Unraveling the origins of a fascinating pond
Til’héeni, dog salmon stream (Salmon Creek) is a new addition to featured Áak’w watersheds. Let’s kick it off with a slideshow I created but never posted back in the innocent prepandemic days of 2019.
Til’héeni drains the mile-long reservoir that powered mines on Chaas’héeni, humpy stream (Sheep Creek). In July, 2019, 4 of us biked up to the old powerhouse to explore an ancient landslide, marked on a surficial geology map by the master geomorphologist RD Miller’s in 1975. Miller described it as a rockslide avalanche of unknown age, composed of massive boulders. Impoundments upvalley have come and gone. The initial lake dewatered at least once, allowing forest to move in. Then, a few decades ago, something raised the water level another meter, drowning spruces. My first hypothesis was beaver damming, but there’s no evidence of their activity.
This 4 minute video explores the resulting mysterious rockslide snagswamp, from the air and through some of the great cartographic resources we’ve inherited through LiDAR. Think of it as the best of RD’s old-school ground-truthing, fine-tuned by cutting edge landform imagery, with the national bird thrown in for good measure.
