The gray riprap marks where the shoreline should be. I guess any paddler is
always looking for the perfect put-in. It was odd to be looking at the grassy
chutes either side of the small tree along the "shore" as beautiful spots to
launch a canoe while the water is still a hundred yards away.
This would have been a thicket of small trees not removed when the dam
was built in 1961. I talked with a man who said he had only seen it this low
once before in the last half century, but when the water came back, it was
like a new lake. All the brush now growing along the immense
exposed area will then be breeding grounds for fish, and protection for little
fingerlings. Why is a beer can lying on the lake bottom? Please carry your
litter ashore. The lake is surrounded by garbage cans, and there are more at
the marina, and more at the convenience store where you'll get gas and drinks,
and likely at your home. Our waterways should remain things of beauty, and not
be used for sewers and solid waste disposal.
The wind building dunes and sandy waves along the shore, which normally
runs for 42 miles around the 8,800 acre lake.
Before the lake, the road I was camping along continued on into the valley.
It is now the exposed remnants of a road to nowhere.
The last horizontal shadow from the tree marks where we launched our canoe
a few years ago. It was then a drop-off of a few feet from the road to nowhere
to where the shoreline was. What should be a lake bottom is now an expanding
area of undergrowth.
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