Busy Weekend

Dad here.

Been a busy weekend here at Coral Pink. On Saturday, we had pretty good flash flood come through the area. We got about 1.4 inches of rain in about 2 hours (most of it in about 30 minutes) and enough hail to make the ground white. I was out on the dunes in the Jeep when it started. We have only had .06" of rain since March 23, so things have been pretty dry. The sand is really soft and hard to get around on. So there I sat and we started getting (to quote Forrest Gump) "big, old FAT rain", that was making pretty good craters in the sand. So I headed back to the park as it got harder and harder and then the hail started and I wondered if my poor cracked windshield was going to hold up. By the time I got back it was pouring and starting to run off, so Brian and I went to look at the wash just south of the house, and by the time we got there, it was running like you see in the picture above. After watching for a bit, we headed back to the park, only to find water and mud running over the road between the houses and the visitor center and getting worse all the time. I had Brian (our new ranger) stay there to stop traffic on that side, while I walked around on our service road where the flood wasn't quite so bad yet, to get on the other side of the blockage and stop traffic there. By the time I got around, a semi truck pulling a grader had tried to get through and gotten stuck. They ended up having to unload the old broken down grader and use it to clear part of the road and then pull the semi through. Then the county road guys showed up and gave us the really bad news. Our western boundary kind of zig zags back and forth just along the road, and right at the point where the washover was, the boundary actually crosses the road and crosses back about 30-40 yards further on. Apparently, a judge somewhere has prohibited the county from doing any road maintenance on federal land, so they have interpreted that to mean that they could clear the sand on the state park land, but couldn't touch the 30-40 yard section in the middle. So there we sat with 2-3 feet of mud on our road and no one willing to clear it off. (see the third picture) The county wouldn't, and the BLM wouldn't/couldn't, so we ended up having our region crew come over on Monday and finish the job. What worries me is if they don't get this resolved before winter, who is going to plow the snow off our roads? The county will do the state sections, but not the bulk of the road. Hopefully it won't come to that and someone somewhere will figure out how dumb the whole thing is before it gets any uglier.

Oh yeah. We also had a lightning strike on a tree out in the dunes that we've been trying to put out. It is at the base of one of the big Ponderosa Pines, and there is about a foot of pine cones, pine needles and various burnables mixed in with the sand, and the fire just kind of smolders under the surface and is a real pain to try and put out with the limited water we are able to haul out there in the Jeep.

So it's been a lot of fun this weekend. But I'm looking forward to my trip to Idaho and the Hart reunion. You guys be good and let us know what's going on with all of you. Love, Dad