Showing posts with label Spring Creek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spring Creek. Show all posts

Tuesday, 7 August 2007

On the monsoon season

Ah, the weather has cooled a bit now. I am told this is the monsoon season. I thought monsoons involved torrential rains and floods.


Oh. That'd be our "yard" being submersed - the spouting she canna take nae more! It can't take the amount of rain falling and we have our own Niagara Falls every time it rains for more than about 10 minutes. This time, though, we were going for Victoria Falls instead....


If that isn't a flood, I don't know what is! Four inches, that's 10cm, of rain in about two hours got most of Fort Collins quite excited! The creek down the bottom of the hill got very excited! So did we! We went and inspected the creek and huddled in the rain, afraid to get under the big trees due to the excessive displays of lightning but afraid to leave their shelter.... Our neighbour took us out driving around town to see how bad the floods were. Some houses had to be evacuated - they are too close to the flood plain or in a drainage area. No trailer parks got washed away this time, and only small lives were lost (two critters that I know of) unlike the flood just over 10 years ago.


Our place was nice and high on the hill - it will have to be some flood to wash us away (though water did get in the garage and found the ONLY thing worth anything in there - our brand new unassembled chairs....). However, the watering systems around here are working on undermining us - the amount of water that is poured on the grass around here is astounding!

Some during and after shots (excuse the dimness of the flood shots - it was twilight):

The bike path at the bottom of the condos


the "falls" (a concrete weir)


Sunset on the 3rd, I think, when the creek is still running hard but much lower :-)


The clean up crews worked overtime clearing out the paths. They were still hard at work yesterday when I rode out eastwards along the Spring Creek path but in most areas apart from the flattened grass and the odd bit of mud you would never know it had flooded a week ago. Bravo to them for getting out the waders and going above and beyond (including above the waders) in clearing things up!

Thursday, 2 August 2007

Crawfish Dreaming

Last Saturday in the evening, we went for a teensy tiny walk to take pictures of sunset.


Oh pretty sunset! Colorado does good sunsets I must say.

Even some of the creek lit up.


Then we noticed something moving on the bike path. It was a squashed yabby, or crawfish or crawdaddy or whatever you like to call them here. We call 'em yabbies, but I do like the word crawfish for whatever reason.

Then we realised there were LOTS of them, not just squashed and dead/dying ones on the path! The local creek (Spring Creek) obviously is a good place for yabbies to live. There were quite a number of them in the creek itself, all of different sizes, a crowd of them like Bondi Beach on a sunny day. Plus there were some big ones on the path, mebbe playing Russian roulette or more likely looking for a home that was a little less crowded.


No Mr Burns and pollution here - the ones we saw all had appropriate numbers of appropriate appendages for yabbies.

We tried backing some off the path but this one got aggro.

Grr! I wave at you with my big nippers! Grr! I scary! You go 'way!

We went.