Fish switching to summer mode

[johnr]

[QUOTE
Allen do you deal with the Aquaphor around here at all? Just wondering since in the 26 years we have had a house there I've never seen it drop five feet in a matter of months. The river being low is obviously the biggest factor but have to wonder if Bismarcks new intake might not be drawing it down a chunk as well.

I don't specifically work with the groundwater in and around Bismarck, but am reasonably familiar with it.

The groundwater in and around Bismarck is low now simply because we were pretty dry last fall and this spring right up until last week. It just hasn't been getting the recharge it's accustomed to. In general though, the groundwater along the Missouri is heading towards the river, not being supplied by the river. The new city water intake is a unique example where they pump enough to actually reverse the groundwater flowpath (very locally) and eventually get river water into the city water supply.

The higher the river the slower the natural movement of water from the aquifer into the river. Conversely, a lower river speeds the groundwater in its path to the river. We know groundwater though is almost always heading to the river by taking a windshield look at water quality. Very little dissolved iron in the river, but take a look at any lawn with a sprinkler system out by Fox Island and note the color of the water stain on the trees and buildings. That isn't river water, it's groundwater sourced up and away from the river itself. It also tends to be high in nitrates, so you can forego buying fertilizer as you will essentially be having your upstream neighbors supplying it for you if you have your own shallow well.

I'd be surprised if Bismarck's new water intake has a significant effect on the water table more than a couple hundred feet away from the collector wells. They are designed to capture river water to avoid having to treat the iron problem, etc.[/QUOTE]

good info

 

[jdinny]

this whole thread was a solid readThumbs Up

dam dean whenever you talked about your parents private lake I figured it was SE somewhere. never put much thought into it. that's a cool lake

 

[Allen]

Thanks for the compliments, guys. Groundwater is something I find quite interesting. I suppose I should add that a large rise in the river would indeed put some river water into the riverbank and groundwater, but that is just not the norm and is probably only really noticeable in years like the 2011 flood.


As far as Cottonwood Lake, that's a whole 'nother topic which is probably best I don't weigh in on. That's something that had to likely have a computer model to design during the permit process. And I don't have access to the model results or input dataset anyway.

I think I can say though that I am not a fan of dugouts.

 

[dean nelson]

Thanks for the compliments, guys. Groundwater is something I find quite interesting. I suppose I should add that a large rise in the river would indeed put some river water into the riverbank and groundwater, but that is just not the norm and is probably only really noticeable in years like the 2011 flood.


As far as Cottonwood Lake, that's a whole 'nother topic which is probably best I don't weigh in on. That's something that had to likely have a computer model to design during the permit process. And I don't have access to the model results or input dataset anyway.

I think I can say though that I am not a fan of dugouts.

You do know it was never designed to be a lake right. It was a deep gravel pit back in the fifties. It had a cable system that moved a scoop from one side to the other sort of like the way the drag lines work up north. Worked well till the water table got to be to much. Some of the old concrete blocks used to anchor the line were still here when we moved in in 90. Damn things were 12 to 15 feet high and just as wide. Bunch of them got shoved into a hole a block east of the lake and are not very deep so someday someone's going to try and dig in their yard and have a serious WTF moment.

 

[Allen]

Dean, you mentioned that a lot of the drop occurred last fall. That, to me, is not unexpected given the fall we had. In most years, we get a hard frost by the middle/latter part of September which kills off vegetation. Last year, we didn't get a hard frost until the latter part of October, if I remember correctly. In most years, very little of the rain received from the end of May through the end of August ends up in the groundwater as a general rule. It is largely captured by vegetative growth and returned to the atmosphere through transpiration and evaporation. However, in the spring snow melt season and late fall, a much larger fraction of received rain and snow melt ends up escaping the root zone and makes its way into the water table. Last fall, we had warm temps, very little moisture to begin with, and plants starved for water until quite late in October. Simply doesn't bode well for water tables.

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You do know it was never designed to be a lake right. It was a deep gravel pit back in the fifties. It had a cable system that moved a scoop from one side to the other sort of like the way the drag lines work up north. Worked well till the water table got to be to much. Some of the old concrete blocks used to anchor the line were still here when we moved in in 90. Damn things were 12 to 15 feet high and just as wide. Bunch of them got shoved into a hole a block east of the lake and are not very deep so someday someone's going to try and dig in their yard and have a serious WTF moment.

I was under the impression it had some modifications to improve it, but as its development pre-dates my time in Bismarck, I could have been misled.

 

[dean nelson]

It was pretty much just a hole in the ground when we moved in. The lake it's self hasn't changed much since the 70's at the vary least and probably back to the 60's when old man wacter built his place on the south side. My family was the first house to be built on the lake other then wacters so can say for a fact that other then Landscaping nothing has changed in that time. There are still big chunks of a diving platform the wacters had way back scattered around the lake.....makes for good fishing structure.

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this whole thread was a solid readThumbs Up

dam dean whenever you talked about your parents private lake I figured it was SE somewhere. never put much thought into it. that's a cool lake

Yeah moving there when I was 12 definitely didn't suck! Go put on the flippers and mask and dive down deep then pop up right next to 20 turtles sunning themselves on a log was a blast. Taking the Jon boat out back and pulling the plug and see who can stay on board. Plus city limits were only a 100 yards away so bb guns and go carts were the equipment of choice. Plus having ducks and geese in the yard is nice for a waterfowl hunter.

 

[dean nelson]

Dean, you mentioned that a lot of the drop occurred last fall. That, to me, is not unexpected given the fall we had. In most years, we get a hard frost by the middle/latter part of September which kills off vegetation. Last year, we didn't get a hard frost until the latter part of October, if I remember correctly. In most years, very little of the rain received from the end of May through the end of August ends up in the groundwater as a general rule. It is largely captured by vegetative growth and returned to the atmosphere through transpiration and evaporation. However, in the spring snow melt season and late fall, a much larger fraction of received rain and snow melt ends up escaping the root zone and makes its way into the water table. Last fall, we had warm temps, very little moisture to begin with, and plants starved for water until quite late in October. Simply doesn't bode well for water tables.

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I was under the impression it had some modifications to improve it, but as its development pre-dates my time in Bismarck, I could have been misled.

Well the aquifer is rising at a crazy rate right now. The boat was several feet out of the water last fall but the lake rose around it during the first warm spell and the battery was out of the water as of a week ago. Looking at at least three feet of rise and counting at this point.

 

[Radar13]

If I remember right, that lake was dug for water for Dakota Sand and Gravel's cement plant. It was dug deep, so there was never a water supply issue. When I worked for Dakota we used to take all our concrete chunks and dumped them there. The cement plant had already moved to where Knife River is now. When I worked for Northern Improvement and we put the streets in down there and we had to deal with all of the cement chunks that were buried down there. That was fun!

 

[BDub]

Back in the 60s there were trout in that pond. One of my friends snuck in and caught a real nice one. I think Paul Wachter was the one that lived down there. Wachters pretty much owned everything down there at that time.

 

[dean nelson]

The vast majority of the concrete that got dumped is where the Cottonwood softball fields are now and why they never tried to develop it and instead donated it to the city. If there was any around the lake other then the blocks the size of a single stall garage it had been removed before 1990. The lake stared out as a gravel pit but eventually morphed into who-knows-what. anybody have any idea of exactly what's going on in this picture. thing sort of looks like they are using the water for more or less sluicing the sand and gravel Definitely doesn't look right for a concrete plant. Definitely explains why we have a sandbar though.

 

[Radar13]

When Northern Improvement put the streets in down there everything was sugar sand type soil, it was a bugger to get densities, we had to add a lot of water to get it to pack for asphalt. Concrete chunks were like icebergs, just a piece was sticking up too high to pave over, and were a lot bigger once a person tried to dig them out. I was born in 65 so I don't remember the place back then. It was early eighties when I worked for Dakota sand and gravel.

 

[dean nelson]

Yeah the sand areas of now show up perfectly in that picture as the light colored spots where as the area on the west side and tight along the south shore where there is a few feet of hard packed clay are darker and probably have grass and weeds in this shot. Tried planting a tree after we moved in and God damn digging a hole in our yard was near impossible. You can definitely make out the cables over the lake for their weird drag line thingy but have no idea how it actually worked.