Hike 101 Miles: Miles ? - ?
Mood
Relieved
We ended up going on a hike this weekend. Sort of. Kind of. It surprised us, let's say. So, naturally, I didn't have my pedometer along. Another unlogged hike.
We got a phone call that was automatically sent out to everyone in the suburb advising us that sand bags were available for our drive ways, that flooding was severe, and that Salt Creek had been allowed to empty out into the abandoned quarry. This sounded interesting, a river flowing into that huge empty quarry! Naturally we headed out to see just what this looked like and we weren't the only ones. There must have been about a dozen people there checking things out at any given time. Slow Sunday, and with all this rain, what else is there to do?
The above is the first part of the quarry where they had made a drain off of Salt Creek and a small river bed to lead to the quarry. Those little "bushes" in the river bed are actually trees!
And, here's the quarry. It wasn't a lake before, I can tell you that!
Next we drove to a nearby park to see how bad the Salt Creek itself was, only to find the parking lot completely flooded. Those concrete lines in the water are the parking bumpers.
Here's the rest of the parking lot.
Hopefully whatever is in that storage unit is water proof. Also, check out the dumpster in the background. Flooded all the way up to the holds that the dumpster trucks use to pick it up by!
We went to a different park because the first one was a) flooded and b) had boarded up fences all the way around so you couldn't get to the Salt Creek at all. We ended up on a bridge that went over it that is part of the Illinois Prairie Path.
The poor trees were flooded up to their branches.
The current was moving incredibly fast. Between that and the dark day it was hard to get good pictures.
That and the sun was starting to set. With the drop in temperature we decided to head home.
It was probably a good thing it all went into the quarry. Don't want to think about how bad the flooding would have been otherwise!
Posted by Bitsy at 10:22 AM Comments
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