The Lake is Gone!

Sorry to bother you one more time with Wodehouse Karst pictures, and these ones are dull as ditch water!  But I went out today to walk in and see if I could get a picture of the lake half-empty, and lo and behold, the lake was gone!  Here's what it looks like today, 12 days after we paddled across the karst!

This is looking at the main cluster of sinkholes.  You can see there's still a little excess water in the stream, but the lake obviously subsided away very quickly once it started.  The bottom 3-4 feet of those tree trunks would have been in the water.

Looking back up the valley where we paddled from, the entire valley is grey-brown, with fine clay sediment coating all the shrubs.  This was all lake up to the tree line on the far side, and probably 3 feet deep where I'm standing.

But I could her quite a roar from down in the valley, sort of like a waterfall around the corner.  Once I got down there I could see the water just thundering down into the ground under these boulders.  The entire stream here, about 6 feet wide, was just dropping down a hole.  Because of all the willow shrubs, this was the best photo I could get; couldn't avoid my shadow.

And nearby one of the now-dry sinkholes, a crevice in the short wall of limestone that blocks the stream.  This may be one of the 'caves' some people check out.  No water, but I could hear water underneath the rocks.

When I got to the perched pond, now a separate pond instead of part of the lake, it definitely seemed a foot or two lower than I've seen it in the past.

I hunted around and found a tiny stream draining out of the pond, downhill toward the sinkholes below.  There's only about a 6 foot gap between the slope down to the sinkholes, and the pond itself, so it won't take much erosion before we may lose the perched pond entirely!  Another future change to watch for.

This is the final main sinkhole with water pooled over it a few feet deep still.  The camera itself is about at the height the lake was 12 days ago.

And this is just one of the deep sinkholes out in the field where we paddled.  It's about 20 feet deep, and was completely underwater; we paddled right across.  And yes, that's still a snowbank in the distance.  It lasts a long time on the east or north sides of slopes where the drifts accumulated deeply.

Now I promise you, no more posts on Wodehouse Creek, at least not for a while.  I've been busy tramping around Bruce Trail properties and other interesting places I want to share with you.