Feeding the Lake!

Today, May 1, is supposed to be the first day of our 2020 cruise season on Cayuga, kicking off a busy spring season taking classes and guests onto the lake.  Alas, COVID has delayed that, but here’s one part of what we would’ve experienced.  This recent aerial image (courtesy of our friend, Bill Hecht) shows you what the lake pretty much looks like today.   

And here's a picture from the Floating Classroom on a similar day!

There is certainly a lot of mud and debris entering the lake, right?  But it's not all bad…consider that this is how our lake ecosystem gets “fed” every spring, fertilizing the plants that feed the fish.  More on that to come, but let’s check in upstream...  

Here’s a picture of Six Mile Creek at Plain St., in downtown Ithaca.  (Thx. Franny Lux!)

This was at about 9am this morning, and Franny pointed out that water levels were going down, because she could see the debris line that marked high water.   

Can you see what she is talking about? She was absolutely right!  Six Mile Creek crested at about 11pm last night, as is indicated on this USGS graph of Six Mile Creek Water levels a bit upstream.

 

You can look up local water levels anytime.  Just search “USGS”, “New York” and the name of your stream.   

Today's Fun fact:  20 years ago, when I worked at the Environmental Protection Agency and conducted stream assessments, we judged high water marks in many areas by the “Toilet Paper Index”.  That’s right, how far up in the streamside trees did floating toilet paper get deposited during a flood?  Yuck!  We’ve come a long way… but not everywhere!    ~Bill