Monday June 5th, 2017
Greetings and welcome!
I have a really busy week coming up so I am getting a head start this morning with my Tuesday update.
Saturday turned out to be a much nicer day than expected. It was sunny and in the low 80s, perfect for some outdoor fun. A lot of people took to the river to do a little rafting, and they had a great time.
We started the day with a line of rain that faded out about the time that it got here. As reported the radar showed some rain getting here about 9am, but none made it to the ground at my house.
On the way back from photographing the noon rafting trip I stopped at the top of Fox Hill and took a scenic shot of Thunder Mountain in the distance. You could see the haze as the humidity hung so heavy in the air. I told people that saw the pictures that all of that water would be falling down later in the day. Golly was I right.
About dinner time the skies grew dark and the storm came. The radar on my phone didn’t look impressive at first and all of a sudden it exploded in red and orange and yellow. There was heavy rain, wind, and some marble sized hail. There was so much lightning that the thunder never seemed to stop. It let up for a few minutes and then wave #2 hit with more of the same. It was an impressive storm.
I wasn’t at home so I missed the radar return rainfall estimates. The USGS gauge by Kosir’s apparently only measured 0.01″ of rain. Um no. At that point I am stuck with guessing with a little guidance from area stations. I will call it 1.5-2″ of rainfall with a decent chance of higher totals.
In my travels Sunday it looked like the damage was limited to small branches and leaves blown off of trees and a lot of washing out of gravel roads and driveways. Some of those washouts were pretty significant. It was enough rain that the river jumped 9″ in a little over a day just from the local runoff.
As mentioned before I didn’t get my usual rain reports on this storm. At that point I will be a little challenged to predict the river levels for the weekend. My best guess is that it will peak in the upper teens about Wednesday and return to about a +6 to+8″ level for Saturday. I don’t see a scenario where it goes under about +6. People had a blast in +6 water last weekend and I think that we are in for another really fun weekend for rafting.
The weather ahead looks nice. We have rain chances Thursday, Friday and again Sunday. Early week we have days in the mid-70s on tap, and it will head into the 80s for the weekend.
The first week in June often brings the first fawn sightings of the year, and several have been seen already. I am pretty sure that I heard one crying in the woods near the house the other night. I expect to see one any day now.
Early June also has brought the first turtle sighting. The snapping turtles come up out of their usual wet habitat and look for sandy spots to lay eggs. This one was on a gravel road in the Nicolet and was about dinner plate sized.
Since my early days of visiting this region I have associated the turtles with good fishing. It is after the bass and panfish spawn, but still before the good bass spots get too weed choked. I am going to see if I can’t do something about that later this week.
That will be the carrot on the stick to hammer through the rest of my must do and to-do list early this week. To that end I am going to wrap up here and get back to work.
Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB
