The Creek is running high and wide!

Current news: written Saturday night

If Saturday wasn't the day of the heaviest rains since we arrived, it will certainly win the red ribbon. It will be interesting to see what the rain gauge declares tomorrow. Neither of us cares to risk falling on our faces in the mud tonight. Inches of rain received or not received is a mainstay of conversation out here so you better know what fell on you recently. We began this rain log back in July when the rainy season, called 'the monsoons', started. When I think of monsoons, I think of natives ducking for shelter in swaying thatch-roofed huts. Wrong image, at least for the last decade from what we've been told. But this year has been different and in just four months we have logged in more rainfall than is usually expected for the entire year.

I prefer the light, gentle rains which slowly soak into the ground. That's not it today, kitty. Dumping, splatting rains combined with a little hail and plenty of lightning and thunder. When these real bad boys hit, the dry ground shuns the water and it rolls downwards to join the other spurned waters. They bring sand, pebbles, pinecones and the odd cow pie along for a hairy ride down the mesa steps until they cascade in the color of chocolate milk into the canyons below. In our case, they sweep past our encampment at the mesa foot, either digging away at anything standing in the way or piling fresh debris around it. I don't doubt that our shovel-wide diversion ditch behind the trailer was overwhelmed tonight and that the morning will bring retrenching and numerous repairs. When you have a trailer sitting up on little more than cement blocks, you really don't want Mother Nature washing them away like shoreline flotsam.

We can hear the normally dry creek roaring now in rapids and ripping away tall banks as it heads to the main canyon. The roads had barely healed themselves of mud sloughs from last weekend's lighter rains and we may regret that we had cancelled our last two weekly supply runs. This latest offering may have us sequestered for another two weeks. The good news is that Mark built a small mouse-proof walk-in pantry very early on in the game and it is reasonably well stocked with edibles. But one item allowed to dwindle to nothing was toilet paper. Paper towels are also getting scarce and newspaper is NO substitute, just trust me on that one. Aside from a few dripping windows however, we are warm and dry compared to the hunters who are encamped in the neighboring areas. They began arriving on Friday and one truck dusted by barely before dusk with two adults and several young children aboard. They had no trailer in tow or camper so I imagine that this has been a glum dad and lad tenting experience for them. Hopefully they took Friday night's rains as a warning and left today. If not, they will encounter deeply muddy roads, which are partially washed out, and likely a few impassable washes. Reporting in to work on Monday morning may not be an option for them. This is a hostile and brutal land if you are caught unprepared by the unexpected. Yep, you know that there plenty of those stories coming up in the weeks ahead.