Storm front: Icy blast pelts Sunriver area
It’s not every day you see people dressed in shorts and flip-flops trekking through icy patches while they shop and dine in Sunriver. But then again, weather can be a funny thing, especially this stormy summer in Central Oregon.
“We were sitting and drinking coffee and this guy comes along with a snow plow on the front of his vehicle. Pretty exciting for August,” a woman visiting Sunriver from Roseburg said Monday.
The hail “was like two feet high on the tables,” Sunriver Brewing owner Karol Cameron said of the wintry wonderland not made of snow, but hail.
A massive storm Sunday night brought thunder, lightning and rain to the High Desert, but Sunriver and southern parts of Deschutes County were treated to dump truck loads of ice — some pellets the size of golf balls.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, anywhere,” Cameron said.”It came down so hard so fast, and it was going in different directions — we couldn’t get under anything that was a shelter.”
And some of those who couldn’t take shelter now have a painful souvenir to remember the power of Mother Nature.
“We were on a bike ride, and it was fun and exciting to watch the storm from afar,” said Milwaukie resident Angie Hayes.
“Then the hail came — that was not fun,” Hayes added, pointing to a bruise on her shoulder. “It pelted us. I got welted up pretty big because I just had a tank top on.”
A pain for those caught in the storm and those left to clean up the aftermath that brought flooding and minor destruction.
“The whole awning collapsed at the grocery store,” Cameron said. “And my flowers, my flowers are just shredded.”
Meanwhile the Sunriver Owners Association Public Works was busy cleaning up debris, pine needles and pumping water out of the bike tunnels.
“There was some flooding in parking lots, landscaping moved around, but we’re cleaning it up,” said SROA Communications Director Brooke Snavely.
By Monday afternoon, most of the ice had melted, the wild weather now giving way back to summer — gone almost as fast it came.
