COLOCKUM — Fire and water are normally two opposing forces, but they appeared to work in unison this past weekend to hammer residents here already hard-hit by two area wildfires.
“Last night it was very scary, because it was water from one end to the next,” said Darcey Brown Monday, gazing at what little was left of her once-manicured yard in the 7400 block of Colockum Road.
The Browns had just finished a barbecue dinner, when Darcey spotted what she described as a wall of brush and water heading their way from just up the road. Suddenly filled by a torrential rain storm that fell on the region Sunday evening, Colockum Creek had jumped its banks and was heading straight for them.
With water on their property rising as high as three feet, they rounded up their three dogs and headed for their pickup.
“My oldest dog is 13 and can’t hear,” Brown said. “I just picked her up and tossed her just like a feather into the truck. And she weighs like 60 pounds.” The family cat stayed behind to fend for itself.
The Browns headed out but were stopped by a debris slide over the road. They ended up sitting in their pickup on higher ground about a half hour, until the rain eased, and they headed back home.
The torrent had swept across their property of 22 years, washing away their yard and depositing a thick coating of mud around their home and outbuilding.
The usually docile creek, which also skirts their property from behind, swallowed a five-foot swath of the Brown’s back yard and carried it downstream.
Mounds of woody debris dotted the property, marking the levels the water reached before it began receding. Their house was untouched.
“We were very, very lucky,” she said. “My cat was kind of muddy when I found her last night.”
Barely a week before, the Colockum Tarps Fire had burned the hillside behind the Browns’ home, stopped only by the quick work of firefighters and the barrier of Colockum Creek.
That close call wouldn’t be the last. Lightning Friday sparked the Milepost 10 Fire, also too close for comfort. And then came the rain Sunday.
The downpour caused floodwaters churning with mud and debris to race out of canyons and down blackened hillsides denuded of vegetation and made less absorbent by fire.
At least six area properties received serious damage, including some to homes. Fresh mud is now visible around several of the four homes that burned to the ground in the Colockum Tarps Fire.
Large mud and rock slides blocked Colockum Road in at least a half-dozen places, including at Milepost 12, where the volume of water running downhill from the (usually) Dry Gulch overwhelmed a drainage culvert some 35 feet below the road’s surface.
Water both topped and undercut the roadway, causing the northbound lane to collapse into a newly opened, 35-foot ravine, halting traffic in or out.
At the road’s intersection with Kingsbury Road, at about Milepost 16, a massive wash out of Robinson Canyon transformed the property of Bill Scroggie into a vast field of river rock. Water churning with rocks and debris swamped the Scroggie home and took out a corner of his barn.
“All this stuff was yard. Beautiful yard,” said Arny Lorentzen, a 15-year area resident who was at the Scroggies’ with a group of men to retrieve a pickup they’d left there. The Scroggies weren’t home at mid-morning Monday.
“Lightning and rain and the fire all at once. It was kind of wild,” said Lyndell Hobbs of Ellensburg Monday, as he headed up Colockum Pass road in a sturdy Polaris ATV pickup to check on 200 head of cattle he grazes at the Colockum Natural Resource Center, an expanse of scrub, grass and forest lands controlled by Chelan County.
He’d brought the cattle to lower ground Saturday night, away from the still-active Milepost 10 Fire and hoped to move them outside the area by truck Sunday. The rain changed their plan, when the trucks couldn’t get through. He said he thought the cattle made it through OK.
County crews, including equipment and personnel from other parts of the county and some private businesses, worked through Sunday night and all day Monday clearing roads and beginning to repair the badly damaged area near Dry Gulch.
Colockum Road was closed at Milepost 12 to all but repair crews and emergency vehicles for much of Monday. It partially opened Monday afternoon, but only to area residents.
“This certainly highlights the importance of vegetation on the land,” Chelan County Commissioner Ron Walter said Monday, as he drove through the area, surveying the damage.
Mitch Reister, Chelan County director of public works, agreed.
“There is a lot of property damage. It’s just amazing the power that Mother Nature exerted on this area,” he said.
“Had there not been a burn, we would have had some mud here and there, but we wouldn’t have what we’re dealing with now.”
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