Monday, October 25, 2010

Buckets!


We had a terrific rainstorm last night and the river has leapt to an extremely high flow. The average volume at Pohono Bridge is about 30 cfs for this week. Because of the good rains of early October, it's been flowing at about 100 cfs for the past week. Since yesterday the river has engorged to over 5700 cfs and is still rising by the minute! This is not quite flood stage, but is higher than it gets during most spring runoffs. It's too dark to go see it at the moment, but Yosemite Falls and all the other falls will have gone from trickles barely worth a photograph to gushing cataracts that'd make the newspapers in May. We've seldom seen such a tremendous surge overnight: from 100 to near 6000 cfs in a matter of hours.
Tioga Road was closed by snow on Saturday morning and remains closed today. Glacier Point Road is still open. This wasn't a cold storm, but it was forecast to deposit 1-2 feet of snow up high. We're a few weeks ahead of the average winter closing date for Tioga Road, but it may be closed for a spell to allow plowing and some melting.

1 comment:

  1. oh you're killing me - i want to be there - miss being so close that i could witness a lot of the changes in yosemite. thanks - as always - for the update.

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