Warning: My local creek bed in Boulder looked totally different after the spring floods

I hike past this spot every week, and last year the exposed rock was mostly smooth sandstone with a few pebbles. After the heavy rains in April, there's now a fresh layer of jagged, dark gray shale fragments covering everything. Is this a normal amount of change for one flood season, or did something unusual happen with the water flow?

2 comments

2 Comments

brookepark19d ago

Lol isn't that just how creeks work though? Water moves stuff around. I've seen my local spot get totally rearranged after a big storm, it always looks different. It's probably just normal erosion, not some weird water flow thing.

noah91718d ago

But @brookepark that's exactly why it's weird. Normal erosion moves stuff slowly, not all at once like someone flipped a switch. If the whole creek bed changed overnight with no big rain, that's not just water doing its thing. I've seen places where the flow pattern reversed for no clear reason, like the water found a whole new path. That points to something underground shifting, not surface erosion. There's a big difference between normal change and sudden weirdness.