A little update on the Dobynn Creek slide

Okay, I'm going to be downloading photos, so keep watching.......the top four were taken facing west. (into the sun. bad timing) The bottom two were taken from the center of the bridge facing west. (more or less) Click on photo to enlarge.

Saturday, my wife made the statement that if we weren't doing anything Sunday, she would like to ride over and look at the Dobynn Slide. So, I wisely arranged to not be doing anything, and I drove her over there. I'm glad that I did, it was a sight to behold. The whole east side of the mountain, from the creek to almost the top has slid down. It pushed its way across the stream and up against a large rock. The gumbo mud with the trees and brush made a very effective adobe dam that even a beaver would be proud of. The water is about thirty feet deep and it has backed up about a mile. I got some fabulous photos that I will add here later, when I figure out how to get them off my new cellphone camera. The email program is not working and I can't send them. When I get to work, I can bluetooth the photos into the computer there. Ain't tecknollogy wonerfull?

Right now the slide is stalled at about half slip. There is a rather large bulge at about the middle of the slide that is slowly forming. In technical terms it is called an "alluvial rotation", where a huge dollop of mud slowly rotates up to the point where it simply takes a crap and slides down the mountain. Like watching rain gather on glass until it reaches critical mass and trickles down the glass. At the top of the slide several springs can be seen, ominously,  trickling over the edge, and some water is pushing out of the exposed blue clay that the the whole slide was based on.

Diana Totten, and the Coleman Brothers Construction Company is in charge of the slide mitigation. They and local volunteers have saved the day.  The work that the crew has done out there has surely saved the house that is located in the new spillway, and the county road bridge, which would have probably been undermined on the south end. The crew sandbagged the water out onto the bridge and let it spill over the side instead of washing down the embankment, where it would have undermined the bridge and possibly have caused it to collapse. Shear genius! Then they used three culverts across the pavement and down the other side onto the rip-rap. They spaced them wide enough to not undermine with water, like they will do if placed to close together. Those kinds of things are things that you just have to know how to do. The average person would be clueless.

Dianna Totton, the Dobynn Slide consultant, is a friend of mine. Her dad was ahead of the state Highways in the Garberville yard before his death, and Diana has a lot of road and earth-moving equipment experience in her own right. She has been watching the large rotation with some degree of apprehension. The slide has already done several alluvial rotations and taken several craps. So it's now a waiting game to see if this rotation builds enough weight to let loose again or simply stabilize and become firm enough to last another ten thousand years or so, or until the soil becomes tight enough to hold the water back, the water that is hydraulicing the soil loose from the top and underneath the large dollop of mud, and send it down the mountain like a large cowpie. When that happens, I wonder if they will still be looking for someone to take the blame for Mother Natures wonderful sense of humor. I can hear it now: "Back in the 50's, some damn fool with a bulldozer went up there and stirred that soil all up, and now ten thousand years later, we have to pay the price. Damn loggers anyway!" I wonder who the old Indians blamed for these canyons that we have here? I bet it was a Coyote. "Darn Coyote scratched that soil all up now it slid."

Alluvial rotations happen all over the north coast's loose soil, and are very distinctive. You can see them all over the place if you know what you are looking for. On a broad sloping hillside you will see a little indentation in the hillside above, and a little point of land that pooches out. It is one of the most enticing building spots that you will ever see. "Look Martha, at that little flat over there, wouldn't that be a nice place to build a little house with a nice duck pond and maybe a vegetable garden?" Many an old-timer has succumbed to the allure of building a house on an alluvial rotation, and most old-timers were sorry. Fortunately today we know better... or do we? I guess that is part of "The wisdom of the people that live there" that I was talking about in my header at the top of the Blog.

But, the good part, that Diana knows, and the "Old Indians" know is, that the north coast is building land faster than it is slipping away, In the 1989 earthquake Petrolia gained 4 feet of elevation, and Kings peak grow 16 inches. That is a lot of soil to wash away folks! Diana made mention of that fact in her "Citizen of the Year" speech when she related that she had stood on the top of Kings Peak and contemplated the awesome knowledge that it had grown 16 inches in her lifetime.

The Earth gives, and the Earth takes away.

More on the Dobynn Slide: Click this link



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