[On my computer the photos are not coming out where they ought to, but I’m a bit too busy to fix it right now.]
Several local roads have been closed since the hurricane, but word has gotten around that some are in fact passable: you drive around the roadblock and find that the road is one-lane in several places, and with guards washed away. I was heading to Cooperstown, New York for an Avett Brothers concert, and wanted to see if County Road 47 – Frost Valley Road – was actually passable to Big Indian and Route 28.
Turns out it is and is not. Driving along north of the Giant Ledge trailhead you come across a roadblock, and just past it is a giant chasm in the middle of the road. It’s about fifty feet wide and forty deep. At its bottom is a tiny trickle of water – it’s hard to believe that such a little tiny creek could have ripped a hole this wide in the road.
I then decided to explore the area below the road, where the creek joins the nascent Esopus. Down there I found a remarkable sight:
A pair of culverts had been under the road; the flood washed them two or three hundred feet downstream, into the woods. Each was seven feet in diameter, cast iron, and forty feet long. I suspect they will be there forever now, as their current location is at the bottom of a gully inaccessible to vehicles as far as I can tell – but of course, the question is merely whether there is willpower to get them out or not.
I returned to the road, and saw a pair of amazing sights. One was a group of well-dressed people walking down to the stream and crossing on a footbridge that had been set up there. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses, or so I inferred when they said they were coming back from the Kingdom Hall. They were separated from their church by the break in the road, so they had left one car at each end of the gap, and walked across the stream. It looked like something from a much earlier era or a faraway place.
The next remarkable sight was a Subaru outback which roared past the roadblocks and at full speed went face-down into the gully, down into the stream, and up the other side – again, at full speed so as not to lose momentum in the mud. It was quite a performance. I considered doing the same when headed to Cooperstown, but an unloaded pickup is not a great traction vehicle – the rear wheels have no weight over them and tend to float in mud.
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