My late father, a solicitor, repeatedly said to me, "Never rent or buy a house that is level with river, lake, sea, and watch the mountainsides for streams!" Later I was chatting to Mary Hayes.
Torrents of water poured down mountainsides and overflowed streams and rivers in three states on Friday, flooding towns in minutes and leaving destruction in their paths.
The residual rock and dirt are then dumped or carted down the mountainside into nearby valleys and streams.
I couldn't see the peaks, wrapped in mist, but there were hundreds of cascading streams down the mountainsides.
Soil and rock are blasted and scraped away by enormous machines, then dumped down the mountainside into adjacent valleys and the streams that run through them.
Go back 2,000 years and Cape Town was actually first named "Camissa," meaning "Place of Sweet Waters," by the indigenous Khoi people, because of its natural and clean streams stemming from the mountainside.
Clean streams run straight off the mountainside, keeping beer cans cold.
We took a tester Rover through the nastiest muck, up snowy mountainsides and down the other side, through streams and headfirst into 4 feet of standing water down a 45-degree mud slope.
Then another high waterfall, a slender hypnotic stream hurtling down the 100-foot mountainside, as the Cascade trail wound through beautiful native forest.
Small streams crawl through the valleys and past the mountainsides covered in amapa, a purple flower.
