Nevada Falls - 2005 vs. 2008

I have the rest of our Half Dome pictures up on my Picasa page now, if anyone is interested. While we were hiking up my favorite part of the trail below Nevada Falls, I kept thinking back to 2005 when we hiked this same stretch during a period of extremely high flow, only a couple days after the entire Yosemite Valley was flooded (and closed) due to a sudden jolt of hot weather that triggered massive May snowmelts. I know that retrospect tends to make things - especially personal experiences - seem grander or more impressive than they may have actually been, but I went back and compared Nevada Falls from that hike (R) and our recent one (L):

Kate is there with Cara on the left one, and our friend and former Foster City neighbor Lisa on the right. As you can see, even the impressively high flow from last weekend is dwarfed in comparison to that trip from 2005! Now I'm curious how those couple days rank on the all time flow rates for the Merced... maybe if I have some time I'll look it up, or someone can find it for me and post it in the comments! Anyways, pretty crazy waterfall, huh?

UPDATE: 14 seconds on the Google and I have answers, thanks to this site with a cool time lapse of all the snow melting that caused the flooding:
You can see that the 2005 flood was maybe the 8th highest recorded flow ever, but the 3rd highest spring-flood flow. And according to this site, the flow during our hike on June 3rd was only around 1100 CFS, while the flow when the 2005 picture was taken was around 3000 CFS. Wow, I can't imagine seeing 9000 CFS going over those waterfalls. Crazy!