It's Always an Adventure

This weekend was a camping weekend for us and we headed out to Redstone with Travis' mom. I spent a lovely morning hiking with my family at Colorado's famous Maroon Bells and thought to myself, "Wow, we've had fairly uneventful camping this year. How great! No wind storms that flatten our tent and unbend the 'S' hooks that hold our fly on. No middle of the night rabbit migrations. No snow, no freezing cold, no flaming hot, and really no rain. What a great year so far for camping!"
After we returned to camp, a little early (another adventure, story for another time) we all just relaxed and kept an eye on the weather which was looking a little cloudy.
35 minutes later our campsite was totally underwater and looked like this-
That is indeed a river running through our site. I dashed to the car to get my camera and after I returned to our shelter Travis remembered that FFM's books were on the floor of our tent. Since I was already wet I dashed out again to toss them into the middle of the tent onto a sleeping bag where they'd have a better chance of staying dry. When I got to the tent it was FLOATING. The entire tent. I've never seen anything like that. Luckily it's a new and very weatherproof tent and the inside was still dry. Floating, but dry.

The deluge and windstorm continued for about half an hour, then turned into a steady rain, and then let up to a hard drizzle. We discussed sleeping options, tent vs car vs calling it a trip and heading for a motel/Avon/home. While discussing, our campground host pulled up and informed us that we were stranded, the deluge had let loose a massive mudslide that covered the only entrance to the campground in 4+ feet of mud. Not only that but it continued to slide onto the road leading into the campground, also closing that road. Well, that solved our where to spend the night dilemma, and having solved that we of course had to go take a look.

Here's the entrance to the campground. The silver car is stranded and on the left side by the bush you can barely see a mailbox peeking out above all the mud.

It doesn't look that deep but it's 4+ deep and full of boulders the size of watermelons to curbside garbage cans.

Our tent was mostly dry that night, it got cool enough that we had a lot of condensation inside so FFM and I slept in the car. Penny's tent did the same thing and she camped out in her car, too. Travis stayed in the tent and reported that he stayed dry but the underside of his sleeping pad got wet. Not bad for all the rain we got (it continued to rain all night).

The Forest Service started digging us out Sunday morning around 8am and announced at 12:40 they were going to be able to release anyone who was ready at 1pm but after that they were going to need to dig out some more. Boy, we wrapped up our lunch fast and boogied out of there!

All in all it was a big adventure, we felt very lucky as we were well prepared for the circumstances and weren't wringing out sleeping bags or throwing away ripped tents like some of the other campers.