Cover page for the study of a hydrologic ‘tug-of-war.’
Trouble at the airstrip
Where Chilkat Lake empties into Tsirku River, aggrading floodplains have created a delicately balanced flow regime that actually causes reversals in Clear Creek, the outlet stream.
Onto this depositional battleground, lake residents constructed a wheelplane airstrip. Level, granted, but not the most stable or safe surface on which to tinker with a hairtrigger glacial floodplain. Enter Dan Bishop, the ‘Better call Saul” of hydraulic reconciliation.
Although not in the original report, which I scanned and ‘OCRed’, I’ve added some context from subsequently acquired LiDAR and IfSAR surface models, plus a pair of ‘pageflippers’ allowing precise point-to-point comparison of change between 1948 and 1979.
In 1989, Dan and I returned to the lake outlet on contract with NSRAA, for a more exhaustive look at the Tsirku-Chilkat Lake seesaw. That report can be downloaded here.
