Never mess with the Power of nature or the Power of a woman's intuition...

Day 213
10-6-2006
Started: Hanksville, UT
Finished: Hanksville, UT
Today's Miles: 0
Total Miles: 3109.0

When the fury of nature stands in your way there is not a whole lot you can do about it! The last thing we wanted to do today was take a zero day in Hanksville. When we woke up this morning our tent had more water in it then it has any morning yet this trip. We couldn't understand it at first and we even had a conversation about the idea of needing to do some seam sealing again. When we opened the tent door everything became much clearer. We were camped out in a lake! Even after our attempts last night to find the highest ground possible we awoke to a few inches of water all around us. We should have known right then and there that today was going to get interesting, but we had no idea just how crazy it was going to get. We waded our way out of the tent and took trips with our wet gear to the campgrounds laundry facilities hoping to lay out our soaked gear for a few minutes before packing it all in our wet packs. The trips back and forth were through the lake that had basically taken over the campground and the rain was continuing to come down in a major downpour. Sheri finally declared that the idea of packing up and continuing west was absolutely ridiculous. Every local that we talked to warned us that this storm was going to be extremely dangerous and the route we would be walking was going to follow the lower ground along the Fremont River, a river that everyone said would probably overflow it's banks and cause major flash flooding and mudslides. Randy was set on walking until Sheri played her "woman's intuition" card. She explained that she just really had a bad feeling about the rains and that there was no way she was walking today. She said she was going to walk down the street to the small Budget Inn and rest her feet in a dry place while the storms came through, and that was that! Randy wasn't going to argue with Sheri's "woman's intuition", so he went down to the post office to check on the package we were waiting on while Sheri went and checked in to a room. When Randy got back with our package he found Sheri still standing in the Motel office. She was patiently waiting while the motel manager checked to see if he could find a room that didn't have a leaking ceiling. He eventually found one and joked as he gave us the key that there were no refunds in the case of a mandatory evacuation when the canal behind the motel broke its banks and caused the motel to flood. Little did he know, his words would soon become a reality. We stood out front of our room and talked with the only other motel guest, a really nice guy named Joey. Joey and his wife were in town on vacation and his wife had gone off to find some wine so it was just the three of us there watching the lake in the motel's front parking lot slowly rising. It wasn't to long before the water had reached the doorways of most of the rooms and had even begun to flood some of the rooms on the opposite side of the L-shaped motel from where our rooms were. We stood outside watching the manager as he fought a losing battle with nature. What we didn't realize until Sheri went back in our room to start packing up in case the water reached our side of the motel was that the canal behind the motel had overflowed it's banks and water was coming in through the back of the motel, and fast! Our thermarests and packs and tent that we had laid out in the back of our room were all floating in three to four inches of water. Sheri yelled for Randy and Joey to start gathering all of our stuff so we could find higher ground. When Joey went in his room to get his things together he made a very important discovery. The power was still on, and the outlets were in the floor! He came running back to our room and started grabbing whatever gear he could carry, telling us to do the same and then we all went running, well as fast as you can run across a parking lot in thigh high water. The manager had become occupied with trying to help get a truck out of the flood waters and had forgotten that he needed to kill the power, something he had mentioned having to do just minutes before we realized the motel was flooding from the back side as well as the front. Thanks to Joey's attentiveness we all safely made it to the middle of the street in front of the motel where we sat and tried to organize our now even wetter gear. The road wasn't busy because it had actually been closed. The Fremont River, yeah the one we would have been walking next to, overflowed it's banks as well and ripped one lane of paved road right off the ground and took it down stream. There were spots where over eight feet of water were measured flowing over the top of the road we would have been walking. Huh, maybe there's something to this "woman's intuition" stuff after all? We ended up walking with Joey to the only other motel in town and luckily they had a second floor. The parking lot of the Whispering Springs Motel was under water as well and they even had a flooded basement but we felt much better knowing that we were on the second floor. The local meteorologist declared that today's rainfall is already the greatest amount of rain from one event in over one hundred years, and it's still raining! Thankfully, "woman's intuition" kept us safe today. It was definitely an exciting day considering we couldn't go anywhere. If there is anything to be learned from a day like today it's that you should never mess with the power of Nature, or the power of a "woman's intuition"!

Your Friends on the ADT,
Randy and Sheri
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