Barbara Lawlor

      To get to Gold Hill from Left Hand Canyon or vice versa, residents have used a steep, switchbacked dirt road, barely wide enough for two cars. Lickskillet has a concrete bridge at the bottom of the road. Actually, it had a bridge at the bottom of the road.

The shortcut was one of the first things to do in last week's flood. The bridge washed out and the small, mostly non-existent creek that runs alongside the road chomped into the ground and took out most of the road in many places. A resident rode her horse down from Gold Hill to see what the damage looked like and was forced to turn back before she reached the bottom because of the precarious narrowing of what had been the road.

Local firefighters have had to stand guard at the intersection to keep the steady flow of traffic through Gold Hill from going through the crime scene and cone barriers to head down the former short cut. Rebuilding the road may take months.

Students at the Gold Hill School spent the first day of re-opening, last Wednesday, Sept. 18, making signs for all the emergency workers assisting the flood recovery efforts and asking people to drive gently on their main road of soft dirt as they find alternative routes to Boulder.