High water makes news again

This morning's local daily newspaper devoted the entire upper half of the front page to flood news.  The Idaho Governor, a guy named Butch, even flew around in an Army helicopter while wearing his trademark cowboy hat.  Somehow that almost reminded me of Slim Pickins riding that bomb out of the B-52 in Doctor Strangelove.

Well, anyway locally at least, it appears the river will make a slow rounded peak today and then recede once again.  We're guessing much of the snow has been washed off the Henry's Fork watershed so the threat of a double whammy has dimmed.  Montana continues to get the brunt of the wet weather and they are having some serious flooding up there.

The Snake is running 31,200 as we write this and rising ever so slowly.  It's earlier peak was May 28th at 4:45 am when it briefly touched 31,800.  We don't see anything upstream to cause a sudden surge to much higher levels.  We also don't see the kind of weather happening that could flash melt the Upper Snake's snowpack.  For all practical purposes, the threat of super severe flooding here is now greatly diminished.  The river will run really big for many weeks but it's highly unlikely to create havoc and mayhem.

One key indicator that the middle elevation snow is all gone is the flow out of Grays Lake. This graph shows what water managers there did yesterday.  They turned off the spigot that releases water from Grays into the Blackfoot River system.  One day is was almost 700 cfs and the next day it was three cfs.  Pretty spiffy.  Well, that means all that snow we saw over there on our May road trip is gone and that's a good indicator of what's happening up on the Henry's Fork, too.

What does all this mean for Little Yonni and Miss Susun?  Simple--time to fire up a vehicle and hit the road.  Today, with any luck at all, we will go see Upper Mesa Falls.  We probably missed its peak by a couple of days but, heck, it was terrible weather during the last two days.  It looks like we might actually see the sun here today and the wind might not be blowing 20-30-40 miles an hour.  The next biggie would be whether we can manage to pull off a Blackfoot River trip.  The releases out of the reservoir are at their peak this morning but are 100% certain to drop quickly since the tap was turned off at Grays Lake yesterday.  It's now or never for that trip and tomorrow or Sunday are the only two possible days when we could rally up such a trip.  Busy, busy.

Yesterday evolved pretty well.  Rodney from Challis came by and bought the raft.  He liked it.  We finally received two packages we'd been waiting on and actually commenced to begin reloading some .38 Special ammunition.  It rained off and on all day so we spent a lot of time in the basement messing with stuff.  Miss Susun has created a really impressive little Sunshine Family niche down there.  Meanwhile my reloading bench is actually beginning to look like the real thing.

Time to get busy prepping for today's road trip.  Maybe we will post some more soon.  CHEERS!  jp

PS--We haven't put up the stats for this blog in awhile.  Here are the weekly stats (June 19, 2010 to date) freshly delivered this AM:

The Daily News                        
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