tenaya.ucsd.edu/~dettinge/Dettinger_Ingram_sciam13.pdf
Jan 4, 2013 - the Pacific Ocean began to pound central California on Christmas Eve in 1861 and continued virtually ... Was the 1861–62 flood a freak event?
I greatly enjoyed looking at the first few artists depictions of the floods of 1861 to 1862 when it rained for 43 days straight (sounds like Noah's flood doesn't it?). However, because it only happened 153 years ago now there are many people who wrote about their experiences of this flood so we have pretty good records available about the extent of it including mud samples taken at various points along the Sacramento River all the way into San Francisco Bay.
If you look carefully at the water levels on the first page of the PDF. you will notice that most of Interstate 5 would be underwater from about maybe Stockton or further south to Bakersfield or Fresno to about Redding where it starts to go up into the mountains near Mt. Shasta.
So, maybe 101 would be how trucks still moved their freight north and South between San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Ashland and Portland up to Seattle and Vancouver, Canada.
However, in 1862 the Columbia and all other rivers flooded too and were very wide too. This flood affected people as far away as Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Washington, Oregon. The flooding to a greater or lesser degree was everywhere. However, the worst results were California where you have such extreme elevation changes between the Sierras and southern Cascades and San Francisco and where The Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys were once lakes in an ancient time.
Also, I believe melting snowpack also played a part when warmer rainstorms not only brought incredible amounts of rain but also melted a large snowpack at the time in the Sierras and Cascade Mountains.
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