THE RAINS CAME DOWN AND THE FLOODS CAME UP

Well, for those of you elsewhere in the country, you may have heard that Washington state experienced a very unusual, very, very white Christmas this year...and then the weather warmed up ALOT. And the rains came. And they kept coming and kept coming. And the snow that we had at Christmas, all melted off of the mountains and began it's trip to the ocean...creating avalanches, mud slides, rock slides and floods. All of the mountain passes out of Western Washington are closed, the major highway going north is down to only one lane due to a pick-up sized boulder in the road, and the major highway going south is closed because the river re-routed and went across the highway (with no possible detour, or so I hear).

Apparently we are the only people who are not under water, in spite of our very temperamental river-neighbor, the Skagit!

This is the Stillaguamish river, about 20min south of us, flowing through a large playing field, and in general, the outskirts of the town of Arlington.

This is what it looks like about 30min north of us, up in Bellingham...not really sure what river is causing the problems in Bellingham (Nooksak, Lumi?), but apparently that isn't hindering things from getting awfully wet!

And this is the Skagit river acting up in our town. It doesn't look all that good, but it's actually only affecting a couple of roads. They haven't even begun sandbagging, and, not to worry, our river probably won't do anything more than splash over the banks a little bit...which we're very grateful for as historically the Skagit enjoys spreading it's waters across the entire county.

Here you can see the current water level of the Skagit at our house (blue line, 27 ft at 7:15am, 01.08.09), and the level it is predicted to reach by early tomorrow morning (29.11 ft). Two years ago, when we had actually moved everything valuable to the upstairs and were pretty much prepared to load the truck & evacuate, the river had reached into the purple and crested at about 33 ft. As you can see, record level is 37.4 ft...so basically, we should be fine. (That is, as long as this rain will stop!