A wall of water

Moving into the city of Golden Colorado, resulting from an ice jam. A town, really. Reverse 911calls went out and several areas were evacuated, in the uncompromising cold unlit wintery night.

But wait!

Shortly before 9 p.m. Tuesday, the City of Golden tweeted: “FLOOD ALERT UPDATE: The wall of water may have taken a hard right turn, slowed down and possibly causing it to go back under the ice.”

Phew. That was close. Scary, huh? 

Golden Colorado is a beautiful place. Dominated by a tabletop mountain, the kind you see in Westerns. 

Let's go there.

Denver is growing right into Golden. Golden is just north of Morrison where Red Rocks is. My parents house is near the lake at the bottom.

Washington Avenue is the traditional old main street where the rustic taverns are. Where the rustic tavern is. I only went into one of them.

This is the river that flooded. The remark to the picture notes the level is high. The video shows water much higher.

All this icy water reminds me of my first white water rafting trip. I think that was on the Brown River. For some reason the guide insisted we straddle the raft with one leg in the water the whole way. There could be no exceptions. Our lives depended on us doing this properly. We were to ride it like a horse. All of us. 

The water we were in was snow, what, an hour previous to our being in it. How long does it take to melt and flow out? We are in the melting snow. Riding it. And one of our legs and feet is freezing and the other one isn't. 

Plus a tourist had died the week previous to our trip by the shock of being tossed into cold water, so a new policy was instituted among the guides that everybody would be prepared for the shock of the cold water and learn by doing and be tested on being tossed into the cold rushing water and work one's way to the edge without panic. Some four separate tour groups amounted to about thirty or so tourist-adventurers, nobody was eager to do that, but it was just the sort of thing I did all the time in the much warmer Red River in Louisiana, and the slower, shallower Platte River too. Don't tell my parents, but I did that with friends all the time, and tried to swim upstream. Of course you cannot swim upstream, but we tried, and that's why I'm such a stud to this day. So in that group of strangers that morning I boldly volunteered to go first, to get that bit over with, shocking my traveling companions who didn't know about my previous Red River swimming upstream experience and so didn't expect such things from me and momentarily won the admiration of my peers. It was the coldest water I ever jumped into and doing that told me don't ever do that again.

Honestly, the leg in the ice cold water the whole time was enough to put me off white water rafting permanently but the subsequent times that was not required. Every once in a while you get a dictatorial guide. It is an odd experience, coming down a mountain like that. What happens in that mountain channel all day in and out of the sun, wet and then dry then wet again, is you switch back and forth between being intensely hot and intensely cold all day long. 

And you go, "Maybe we should do the 1/2 day trip next time."