Yesterday, my husband and I drove down to a local park to get some river rocks to use in our garden. This park is part of the local trail system and has paths that follow the banks of the Nechako River. We can actually walk there from our house - put walking home with 3 5-gallon pails of rocks would have been awkward (impossible for me - I could barely carry one from the riverbank to the car). Anyways, this winter the river was struck with a major icejam for about 3 months - houses were flooded, and roads/businesses were closed for a significant amount of time. This park was in the middle of the ice jam. Yesterday, we saw the devastaion that the ice had actually caused. There are still ice blocks there that are 10-12 feet high. The trail has been washed away in places - and bridges have been reduced to splinters, and there is trees, branches and debris everywhere. It's funny how you can live so close to a disaster like this, and not really know its full effects. We are only several blocks from the river - but up a hill, so there was no chance of it affecting us -and yet, we had never seen the extent of the damage. The park is still beautiful, but since parts of it have been washed away (several times in the last few years), it will never quite be the same, and will take a lot of money and time to fix back up.