By Kim Nilsen
We posted a little dramatic story about the Nash Stream Bog Dam breach disaster of 1969 on Facebook more than a month ago. Folks just loved that flood, apparently. As of today, more than 280 people have “liked” the article and an astonishing 231 people have shared it with their Facebook friends and family. So the great flood has washed into hundreds of computers across the land and inundated thousands of innocent folks on laptops, tablets and cellphones everywhere.
Here’s a tip. When you motor north on the Nash Stream Road, within a few miles a huge sand bank appears on the right. Well, fine. But it is what is across the road there that is telltale evidence of the erosive power of that flood.
The soils were so heavily eroded by the coursing waters that the land has not really recovered. There are beds of low mosses and lichens amid the spindly starved-for-nutrients trees along the stream banks. This tenuous environment stretches in patchwork fashion for miles upstream, including near the Percy Peaks Trail trailhead.
If you visit the Devil’s Jacuzzi on the East Side Trail, take a look upstream 70 feet above the “jacuzzi” pool. There are several huge boulders standing in the stream to the north. The boulders have scars on their flanks, because the flood was strong enough to actually roll them a ways downstream.
