The Olympians Pay a Visit

This weekend Zeus paid a little visit to the area as did his fellow Olympian, Poseidon. About 2:30 am on Sunday, I was awakened by some pretty impressive bolt tossing done by the big guy. One strike was so close that the thunder was simultaneous with the flash. The thunder was of the kind that seems to start inside your head and vibrates down your spinal column. The rain was blowing so hard it was sideways and actually coming through the walls. With storms like this you just assume that the beach is getting reworked into a new form. You could see the waves rolling in like a herd of horses tumbling over each other in a rush to get ashore. To say there were white caps on the lake would be a bit misleading as the entire lake seemed to be churned to a white froth .


When I got down to the beach in the afternoon, things had calmed considerably and I was pleasantly surprised to see my stonework had survived for the most part. A 15 foot section of wall will need to be reset, but the remains of the Stonewave were largely intact. Where the real surprise was, was at the retaining wall at the foot of the bluff. These first two pictures show that the water running down the bluff face had piled up behind the retaining wall at least as high as the wall itself before blowing through it. A good 12 foot section was just obliterated by the force of the water as it gushed out of the breach. Stone from the wall was strewn in the torrent's path a good thirty feet from the wall.

These photos show the next manifestation of the Stonewave and what's left of the wall in front of it. There are two rectangular towers at this point each are about 5 or 6 feet tall at this point. There is a gap between them that I'm coaxing into a curve as the left hand tower bends away from the right hand side. Behind to the left is a small circular tower that is for storing the stone before it goes into the fill inside of the tower. It will shrink as the other two grow. The Stonewave will also feed the two towers as it gets disassembled.

There is also plenty of stone on the beach right now courtesy of a couple of big Spring storms. So I will have plenty to work with for the rest of June I would imagine.