Monsoon rains a nice distraction from summer drudgery

Rain.

It’s fun to write that word and let it stand alone without the usual Owens Valley qualifier: “Land of Little Rain.”

Backyard rain gauges in Bishop and the

Alabama Hills pegged the recent monsoons as delivering nearly 2 inches of rain to our parched landscape. That’s almost half of our yearly rain total of tad more than 5 inches.

Unfortunately, that “water from the sky” won’t do much to dent the current drought. Monsoon rainstorms that make streams run higher than their mid-summer averages are nice but it’s like shooting an elephant with a BB gun when it comes to knocking down the drought.

The stretch of cloudy weather had other benefits.

Day after day the weather forecasts called for afternoon thunderstorm and possible rain showers. Flash flood alerts popped up adding to the excitement. Watching clouds roll up and over the Sierra and top off the Whites and Inyos became a bit of an obsessive habit. Almost hourly checks on radar and weather forecasts and cloud cover became a welcome diversion from standard summer drudgery.

Of course, most days there was no rain on the valley floor. A different story in the high country. Rain fell. Dry canyons came to life with water. And debris.

A huge debris flow swept down a normally dry Sierra canyon just south of Pinon Creek and buried Foothill Road west of Independence. Once the water and mud left the narrow canyon it spread out across the old Pinon Fire burn scar. It was a striking example of the power that can be generated by even a small amount of high-country rain. The debris flow started in the trees miles above the road. Dozens of aspen and pine tree stumps, branches and trunks shorn of limbs and bark came to rest on the mud-packed alluvial fan. An alluvial fan that gained a couple feet of elevation thanks to the mudflow.

Chasing the water as it continued downhill led to an unusual sight. A small stream of rainwater runoff had somehow made it from the Sierra across U.S. 395 to the LA Aqueduct where it crosses Mazourka Canyon Road. Not sure what route the water took. But there it was. A small muddy plume of rain water in the aqueduct.

That only fortified another rainy day obsession: Checking the real time data on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power webpage.

The string of high-country storms led to a significant jump in stream levels. Rush Creek which feeds Grant Lake then Mono Lake hopped up to about 92 cubic feet per second on Aug. 9.

Lee Vining and Parker creeks also doubled in size early this week. Bishop Creek popped above 100 cfs and stayed well above 70 cfs. Quite a jump from summer levels. Big Pine Creek roared to more than 171 cfs on Aug. 5, before dropping to just 36 cfs. Independence Creek peaked at about 20 cfs, then settled in around 10 cfs, which is about double its regular flow.

Watching creek levels yo-yo up and down ate up the time in between checking weather reports and surveying the sky for clouds.

But now with clear skies, no rain and 90-degree temperatures forecast into the coming weeks, I’ll have to find some other diversions to chew up my time.