There's a huge bunch of flooding in Yellowstone National Park. It started with heavy rain yesterday that led to a mass melting of the high altitude snowpack. Net result is instant 100 year floods on multiple rivers through Wyoming and Montana. Here's a video of some of the flooding. That video shows the North Entrance road which comes into the park from the northwest side (starting at a town, Gardiner, Montana) and runs along side the Gardiner River, which is a minor river which dumps into the Yellowstone River - the latter is the largest tributary of the Missouri River.
Anyway, this shows the crazy erosion power of a mountain river that's flooding. With normal spring melt level (which is when the river is at its routine highest seasonally), the river moderately erodes its banks, but hasn't threatened the road in decades. But with this higher level of flooding, the road has been completely cut through in five places in the video. In addition to the road bridge (which is still in place in the video), there was a trail bridge about a mile north of the road bridge which was washed out too (it's almost center in the last frame, you can see a pull out on the right between road and river with a trail on both sides of the river - the bridge would have been in between the trail parts).
Finally, I linked to the map so you can see what the stretch looked like before the flooding. The helicopter is flying from south to north along the road. By coincidence, the video starts about where the tag is on the map.
Here's more update. Yellowstone has reopened. Things are a bit crazy. The northern part of the park is presently closed to visitors, but most of the attractions are open: the Firehole River valley (which by itself probably has about a quarter to a third of the world's geysers, including Old Faithful), the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Yellowstone Lake, Norris Geyser Basin, and backcountry areas in the southern part of the park. The park is restricted, crudely splitting visitation into even and odd days. As I understand it, you can visit on an even numbered day if your license plate ends in an even number (similarly for odd). No idea what happens if you have a specialty license plate with no numbers, but they probably figured it out by now.
Still weird to me how a few inches of rain caused so much trouble.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 27 2022, @03:11AM
Still weird to me how a few inches of rain caused so much trouble.