The Big White Flooded

The Big White River is the river that borders my ranch and every year we steadily loose 5 to 10 to 15 feet of the river bank near the house. It's getting to be VERY NEAR the barns. The National Geographic proclaims this river as the crookedest river in the entire United States.

This year, she reared her ugly side and showed everyone what she was capable of. It all started last week really. The area got a heavy rain...2 to 3 inches. Normally, not a bad thing in these parts, but the ground is still frozen so rather than soak in, it all ran off...filling dams and the river. Again, normally not a problem, but the ice had not yet gone out of the river and all of this moisture wreaked havoc with the ice flow. As the ice broke up, it also jammed up on a curve and this is the result...

Above picture is ice chunks deposited in a field. The trees in the background are where the river bed is. It's a good 1/2 mile to those trees. The white ice chunks on the left are almost 2 feet thick. The brown ice chunk in the middle is 3 foot thick.

The picture below is along Highway 83. I am parked on a gravel road that is a little over a 1/4 mile away from the river(the tree line is the river). This entire field is littered with massive ice chunks. And this is the west side of Highway 83... This is a field and that is not the river at the front of the picture...this has all been washed away from the massive flooding. This new "channel" is no less than 20 feet deep. The small group of trees toward the top and left side of the picture is where someone's house stood. The ice took it out. The tree line on the right side of the picture is the river border and all of that white looking stuff is ice flow. Yep, there was another ice jam moving down the river while we watched. They had no idea which way it would go...follow the original river bed or come straight across this field and the new channels that had been cut.

I panned left of the picture above and this is the rest of the flooded field. Two more houses were flooded and a midnight rescue of 4 horses had to be executed by floodlight and with a pontoon boat. They got the horses out minutes before the ice jam hit the corrals... No one has ever seen the river do this much damage at one time. She is usually a slow eroder, not a massive flooder. Just a really weird weather combination that proved we will never control Mother Nature. This channel that has been cut is only one of two or three that were cut out. I have never seen anything like it.

We are lucky, this is below our ranch, so we haven't sufferered any damage. But they reported two more ice jams above our place that they are closely monitoring. One is moving, the other isn't. I hope they get broke up before they get near our place. We are on the high side, but still...

Interesting note...some of those ice chunks are 20 to 30 feet across and 3 feet thick...not counting the ones that have stacked on top of each other...

Mom and I figured they wouldn't be completely melted until at least the end of June. Crazy stuff!!

**Any of the pictures will enlarge if you click on them. I just couldn't get any one picture to capture the magnitude of the devestation.