It has been quite some time since I shared any stories related to my photography adventures but things got a little dicey this past week, so I thought this was worth sharing. This location was once a private home but the local township purchased it for a public park and many restoration projects have been undertaken to get it back to its former beauty. I went this particular evening to try and capture the newly installed cobblestone walkway and the closer I got to arriving, the more I began noticing the creeks were overflowing?  There is a small creek on this property and as I parked my jeep in a marked space, I could see the creek was well over its banks and had flooded the picnic area on the right but the water was at least  40-50 feet away and it had not rained for hours as far as I knew so I assumed we were going to see the water start to recede?

I gathered my gear, took my shoes off because I had plans to walk through the portion of the driveway that had about a foot and a half of non flowing water covering it. I know the layout here and what to expect with depth, so I made it halfway across the road to the area I wanted to photograph, and set my gear down on the dry wooden bridge that was above the water line. I grabbed my tripod, mounted the camera and extended the tripod legs into the same foot and a half of water and began shooting. I was shooting around 20 minutes there when I looked at the dry bridge and it was now 6 inches under water. That was a real kick start to get back to dry land and the water was up past my shorts now as I walked back out. When I got in sight of my Jeep, the once dry parking area had filled and the water was about 8 inches deep all around my jeep. I still had 4-6 inches till it got to the frame but lets just say we stepped up the pace a bit. There were two passenger cars near me and the water was minutes from their doors. The one gentleman asked me if I was going back in the water to shoot more, and if so he warned me that there were two decent sized water snakes that swam right by his family when they were walking in the water near my location, so that was all I needed to hear.

It turns out they had 6 inches of rain in less than an hour just a few miles away and the runoff was still coming when I assumed the exact opposite. When I arrived here I drove through about 9 inches of standing water but when I left the water was 24-30 inches deep and Even though I was tempted to test the door seals on my jeep, I just could not bring myself to do it, even though it was not moving at all.