Ideas From One Lake To Another

Sorry to go cold on the blog without notice.  I fully intended to blog during a week long rendezvous with family at an Inland Northwest, lakeside cabin as guests of my Sister and Brother-In-Law on the western shore of Newman Lake.  We gathered from Northern California, Utah, the Puget Sound area and North Carolina.

Reliant on a tether to my Smartphone, the plan to blog was thwarted when I overturned in a canoe and it took until I returned home for things to dry out and work again.  Tethering is a great idea though and worked great before my dunking.  Essentially it is a data plan option that permits you to connect a computer through a phone when there is no wifi or other broadband access available.

Newman is a natural lake, resting below Mt. Spokane, along the Idaho line, one of 75 within fifty miles of that city where I first cut my teeth on destination marketing.

I love being lakeside with the constant laughter of children splashing, peaceful sunrises and sunsets, bonfires, the call of Loons and much more.

But I also saw some relatively inexpensive solutions I trust are being evaluated for the issues impacting Falls Lake in Durham.  Falls is ten times larger but like Newman, relatively shallow.

When I left Spokane for Anchorage in the late ‘70’s, there were concerns about large algae blooms on Newman Lake, a symptom a lake is dying.  Today the lake is thriving, thanks in part to what I ran across on one of my canoe ventures.

Near the middle you could see bubbles coming up in an area surrounded by buoys.  Far below was hypolimnetic aeration, which pumps air (oxygen) into the lake bed to inhibit release of phosphorus etc. 

Newman wasn’t created for flood control or to provide water like Falls, but it had no natural outlet and farmers cut a canal to give it one at start of the 1900’s.  And there are still farms around the lake today.

And thanks to the efforts to rejuvenate the lake, today it is healthy and home to largemouth bass, bluegill, crappie, perch, catfish and rainbow, brown and eastern brook trout, along with tiger muskies to eliminate carp some idiot introduced to the lake.  It is also well known for deer and moose and a wide range of water fowl including a significant Osprey population.

But I need to find out whatever happened to the toads and chipmunks.