The Great Equinox Flood of 2012, Part Two

…Continued from part one.

Wednesday night, September 19th it was pouring rain all night. This was not remarkable at the time, since it had already been pouring rain for as long as anyone in town could remember. The river roared all night, as it did every night, invisible in the autumn darkness. A soggy Thursday morning dawned, eventually, and I reluctantly crawled out of a warm bed and glanced out the window at the dog yard, as always. Suddenly,?as Han Solo would say, I had a very bad feeling. The back of the dog yard is framed by a nice big clump of birch on the river bank.

The dogyard in more peaceful times last spring, with the birch clump behind the dog houses.

Except that it wasn’t. The big clump of birch was gone. It was a sensation like waking up and finding that one of your teeth is missing. There was a great big space of nothing where the tree had been, and the dog yard felt naked and exposed to the rushing river. The river was practically deafening, and raging like an angry beast. Trees way bigger than my missing birches streamed past and slammed into the log jam. Some of them were hundred foot tall -I mean long! – cottonwoods four feet in diameter.

Things were getting serious.

Talkeetna River in the Flood of September 2012

The scene out front. You will have to provide your own soundtrack.

Continued in part three

The Great Equinox Flood of 2012, Part One

“Now if it will just quit raining I can start roofing”

Talk about famous last words! That was how I ended my previous post.

The minute I got the roof metal in to the cabin it began to rain. And rain. And rain. Not rain-y. Not wet weather. Not showers, or drizzle. RAIN. Pouring down, hammering rain, all day and all night. For two months. Not only did I not get any roofing done, it soon became doubtful whether there would even be a cabin on which to put the roof. The whole thing was kind of nightmarish, frankly. It all peaked on September 21st with the Big Flood. I’m writing this a month later. Besides dealing with the flood, and then, finally, the roof, I have been having a hard time getting this posted because I want to tell the whole story, and it’s a lot to write. I have now realized that I can just post it a chunk at a time, and consolidate later if I want. Or not – this a blog after all. So, for starters, I will show the picture that pretty well sums it all up, taken by local pilot Jim Okonek on September 21st, at the height of the flood. More of the story to come… in part two.

Aerial view of flooded rivers , Talkeetna Alaska, September 2012

Look for the cabin, just below the center of the picture, framed by two pairs of spruce trees.