Barbara Lawlor, Boulder County. Veruska Trask tossed and turned, unable to sleep on Friday night. As rain pummeled her windows, the long time Fourmile resident couldn’t help but think of the 2013 flood that washed out the road in front of her house.

After a week of constant rain, the ground was saturated, the creek rising and gaining in velocity, and the memories were flooding in.

“I watched the house I lived in, the old hotel in Sumerville burn down,” says Veruska. “I watched it burn 100 times as they showed it over and over again during the Fourmile Fire.”

She says the building she lives in now was an old store, established in the 1860s. They sold liquor from the back and dynamite from the front. At that time Sumerville was a mining town and frame houses bordered the switchback where three streams joined forces and forged downhill.

Tom Trask looks at the wide gully etched out by the last flood two years ago and says, “that used to be 18 inches across. The flood took out the road. Since then, we have been piling up sandbags and then replacing them as they get swept downstream.”

Veruska says she and her neighbors are still trying to recover, trying to figure it all out. On Saturday morning, she and other Fourmile residents stood above the creek shaking their heads, wondering if they were in for another deluge. Weather reports predicted there could be up to a foot of snow, which would be a good thing. It would slow down the rising water.

But if a heavy rain hit hard Saturday night, they would be looking at washed-out roads, bridges, and flooded homes. This time they would be prepared.

“Sometimes you have to surrender,” said Vetruska. “But we have our land so we will continue our responsibility. I have learned how to swear in five languages. Right now we are hoping for snow. We have done all the work and now we can just observe the flow.”

Fourmile resident Ward King got out his heavy equipment and headed to a neighbor’s house where a blocked culvert was forming a pond that was threatening to take out a bridge. Sandbags were piled at the entrance to the driveway, but the property owners weren’t home. King drove on down the road to see if his help was needed elsewhere.

Rob Reynolds and his son Morgan were called to help deliver sandbags to Duncan Walker’s home. The sandbags have been piled on a pullout on Fourmile Canyon Road for the past year and a half, in case residents needed them again.  There weren’t many left and what was there was just about submerged in the accumulated overnight rainfall.

Reynold filled his front end loader and headed to Walker’s home where neighbors dropped in to help stack the sandbags in front of the garage. Duncan Walker said that they lost their bridge in the 2013 flood and replaced it, that the water had been three feet high against their garage.

It was difficult to communicate this close to the stream, with the rattle of the rocks and the incessant roar of the water muffling words.

Veruska and Tom Trask say that recently the Fourmile homeowners received a grant that will help them rebuild their riverbanks and roads and bridges. They say the grant will cover crews who will help dig out the debris that is clogging the stream, the old dead trees and pieces of cement that block the proper flow of water.

“We just keep trying to figure out to stay here,” says Veruska. “We bought 12 tons of sandbags and now are waiting for the crews and the machines.”

Tom Trask stood above the stream watching the Cash Gulch water run into the Gold Run water and then both of them mix with the Black Hawk Gulch water. All he could do was pile up sandbags and hope for snow.

Later that night, it snowed, but nowhere near what was expected. The water continued to gush down the canyon, but it reached a peak at a safe level and by Sunday morning, the danger of flooding had receded.

The bullet had been dodged, this time. Mountain residents have spent the last year and a half trying to rebuild what had been swept away. Mountain roads are still defined as temporary and money is still being sought to pay for the recovery effort.

After record-breaking wildfire and flood damage, Fourmile residents are resilient, doing what they can to be prepared for whatever nature has to throw at them and waiting for promised assistance that will help them sleep more easily at night when the wind blows and rain falls.

Recent ground saturation levels have rapidly filled Barker Reservoir in Nederland. Craig Skeie, City of Boulder Water Resources Facility Manager, said on Monday, that water was splashing over the spillway and would be flowing over it in the next couple of days, which it does every year. This year the event will be occurring a couple of weeks earlier than usual.