! I am working on IDing my wild solanaceae (the family that includes everything from potatoes to tomatoes to peppers to eggplants to deadly nightshade.) This is a solanum that was growing around the bridge, my best guess is Silverleaf Nightshade, but with all the leaves gone in the flood I can't be sure.