Mesa Trail ch. 15
Draft 2

"It can start with virtually nothing here where we live.  Where the plateau meets the foothills then turns to upslope, anything is possible. Always keep an eye out for coming weather. Don't wait for the news." Her father had watched the great flood of 2013 very carefully.  To know what might cause over 17 inches of rainfall in eight days was of great worth.  The usual standard annual rainfall for the area was about 17 inches.  Much of the terrain here was semi-arid, she remembered that term because she didn't think it was possible. The first time she visited Boulder she arrived from Denver not from the east and didn't see what the dray flats of the near border looked like.  There was little life out there in the scrub and dry soil.  Cattle grazing on wisps of grass, oil rigs dipping down into the flatmud lazily and wind that might penetrate right through the skin if not covered.  She watched the horizon every day in the mountains and spoke like a meterologist, saying 'inversion' and low pressures and high latitudes.  She kept it to herself, mostly, but she had always been tempted to talk sun spots, her father's specialty, and what brought him to the Atmospheric Research Center, which she could just now see a small portion of the building off on Mesa Drive.  "When the corona of the sun pulses or does not pulse, it affects everything on earth.  The Little Ice Age was a period of little known activity in the Corona and the earth got colder." Her back chilled to a downdrafting wind that scooted along the Flatirons and sunk through the creases of the rocks. Sometimes temperature might drop 15-20 degrees in a matter of hours.  But rarely rarely in the morning. How could she have known that it would rain for three days straight, that the creeks would swell from a leisurely 50 cubic feet per minute up into the hundreds? The sluice box crossed her mind only briefly.  The great flood years earlier brought damage and destruction throughout Boulder.  A wall of mud at one point, during the worst day, 9 inches in 24 hours, came rushing right down off of Flagstaff Mountain onto the steps of the Pearl Street Walkway.  Hotels evacuated customers.  Roads disintegrated and cars fell.  No, this had only been a dream up until this morning.  Who might have guessed that a group of fifteen year olds might have sustained a mining operation anyway...? The rain came and it came hard.  The turtle, Diver, found his rock on high ground at the bottom of the mountain and pulled his head inside his shell.  Biggalow holed up in the cave alongside Dinosaur Mountain. Inuna wandered from house to house to help and Hannah stayed home to weather the storm.