Amy and I took one of our Qx vacations last week – where we go off the grid entirely for the week (no phone, no email, no computer stuff). We were originally going on a walking trip to Prague with some friends, but decided we needed 12 hours of sleep a night for a week so we gave our trip to some other friends and headed to Vail to hide out for a week in a fancy hotel with room service and a spa.
All went according to plan until Thursday. I woke up at about 10:30 and wandered into the living room of our hotel with the goal of going downstairs and getting some coffee. The TV was on – which is weird since we don’t watch day time TV – and Amy seemed really agitated.
“Boulder is flooding,” she said.
“Huh? That’s weird,” I replied.
“They are having massive flash floods.”
Photo Credit: Jenna Rice
We spent the next hour glued to the TV, the web, and Twitter trying to figure out what was going on. It only took an hour – it was clear this was going to be awful given the weather system. Even though we were 120 miles away, we were incredibly anxious. And the constant stream of news – and water – didn’t help. As we started seeing areas we knew well, like the Boulder Creek, Canyon Road, 36 on the way to Lyons, and Lyons being flooded and destroyed, the severity of it all sank in.
I generally stayed offline until Sunday. We monitored everything through Saturday, checking in with our friends and offering help to a few folks we knew were stranded. We felt helpless to really do anything and it made no sense to go back early since many of the roads into Boulder were impassable so we just hung out, tried to keep relaxing, and sort of stayed in touch and offered help where we could.
I got back online yesterday. By that point things were settling down. I don’t necessarily mean getting better; rather the extent of the damage was becoming clear. And the rain was still coming down.
This is a photo of what used to be the driveway to our house in Eldorado Canyon. And the picture above it is the road to our house – or what used to be the road – through Eldorado Canyon state park. We have no idea what condition the house is in – we’ll find out more today when we try to get up there using our hovercraft.
Thanks to everyone for all their well wishes. We are fine – many are worse off – so we are going to turn our attention to them and see if we can be helpful now that we are back in town.
And yes – it’s still raining, although the weather people say it’s finally going to stop today.