Spring Flood
Bilk Creek Reservoir looks calm in the spring evening, but water levels are dangerously high. More rain and snow on the way, and a south wind blowing. CKD photo.
After a week of rain and slushy snow, the spillway at the reservoir started to let go this week. I watched as gravel bars built and disappeared along the roaring channel; great slumping masses of the spillway wall woofed down into the torrent. Rolling boulders clacked along the channel, three-foot high sagebrush tumbling with them. Within minutes, the new slide would wash away, and pebbles would start to roll from another steep spot of the saturated bank.
We started moving cows from the fields down below, pulled the boards in the irrigating dams, crossing our fingers, letting all the water go down there at the farm. The brothers hauled boulders as big as they could carry, one at a time in their hip waders across the spillway, building rock weirs to divert the strongest of the current to the other side. By an hour before sunset , Todd showed up from town with a Track-Hoe, massive wierd cross between a tank and a mechanical T-Rex, and Hank met him with a truckload of one-ton bales and the tractor. In the fading light, Todd ever so gently nudged the great blocks of alfalfa into the flood, saving us for the moment from a fate that, this year, seems almost inevitable.
Bilk Creek Spillway, April 8. CKD photo.