It’s been raining at my house for 36 hours. Areas just to the north of me have had as much as seven inches of rain since yesterday.

I live in the foothills outside of Boulder, Colorado. For the first time in the 9 years that I’ve been living here, schools are closed because of unsafe driving conditions due to rain.

My driveway looks like the Badlands, or the Grand Canyon.

The dirt road which passes in front of my house looks like a mud pit from a military obstacle course.

Both roads which lead from my area to Boulder and Denver are closed.

Roads throughout the area have washes of mud and gravel going across them, deep crevasses in the dirt bordering the road showing where the hazards were sitting harmlessly just two days earlier. Drivers inexperienced with dirt roads slide around, posing great risk to anyone coming the other way on some of our narrow mountain roads. I hope that most people will take the sheriff’s advice and not drive if they don’t have to.

Two days ago, a lightning storm nearby took out two of my televisions and two DirecTV receivers. Two weeks earlier a similar storm took out a different TV, a surround-sound receiver, and various small electrical devices.

Again, I’ve never seen anything like it in nearly a decade in the Colorado mountains.