It rained and hailed like a mad bastard for a spell yesterday, the first moisture to make landfall here in the better part of quite some time. Fifty-four days, to be precise.
The trees lost a few leaves, and the Duke City lost at least one resident, who got swept to the next world via the North Diversion Channel. Firefighters rescued five other folks from various places they shouldn’t have oughta been. Water don’t play, yo.
We might get some more today, and we might not. Regardless, don’t expect to see me loading up the woody with my board inside, heading out and singing my song. I have other, drier diversions in mind.
Mad Blog Media 
we got 4″ last night and another inch or so this morning. the monsoon season is here.
Yow. That’s not a monsoon, that’s Noah wanting to water-ski.
I saw the wicked witch of the west flying by my building in Bombtown yesterday. Quite a rain and blow.
Not quite as blustery as the hailstorm that shredded our maple in Bibleburg back in May 2014, but quite a blow nonetheless.
I remember that post. At first I couldn’t figure out was was stuck to the siding on your house. Did the maple survive the storm?
It did, Pat. Damn, that was a beautiful tree. Is a beautiful tree. The Turk loved climbing it when he had the chance, and it provided some welcome shade come summertime in a house without air conditioning.
I always raked a dozen or more lawn bags full of leaves from it come fall, and neighbors got them for mulch. That tree was a good neighbor, and it’s nice to have one of its cousins in our back yard here.
Violent. Patrick, the drainage is good in your neighborhood? The trails you ride, do they all need to be cleared, or rebuilt after that deluge?
O, indeed, Libby. Here’s a shot of the arroyo right behind El Rancho Pendejo, on the other side of that cinderblock wall in the back yard.
Duke City is laced with these arroyos, natural and manmade, but when you get a whole bunch of water all at once and it starts heading downhill, it’s look out below!
I’ve posted a few pix of the Northern Diversion Channel Trail, which runs alongside a huge drainage that eventually dumps into the Rio Grande. The water that swept that woman away must have been insanely deep and fast.
I’ve seen homeless people and kids dicking around down in those drainages. When it’s been dry, like it has lately, you don’t think much of it. But when the water is eight feet deep and blasting along at 35-40 mph, it sure does focus your attention.
The trails seem to sop this water right up like sponges. You’ll see some erosion, of course, but the trails here are pretty well laid out and maintained, with water bars to divert runoff. And it practically goes without saying that the earth has been thirsty lately.
Sir, you are correct. Flash floods do not play. When I first got here, 1981, I helped some other folks get a guy out of his truck and back to dry land after he got stuck in a rapidly flooding arroyo. We threw him a rope and pulled him to the bank. Then we all watched his truck flip over and disappear downstream. I never forgot that lesson, and I am glad I got it during my first monsoon season.
I feel sorry for the woman who got swept up in the canal. Seems like when we rode the loop at the South end of the Paseo del Bosque, we rode by the diversion canal as it went to the river. Is my memory correct? And, that short video in the newspaper piece looked like the view from the rear view mirror when we were going to ride the Bosque last year.
Rain is good!
Pat, that was the South Diversion Channel Trail we rode around there at the lollipop end of the bosque ride. I’m not quite certain where the North Diversion Channel Trail feeds into the Rio. As you ride the NDCT, which is uphill and east of the Paseo del Bosque, running from Balloon Fiesta Park on the north to UNM on the south, you can see ditches, spillways, drainpipes and arroyos feeding into the beast.
I remember the Tucson floods from my time at The Arizona Daily Star. One little dip that didn’t look like much took a dude and his truck right off near my rental on Orange Grove Road west of Oracle.
Bad drought last year. One of my neighbors, the day that my wife retired, looked up and saw the clouds building, as it had not rained in a long time. He quipped “and its a hard fall…gonna rain”