Weather you know it or not!

This has been a miserable winter so far with all the wind, rain, road failures, and power outages. I overheard a couple of newcomers that had Garberville weather all figured out. They were seated at the counter of a popular downtown restaurant. The subject of the weather came up and the one guy said to the other, “Only a damn fool would not believe in Global Warming after all of this weather.” They talked about the rainfall and the minor flooding, and how it even snowed in Redway, and about all the trees that blew down, and how this is the worst power outages in a long time. They put it all together and decided: “Yep! Global Warming”.

As I sat there chuckling to myself, and trying not to tell them that they were missing a whole bunch of information. I got to thinking about the weather I’ve seen in Garberville.

The first time I remember the weather being a phenomenon was the flood of 1955. I won’t go into great detail because the flood of 1964 greatly surpassed it. But, there were a bunch of homes and towns that were washed away, or heavily damaged in 1955. Some were rebuilt right back in place, because they thought that the flood was a freak occurrence and wasn’t likely to happen again.

Then there was the Columbus Day wind storm in 1962, where forests were blown down like match sticks. The north end of the flat over by the Garberville airport had a large stand of Fir trees. If you know where the Crazy Horse Ranch is, they grew on that flat. A whole wall of trees blew down across the road. A man, Lloyd Swenson, who was a passenger in a pick-up truck, was killed. The man who owned the Garage in Briceland, Pete Star, decided that the wind was just getting too bad, and he decided to drive home to Garberville. Just as he was nearing the west end of the bridge that crosses the Eel river in lower Redway, a large diameter Redwood fell clear through the west approach to the bridge. Realizing that he was not going to be able to travel any further, he turned around and headed back toward Briceland. Before he could get out of the grove, more trees came down and he was blocked in. Not really thinking about what he was doing he got out of the truck and ran for his life. Heavy Redwood limbs were falling all around him. He made it out of the grove alive and walked back to Briceland. His truck was relatively unscathed. There were more trees blown down than the loggers could salvage, and some ended up rotting. That was a gravy-train year for the logger, with all the trees already down and all laying in the same direction. Nowadays there would be some environmental reason that they would all have to rot.

The brunt of the storm hit in Oregon where the wind was so strong that the wind speed gauges blew up. They figured out that some ridge top winds hit 179 M.P.H.

The 1964 flood has been talked about by almost everyone, but one of the things that you may not know is how much it rained. I have heard all kinds of reasons for the flood to have happened. The one that I’ve heard the most is the loggers built so many roads in the hills that they just washed away. To some extent that was true, but south of Leggett California, there was a whole large hillside of virgin timber that slid clear into the river. The forest had never had a piece of logging equipment in it. It was one of the worst landslides on the South fork of the Eel.

In the headwaters of the South Fork of the Eel, Branscomb California, It rained twenty-four inches in forty eight hours, seven of those in the last four hours. It rained like a heavy thunder shower for two days, and the final rain was so heavy that it couldn’t even run off. It looked like it was raining so hard that you couldn’t breathe the air. All of the culverts in Garberville were over run, and water was running down the streets like rivers. A person could not walk across the main street, because the water was to deep and swift. It was one of the spookiest feelings that I’ve ever had. Everyone was speechless, dead silent. Some times you would hear someone worry out loud about someone or some place, otherwise there was dead silence. There was some that even wondered if Garberville was high enough off the river to avoid flooding. None of us had ever seen rain like that before, or since.

In the early seventies the winter temperatures got down to 14 degrees in Redway, the fire hydrants froze and broke. It was so cold that even the drain lines were frozen, and almost every pipe and faucet that was exposed broke. The temperature got down 4 degrees in Whitethorn, and it got clear down to Zero in Branscomb.

In the middle of all this cold weather, my cousin Roy Branscomb came up from Laytonville to go fishing. We went down to lower Redway, to the Pete Johnson hole. He hooked a large steelhead almost immediately. He played it for quite a while and his hands were getting very cold. Just as he got it to shore, it came unhooked and we both jumped into the shallow water with our hip boots, and between the two of us we were able to grab the fish and flip it onshore. We left the fish there and ran for the truck, our hands were so cold that we couldn’t feel anything. I had left the keys in the ignition, you could still do that back then. The truck started and while we were waiting for it to get warm we looked down at our hands and the backs of them had ice on them.

Also in the early seventies, we had over one-hundred inches of rain in Garberville. It stared raining in August and it rained fairly steadily up until May. I remember that my new bride, Janis, and I were taking a drive up Mud Creek in Laytonville, to see the mud springs. My Uncle Ben Branscomb was driving his new Bronco that he was so proud of. I remarked about what a warm rain that it was. My Uncle replied; “It aught to be warm, this is August!”

When the Franciks moved to Redway, they rented a house, and I delivered them a new refrigerator. They remarked that they didn’t want to buy a house yet, because they heard that it rained a lot in Garberville, and they weren’t sure that they would like it here. I must have thought of them a hundred times that winter. By spring they decided that if that was one of the wettest winters, that it would be okay, and that they liked the people here. So they stayed.

In the late seventies we had less than twenty-two inches of rain. It rained so little that all of the hill people’s springs were dried up. That was back before all of the potable water trucks were around, and every one had to haul their own water. Dick Keating was smart enough to buy up a bunch of surplus pickle barrels and he sold them by the thousands. People were coming out of the hills and stealing water from anyone that had a faucet that they could sneak up to. Finally they put in a water dispenser at the Redway fire hall. If I recall correctly it was set to dispense fifty gallons of water for twenty-five cents.

One person that I knew hauled his water in an old waterbed that he had in the bed of his truck. He had a piece of plywood placed over it to keep it from sloshing. He had some good old Garberville ingenuity.

There has been a few remarkable earthquakes, and some pretty terrific fires also. The Finnly Creek fire burned from Finnly creek on the Wolf Ranch on Telegraph Ridge to Shelter Cove and out to sea in one night. Over ten thousand acres. It was fanned by a strong land wind, like a Santa Anna Wind but the Southern Californians get upset if you use that term because they own it.

Then more recently the Saddle fire and the Canoe Fire. But most people know about the recent stuff, I just though you might like to hear about some of the things that happened around here to the best of my recollection. Some things I’ve left vague because I can’t remember the exact dates, or numbers but otherwise this is a fairly accurate recolllection of things. Please feel free to add to, or correct me.