The Blocked Bridge on the LaBarque

Bridge over Doc Sargent Road

I've seen Roman aqueducts; they're very cool and they still work. This one on LaBarque Creek is more basic. I enjoy sidling down the sandy creek banks and hunting the fascinating fossils near this bridge on Doc Sargent Road. This area was once the shore of the great inland ocean, so the fossils are of marine plants. Imagine a time when plants, only plants, ruled the Earth! Was there love? Oh, there had to be! The rocks pictured below are from my latest hunt. Fortunately, fossils on rocks almost always lie fossil-side-up, making hunting a little simpler.

Yet this was the first time I actually  saw how one of the bridge's two ducts was clogged near to its "ceiling" with sand. Now I fully understand why in 2015 and 2017 the LaBarque, usually not much more than a stream, rose so quickly and forcefully over its banks and the adjacent road.

Seeing new and huge deposits of sand choking the creek, after those floods, did bother me, but it seems that Nature took care of them. This, though, I can't see a solution to.

LaBarque Creek Now, and Back Then

The photo with blue sky and snow was taken in January 2012, the other in March 2016. (It's the same leaning sycamore tree in both pictures.) The December 2015 flash flood here was like a flood of sand, creating new white sand "beaches" on the property, the result of gushing water, erosion and trees weakened and downed by invasive honeysuckle. Here's a brand-new "beach": Looks appealing, but where you see sand there once was water. I climbed a cliff to to get a bird's-eye view of just how far the flood carried sand over the creek banks and into the woods: When I first moved here in 1998 lavish white sand beaches lined the side of the creek where there aren't any now, and the water was deep enough to catch little sunfish. In 2001 and 2008 beavers built enormous dams just beyond the creek bend, and chewed down numerous nearby trees, destabilizing the creek bank on the near side; the flood of '08 destroyed the most magnificent beaver dam and greatest swimming hole I have ever seen. Beaver dam again in 2012. The current flood of sand means the creek is one foot deep. I never worry. Living here has taught me is that worry is all in the mind and utterly useless.