Saturday Adventure

Amanda went out of town this weekend for a spa day with her friends, so I got to play single dad on Saturday. We've had a ton of rain the past three weeks and Beaver Lake is at record levels, so the Corps of Engineers opened the floodgates on the dam again on Thursday night. This is always something neat to see, so I decided to drive out there with the boys.

Here is a view from the observation station on the hill above the dam. According to the news, the lake crested at an all-time high of 1,132.26 feet at 2 am on Friday. Thursday night the floodgates were open 9.5 feet - four feet higher than ever before (they're open about 7 feet in this picture). It was very windy and cold at the top of the hill, but the boys thought it was really cool.

This is the spillway below the dam. Almost one million gallons of water per second are coming out through the floodgates.

Here are the boys, wishing they could get a lot closer to all that water. I'm glad the fence was there! They thought standing in the spray from the water was pretty funny.

William: "Daddy, are there sharks in that ocean?"

Me: "No, William - that's the lake. There are no sharks in the lake."

William: "No, that's the ocean! Look at the waves!"

Me: "No, William. See, the wind is making those waves, so it looks like the ocean, and.."

William: "It's the ocean!"

Me: *sigh* "Okay, it's the ocean"

Andrew: "Ocean?"

Strangely, no one wanted to have a cookout here today.