Flooding!

As you may have heard, the Northwest has had a bit of rain lately... it apparently is caused by something called Pineapple Express, which is a stream of warm air that comes in from the Pacific. (I'd never heard of it, either.)

Anyway, as a result many of the rivers have been overflowing their banks, carving new paths, etc. Since the western border of our property is the White Salmon River, we were curious what all of the rain was doing to our little river.

Thankfully, in our section the White Salmon goes through a fairly sizable gorge and so there was no danger to our place. But the river was unrecognizable. We walked along the river as if it was someplace we'd never been before.

Here are some photos we took in the midst of the flooding, then several days afterwards when the water has started to recede. The photos in the left column were taken during the flooding; the photos in the right were taken 5 days later as the water was receding, but not yet down to "normal" level for this time of year.

During the flooding	5 days later

This flooding is remarkably like the flooding which occurred in 1996, when one of the main roads between Trout Lake and the Columbia River was completely washed out; thankfully, that didn't happen this time around.

Unfortunately, both of the roads to the Mt Hood Meadows ski resort WERE destroyed. The mountain usually opens for skiing and snowboarding sometime around Thanksgiving, but this year there won't be any way to get there until at least mid-December. I guess it's a good thing we decided to get a 10x pass to the mountain rather than a season pass. The Mt Hood Meadows blog has tons of photos of the damage and the progress they are making. Let's hope things get cleared up soon!

- Mike (& Corinne)