Just What We Needed

It has been raining a lot here lately...so when it rained hard for several hours yesterday it caused some problems. The soil was already pretty much saturated from the rain we've been having so when it started to come down again it caused a bunch of runoff (side note: one of the things I remember from my Hydrology class in college was that the technical term for runoff is “Horton overland flow.” Why they felt a need to coin a term for what is essentially runoff is funny in a kind of ridiculous way...but I digress). That runoff collected in the creeks and rivers and caused some problems. I'm 28 – not an old timer but not a spring chicken either - and I've never seen water as high as it has been this spring. Two times now it has been unusually high – over Lincoln Rd. which is the road my parents live on and I grew up on. I cannot remember another time it came up over the road. I wrote about, and took some pictures of, the flood we had earlier this spring in another post. I took a few pictures of the flood yesterday. They were taken after the peak of the flood after it had stopped raining and I could get out with my camera without much fear of it getting rained on. You might be able to see evidence of the water being higher than it shows in the pics.

I went to Governor Dodge State Park after work on Tuesday. I did some canoeing Tuesday evening and then Wednesday morning I got out with my camera a bit before I had to be at work (but, unfortunately didn't get a single picture worth sharing). The water was very high there too (this was before the flooding but after we had had a significant amount of rain). If you're not familiar with the park it has a couple of man made lakes. Below the dam on one of the lakes was some pretty wild white water. It is a small stream but was fun to watch. There were some slow, deep spots a little ways below the dam and there were literally hundreds of fish (bass and bluegills mostly and you won't find these in streams naturally, they are lake fish. I've used my schooling [I had a double major in Fisheries/Limnology and Biology] more in this post than the past few years put together) that had been washed over the dam.

Fog and pine tree picture: This doesn't have much to do with anything here but it was taken just upstream of where one of the flood pictures was taken. It shows you what size the stream is usually.

“Golf Carts” bridge picture: this is the same stream as the one in the fog picture.

The picture with high water flowing under and around a bridge with trees in the background: this is the same stream as the previous picture and the fog picture. The channel of the stream is under the bridge (obviously - they would not have put the bridge over dry land) but you can see there is much too much water to fit in the channel.

Light in the old stone building: This has nothing to do with high water (obviously). It's just a shot of the old stone poolhouse in Lancaster. I remember going through here when we went to go swimming and playing “shark.”

Picture of the green leaves on the maroon background: I actually went out this morning and took this. The reason I chose this particular picture is because these are the same two trees that you saw in the first picture under the “Mosquito” post I did a few weeks back. Then I was standing under the tree with the maroon leaves (I was standing under this particular tree because it was the closest to where I was when it started raining) and the tree with the green leaves made up my background – this time it's the opposite. The leaves are much more vibrant in the picture in the “Mosquito” post because of the way the light was hitting them.

If any of you readers are living in the area I have an exhibit of my photos at Rountree Gallery, in Platteville, coming up in July. The exhibit starts the 2nd of July and lasts through the 2nd of August. The artist's reception in going to be on Sunday July 13th from 1-3. It'd be cool to see you there.