In the desert–when it rains it floods.

I was headed home from grocery shopping, saw some cool cloud formations and decided to stop at Sugarhouse Park to get some pictures.

I also got this shot of a dad and his kid sledding down the hill.  Seems that wet grass can be as much fun as snow.

Then came the parade of cars driving the wrong way around the park.  I’ve seen this before, so at first I just thought it was some moron who thought their 2 minutes was more important than the safety of others.

But around the 4th car, I decided to go see what was going on that was causing all this anarchy.

Well, I got about 3/4 the way around the park and found out what was turning everyone back.  The creek running through the park was overflowing and flooding over the road.

It really wasn’t that deep, but recently in a small town on the border of Utah and Arizona an SUV and a van were swept down by a flash flood.  12 kids and adults were drowned, I can understand why people weren’t too anxious to forge through the water.

Although the ones that did cross had no problems at all.

It rained less than 1/10” in the city, maybe up to a quarter inch in the mountains.  But since all the runoff from the mountains get funneled into about a half dozen creeks going through the city, and it came down quite quickly, they tend to overflow and run out into the streets.  And the water can get moving pretty quickly.

I spent about a half hour walking around the park taking pictures and by the time I got back, the water had already ceded.  You can see how high the water got, where it pushed the leaves up to a line on the lawn.

And finally, it decided to rain on me again as I was heading home.  Even a little bit of hail to boot.  But, as typical here, it didn’t even last through the light I was stopped at.

Easy as pie.

It's amazing how fast things dry out here in Utah. Went back to get the Jeep today (yeah, couldn't get it out yesterday - too muddy) and we decided to hike out to it to see if the Armada would make it. We get there and my little brother says "You got the keys?" He suggests we try it before heading to get all the equipment*. I hand him the keys and tell him to go for it, expecting it to go nowhere. He puts it into 4-lo, rocks it about 3 times and it comes right out of the holes. It was like pudding yesterday and after only 14 rain-free hours it was solid. Go figure.

*Figuring we'd be fighting to get it out, we brought:
- 2 hi-boy jacks
- tow chain
- come-along
- winch
- 6 bags of lava rocks to put under the tires
- 3 2x6s and 4 2x4s of varying length
- a big, flat rock
- gloves and spare shoes.
We could have walked out in shorts and flip-flops and got it out.

My new mantra.

“No more dirt roads in the rain.”

That’s what I said to myself for the hour or so I was waiting for my little brother to help me out of this mess.  that and “stoopid” about a million times.

Apocalyptic.

Rainy weekend.  Faucet repair completed.  School is all planned for the next week.

So, what did I decide to do for this Sunday?  Yup – go find some mud to play in out in the West Desert.

As usual, I fill the gas tank before heading out.  I reset the average gas mileage indicator and about 30 miles out on I-80 I check to see how I’m doing.

27 MPG?  Wow.  My old one could only have made that if I’d driven it off a cliff.  And turned off the engine on the way.  Now, I know the onboard MPG computer is not completely accurate.  I kept track of it for a while and compared it to my actual mileage, and it was off by about 2%.  But that’s still over 26 MPG.

I get to one of my favorite spots out there and I see a bunch of cars parked on the side of the highway.  Nobody in sight, so of course I wonder what is going on.

Along the dirt road, just off the highway, I see the first abandoned vehicle.  I’m pretty sure nobody got hurt because I didn’t see any blood on the inside.

Somebody seriously rolled their Jeep.  But just one vehicle is not a bad omen.

A little further down the road I find this truck abandoned, with a flat tire.  Man, there was some bad luck out here this weekend.

I keep going, having a blast getting my wrangler all dirty, spittin’ mud all over the place.  Then I come across this Subaru, another abandoned car out here, but this time there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it.  Kinda getting creepy.

I head down another road, cruise around for a half hour or so and then come back around the vehicular graveyard.  A young couple are walking along the side of the muddy road, carrying a gas can.  I flip around and offer them a ride to their car, thinking it’s the one I can see way down the road.

As it turns out, the next car isn’t theirs, but another abandoned one instead.  We could see why this one was abandoned.

So deep into the water that the floor behind the driver’s seat is flooded with murky water.

Well, as it turns out Janice and Cam were part of a party out here in the dry lakebed that made the news when a heavy rain storm hit and flooded the whole area.  Their description of the whole thing was crazy.  People in cars stuck all over the place, they waited 6 hours in the car before a group of school busses showed up to bring them back into Grantsville.

We went to the lakebed to find their Jeep.  At first I drove onto the flats figuring that it would have dried up enough that I could drive on it.  Yeah, but just barely.  A couple of times I almost got stuck, and if I hadn’t heeded the advice “whatever, don’t stop moving”, I would have.  I was just barely moving, but I headed uphill and got out of the slick, snotty stuff onto the edge, which was just better enough that it was manageable.  From that point on, we skirted the edge of the lakebed.

It was surrealistic.  We drove all around the lakebed looking for their Jeep, a couple of miles, and saw at least two dozen abandoned vehicles.  Tents were left out there, as was a couch somebody brought.

It looked like some of the people stopped before they got stuck, figuring they could just drive out when things dried out a bit.

Other people look like they fought the mud, and ended up losing to it and would have to be pulled out.

Anyhow, 2 miles of abandoned cars littered all over the place, in my Jeep with 2 strangers and a can of gas, I felt like I was in some kind of apocalypse movie.  Maybe “Return of Lake Bonneville: The Brine Shrimp’s Revenge.”  Yeah, they must have got sick of being sold as Sea Monkeys.

Finally we found their Jeep.  I parked up on a (dry) hill and made them walk the couple hundred feet to their vehicle.  I wasn’t going to become a victim of the Brine Shrimp.

There’s Janice taking a picture of their Cherokee buried up to it’s axles in mud.

I was going to stick around for a little more mudding, but it was almost 4, and it started to rain.  I’d seen what happened the last time it rained, I was getting the hell outta there.