Big Flood Big Sweep

This evening I went to the NW entrance to the Woods at 8 PM to see what the heavy flood rains had done. On April 1st a crew of Big Event OU students and faculty hit the Woods to mark trails, label/tag trees on the Tree Loop and clean up debris washed into the Woods from north of Hwy 9. Two or three days earlier, the heaviest rains in a year began to fall. Four and a half inches of rain built a flood, washing out across the central and southern Woods. A week later, the water has largely receded. As the flood pushed across the Woods, it shoved tons of leaf litter ahead of it. Trails now are oddly clean as though they have been power-washed, down to the soil. Rafts of leaf litter, bits of branches and old decomposing logs are pushed into deposits here and there.
The early spring warm March and this spring rain have changed the Woods. They have gone from their late winter openness or bareness, to the mid spring flush with green leaves of box elder, sugar berry, elm and others filling the under story, cushioning, absorbing the sound of traffic from the highway and obscuring line of sight across the Woods. I like this time.
This evening there is water filling the Wash at Elm Bridge and at the Beaver Dam (barely moving). The East Pond and NW Pond are both well-filled.
I walked a mile and a half of looping trails that seemed in fairly good shape, no big trees down. In the western woods the water is slowly seeping down into the ground. The land serving as a sponge to slowly recharge the ground water table.