Driving our newly-opened highway down to the flatlands, you would never know that 70% of the road was wiped out in the floods, some of it so gone you couldn't tell there ever was a road.





It's all back again: smooth paving, white stripes on the sides, decent shoulders in most places.

But looking past the road is another story. So many trees and structures were wiped out in some places, the views have completely changed. You'll be going along, and all of a sudden you remember there used to be five cabins along the highway in a certain spot, and now they are gone without a trace.

This is all downstream from me, where all the debris and additional rivers joined to make for a more damaging situation than I had at my house.

Some of them are houses I've seen along the river for all my life, and it's sad to see them in distress.





A lot of people lost real estate to the river. The word is that this is a natural process, and their land cannot be restored.



This is where a dam was so wrecked they decided to remove it, taking out a river lake that was lovely to look at: a change from the river to rest your eyes on. Yes, that's himself, taken a couple of years ago.





The flood was September 12, and because the roads were so bad, they have only been able to get to their property in the last two weeks. Many of volunteers have lost interest and gone home, so they don't have all the help that was available when the flood was in the news. I was behind some, but not like these people.