Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Mudflow!

So here I am on "Old Yellowstone Trail" on the west side of the
Yellowstone River about 10 miles outside of Gardiner, Montana.
Gardiner is the first town outside of Yellowstone's north entrance. We
were traveling north in US-89 when all of a sudden it started raining
big drops. Then we saw a cop with flashing lights up ahead and he road
disappeared...you could tell there was debris in the road. We didn't
drive all the way up to the cop, but it looked like a flash flood
caused a mudslide/debris flow from drainage off the mountain to the
east. Cars stated turning around, so we looked up on our iPad map to
see if there were bridges to cross the river and and alternate way
through. Fortunately, there was a bridge just a few miles back, and
the old Yellowstone Trail on the other side of the river. It was a
gravel road that had crazy deep washouts on it, too, but we made it
just fine following a local in our Jeep! I wish we would've gotten a
shot of the mud bogging we did, but we were too busy watching the road
and deciding if it was safe to continue! And watching crazy people in
cars - we are sure some didn't make it! Our biggest fear was that cars
would get stuck in the road on either side of us, trapping us in the
middle. How exciting that we got to really use the Jeep!

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