Kelly Canyon Ski Resort snow run-off parking lot erosion

Originally posted 5-29-2011

Today we kicked off the Memorial Day Weekend with an outing to Kelly Canyon.  We went to the Ski Resort. Matt clued us into the fact that there is a huge snow-runoff that's happening there, and it's eroding out part of their parking lot.  It was actually pretty impressive!

This is what the runoff erosion looks like between the two lifts at Kelly's Canyon.  The resort will definitely have to do something about this so that they can use the hill.  This is right at the foot of the main hill by the lodge.  Emily is in the foreground, and Kat is up ahead.

This is where all that water was heading.  This is the erosion at the lower end of the main parking lot at Kelly's Canyon.  It's quite a gully!  You can see the Kelly Canyon Resort Building in the background.

Here are Kat and emily standing near the eroded gully.  The erosion was so bad that the flow of water was diverted to the foot of the hill bordering the parking lot, and another good sized gully is developing there too.

While this erosion is going to cost a good pile of cash to fix once the runoff is done, it was cool to be able to see how this scale of erosion works.  There is the small canyon, small waterfall, etc. 

So, this was stop number one on our Memorial Day Saturday outing.

The photo below shows the size of the gully that has been cut into the parking lot.