My daughters and I went out to check out the flooding around the Apple Valley area today around 1PM. Before we left I heard on a news report that one spot in the San Bernardino Mountains as of this morning has received since last Friday 26 and a half inches of rain, and today we got some more big downpours, with the last one coming near sunset. About a mile from our home we ran across two seperate isolated homes in the low areas of eastern Apple Valley that were surround by small lakes and the homes were clearly fllooded. The roadways were like rivers in a way like I have not seen before. We went first down to Rock Springs Rd to see the flooding there. A small truck is sitting on Rock Springs Rd in the middle of the river with the flood waters rushing bank to bank on either side of it.

Then we went on down Deep Creek Rd to the Mojave Forks dam to see its outlet pipe blasting out completely full. We hiked to the top of the dam and found that the stream waters from Deep Creek and the West Fork of the Mojave river are backing up behind the dam and the lake forming is almost as high as it got in the big 2005 winter flood event. There were road barriers that we could see on Lake Arrowhead Rd by the west side of the Mojave Forks dam and a police helicopter circling that area too, and it appeared that perhaps the lake behind the dam has submerged that rd near the HWY173 junction. Then we drove out to Rabbit Dry Lake on the way to Lucerne Valley and found it was completely full of water and we can now call it Rabbit Lake for a while :-)

It was about 4PM by then so we hit one last spot I wanted to check out which was Reed Dry Lake which is on the east side of the Fairview Mountains in north eastern Apple Valley and we found it was also filled up with rain water. By that time there was extremely heavy rain falling from a big storm cell passing over. By about 6PM this evening the rain had subsided and looks like the next chance for rain will be Saturday and Sunday for So Cal. The desert out here with all of this rain is going to be alot greener this year which will be nice to see :-)

I took numerous photos during our travels today and will post some at Wizard's pictures when I get the chance. I'll post here when they are up for viewing.