After the mountain moved, Lawson Hill residents returned to their houses yesterday afternoon.

The San Miguel sheriff’s Office had evacuated a cluster of houses Saturday night after a mudslide ripped out an entire hillside and threatened 13 homes at the end of Society Drive.

Residents are being told by a geologist and the Sheriff that the mudslide probably won’t end in catastrophe. But they are entering at their own risk. 

Geologists are planning to keep an eye on the slide for the next week to see if the patch of mud and downed trees is sliding — and how fast.

It’s a tenuous situation, and Lawsonians met in the Miramonte Building yesterday morning with a sense of the possibility of impending disaster. Like in any disaster movie, they called on the scientist to explain what had happened and to give them answers. The scientist was Thomas E. Griepentrog, an engineer with Buckhorn Geotech. He diagrammed what happened on the hillside, how water from the meadow above the hillside seeped into the ground, destabilized it, and unloosed a section of the hill.

The mudslide was still a “continuing” and “severe” danger, Griepentrog said.
“We consider it to be still unstable,” he said. “It will stabilize as the water diminishes,” he said, but rain (which is in the forecast) could make it worse.

“What happens if we do get a big rain storm?” asked Eric Wolff.

Griepentrog grimaced and called that the “worst case scenario.”

So, asked another resident: What happens if the worst case scenario comes to pass? Will it be catastrophic? Will the area be swept away?
Probably not, Griepentrog said. If the slide goes, it’s not likely to be like those Guatemalan mudslides that bury whole villages. It will more likely be a few feet of mud and water and debris that will slap up against the houses.

“I don’t see too much of a possibility of catastrophic failure,” Griepentrog said.
Sheriff Bill Masters (whose office was given a round of applause for the way it handled the emergency) put it this way:

“You might get a new yard out of it, but it’s not going to kill anybody.”
Emergency Manager Jennifer Dinsmore encouraged residents to sign up for a text-messaging service at SanMiguelSheriff.com that will warn people of disasters.
After the meeting, a few Lawsonites returned to their homes, while a gaggle of professionals crowded Society Drive. Buckhorn geologists were on their way up the hill to stake out the slide. Workers from SourceGas were preparing to dig a hole to the gas line on the other side of the bridge over Skunk Creek. This way, the gas could be shut off in case of an emergency. And a diversionary trench had been dug between the two houses in the most danger — owned by Anton Viditz-Ward and Shannon Watson — to funnel runoff into Skunk Creek.

Up above the houses, where the slide happened, an entire 25-degree hillside is gone, holed out as if by a bomb or a meteor impact (something more dramatic than water and time). Now, a brown river flows down the scarred earth. Water appears from nowhere, which means it’s coming from underground, which means it’s destabilizing the hillside.
For 500 or 1,000 years, water has flowed through that hillside without a problem, Griepentrog said.

But it’s been a long time since snow came in quite the volume it has this year, at least since the early 1990s.

“With intense runoff and warmer temperatures, more stuff comes down,” said Gripentrog.

The mudslide is still a good distance from the houses. But those who live near the slide are listening like Neapolitans listening to Vesuvius, listening for a crack, a rumbling, any sign that it’s going to go.

Looking at the slide, the principle of universalism is right before your eyes (the idea that the forces that shaped the Earth are still shaping it) , and so what used to be an idyllic mountain slope full of aspens and pines and snow is now just a mess of dirt, roots, rocks, logs and, above all, more dirt. Dirt without roots to hold it down. Dirt before it compresses into rock. Dirt the color of cinnamon. Also mud. Lots of mud.

Above the slide is a gentle pasture where cows graze in the summertime. It’s mostly bare now, the snow having already sloughed or melted off on its way to commit mischief. Residents hope it won’t commit any more.