Beltane Beltane Moon
Snow began coming down in parallel streaks about 2 p.m. yesterday. It built up quickly, then slacked off. Overnight more snow fell. This is snow with a 3/1-7/1 water ratio so it’s wet, heavy. I estimate 4-6 inches which, with a different water ratio, would have been 12-18 inches.
10 days after Beltane, the beginning of summer in Celtic lands, we have snow laden ponderosa boughs, a driveway covered in a thick blanket, roofs and yard all white.
This brings us to flooding. According to weather5280, the front range has absorbed all the water it can. The rest now gallops downhill like a herd of wild mustangs. Up where we are the mountain streams are thick with fast moving water. It has spread beyond stream banks and minor flooding has occurred. But we’re the feeder system, our streams smaller, more shallow. It’s when Cub Creek hits Maxwell Creek and the two become one heading for Evergreen that the real danger happens.
Down mountain the streams collect the Cub Creeks, the Maxwell Creeks, the Shadow Brooks to create fast moving, not to be restrained small rivers. A couple of years ago this created serious flooding in Boulder, Golden, Manitou Springs, Denver all distinguished by their positions along the beginning of the high plains.
(This one from May 9th.)
All the water from the Eastern Slopes, by virtue of gravity’s strong pull, has a passionate desire to get lower, reduce the tractor beam energy created by lower altitudes. And it will see its desire met. No matter what lies in its way.
This is nature at its wildest. Floods are a force like hurricanes, tornadoes, avalanches, wildfire. We humans build our houses, pave roads, throw up restaurants, grocery stores and filling stations and often wild nature lets us have them for a time. But. Ask the residents of New Orleans after Katrina, of New York City after Sandy, the nearby residents of Waldo Canyon who saw the 2012 Waldo Canyon fire ravage their homes, the merchants in Manitou Springs who had two feet of mud in their basements, folks living in Moore, Oklahoma after the F-5 tornado did a Dorothy on their homes. Ask them whether human artifice seems so permanent.
Now there is significantly more water up here in the mountains. It came over the last week in the form of rain and today, for those of us above 8,000 feet, as snow. The rain is already on its way to the Denver metroplex. The snow may, thankfully, delay some of the water by plugging up streams and releasing its own moisture gradually over the next days.
