I have updated the post. Thanks for catching that. I don't count White Pine in the same category as the others, it is a whole different animal.
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The Great Smaug
- Thread starter campfire
- Start date
I have updated the post. Thanks for catching that. I don't count White Pine in the same category as the others, it is a whole different animal.
We left Indiana and kept moving North.
This year's harvest:
Last year's harvest:
A neat little low-head.
We stopped to enjoy Lake Superior for a bit before moseying on to camp.
After getting our fill of beach, we headed further North to meet up with @73k5blazer.
This year's harvest:
Last year's harvest:
A neat little low-head.
We stopped to enjoy Lake Superior for a bit before moseying on to camp.
After getting our fill of beach, we headed further North to meet up with @73k5blazer.
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We showed up at the campsite and settled into the spacious yard. Thanks, Ken! 
Folks spread out by the bluff.
We stayed a ways back from the rest of the group so they would not be bothered by our noise.
My codriver messed with the camera settings again.
Obligatory @AgDieseler cameo. 5th consecutive year he's tagged along with us. Though the original one is getting faded these days.
The rest of the family met us here. They had skipped the bulk of the trip because a certain munchkin was in a non-camping phase (prolonged crying and refusing to sleep in the tent). Hence the noise barrier.
After setting up camp we wandered down to Redridge. The water was up to the (lowered) spillway outlets. Probably due to that day's rain. Ken said the water had been lower just a few hours earlier.
The water flows through the holes cut into the dam, spilling onto the concrete foundations. Someday that erosion will cause major structural problems. But for now we get a front-row seat to this artificial waterfall (when the water is high enough).
The sad part is that the lower discharge pipes do not appear to be flowing very much water. If the valves could be unstuck, perhaps the dam would not need to overflow. Lacking an on-site operator, I do not see that ever happening. So the dam is slowly destroying itself with each heavy rain.
Folks spread out by the bluff.
We stayed a ways back from the rest of the group so they would not be bothered by our noise.
My codriver messed with the camera settings again.
Obligatory @AgDieseler cameo. 5th consecutive year he's tagged along with us. Though the original one is getting faded these days.
The rest of the family met us here. They had skipped the bulk of the trip because a certain munchkin was in a non-camping phase (prolonged crying and refusing to sleep in the tent). Hence the noise barrier.
After setting up camp we wandered down to Redridge. The water was up to the (lowered) spillway outlets. Probably due to that day's rain. Ken said the water had been lower just a few hours earlier.
The water flows through the holes cut into the dam, spilling onto the concrete foundations. Someday that erosion will cause major structural problems. But for now we get a front-row seat to this artificial waterfall (when the water is high enough).
The sad part is that the lower discharge pipes do not appear to be flowing very much water. If the valves could be unstuck, perhaps the dam would not need to overflow. Lacking an on-site operator, I do not see that ever happening. So the dam is slowly destroying itself with each heavy rain.
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We showed up at the campsite and settled into the spacious yard. Thanks, Ken!
The sad part is that the lower discharge pipes do not appear to be flowing very much water. If the valves could be unstuck, perhaps the dam would not need to overflow. Lacking an on-site operator, I do not see that ever happening. So the dam is slowly destroying itself with each heavy rain.
No Problem!. BTW, the Township secured FEMA $$$ to "stabilize" the dam. Story here
DailyMiningGazette said:
Interesting! I had assumed the FEMA money was all distributed by now. The detached steel pillar had me quite nervous about its future, so I'm happy to hear this.
Will they be dispatching someone to monitor the water depth and adjust the discharge rate accordingly? Or is it going to continue overflowing and eroding the foundation? "Stabilizing" the dam for 30 years doesn't necessarily mean that the problem will be solved. They might just be kicking the can further down the road.
Yeah, well, the township owns it and is basically super poor and has zero $$$ to do anything with it, in the meetings they complain about how it costs them already thousands more/year in their insurance costs. So, anything is better than nothing. Clearing the discharge pipes will go a long way to keep it from reaching the overflow holes. As far as I know, that has never been done. Only 3 of the 4 flow water, and one of the three is very low flow, only 1 really flows like it should, so if you had 4 full flow pipes, that should basically keep all but a very heavy spring runoff or a fathers day flood from overflowing and hitting the new stabilized cement.Interesting! I had assumed the FEMA money was all distributed by now. The detached steel pillar had me quite nervous about its future, so I'm happy to hear this.
Will they be dispatching someone to monitor the water depth and adjust the discharge rate accordingly? Or is it going to continue overflowing and eroding the foundation? "Stabilizing" the dam for 30 years doesn't necessarily mean that the problem will be solved. They might just be kicking the can further down the road.
Right now it it hits those overflow holes every time it rains.
Last year I starting thinking about starting some group to help keep on eye on it or help find ways to raise $$$ or do something with it. I even did some preliminary flow calculations to turn it into a hydroelectric dam, considering the push to "green" energy. I found figures from every 15-20years or so the fed gov't takes flow rate. Using some averages...Basically I calculated it could produce about 1.5-3MW or more depending on how much head (how high) you would be allowed to back up the resevoir. Not a lot, but considering they're closing 1000MW coal plants and opening 200MW wind farms and calling that a win, it seems like there could be some feasible way to use it. I'm sure it would take a decade of environmental studies (it's already there!) and another decade of permit process and probably 10's of millions in costs for that and to "build" it.. which probably makes it cost infeasible. That's bureaucracy for you.
Of course, that would render it inaccessible to the public ;( . Just one of my crazy ideas. No idea if my math or formulas are correct.
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Your idea had my support until you reached this point.
We have a number of power dams that allow good public access. I have one next to my house with a public catwalk over the turbine inlets, so I can walk or bike right past the power house to the other side. So Redridge wouldn't necessarily need to restrict access. Plenty of dams find a reasonable compromise.
We also sneaked in a short trip down to the beach before the sun finished setting.
The water sparkles, even with fading daylight.
This section of beach has washed out a bunch since my first visit 4 years ago.
@73k5blazer, did this section collapse after the Father's Day flood? Or was it a gradual crumbling?
The water sparkles, even with fading daylight.
This section of beach has washed out a bunch since my first visit 4 years ago.
@73k5blazer, did this section collapse after the Father's Day flood? Or was it a gradual crumbling?
I believe you (unfortunately). More and more stuff is getting closed off. So I enjoy the access we have, for however long it lasts.
Keep 'em open...please?
Nope, that was Fall/Early Winter 2019 the lake level was at a near all time high and it was super windy for about a couple months, wind advisory's constantly. The blue house on the other side of the Salmon Trout is in deep trouble, and those people are still living in it! It's literally on the edge now, their "back porch" is in the lake.
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So...how often does Michigan recalculate the ordinary high water mark? Seems like they could easily start (or continue?) stealing land from those unfortunate enough to be down below the newly-recalculated high water mark. Asked another way, how much of your property are you allowed to actually own?
Well, my case (as well as all stamp sands) are a bit unique and have been tested in MI courts. In normal cases, The court generally defines any waterfront property owners property as something like 20' from the "ordinary high water mark". Nobody really calculates that as far as I know, they do calculate "lake level" but for any given shoreline it's probably difficult to know where the ordinary high water mark is, most people just look at the shore and go yeah, I can see recently water was there..so, there's your mark.
In stamp sand owners case it's a bit different. The MI DEQ considers stamp sand toxic (hence they wanted to truck it around the US and put it on people's roofs everywhere
)...so stamp sand is technically lake, contaminated by stamp sand. So you don't own that. Hence why they issued permits to at least one place to strip it (over in Gay, that company (one guy) also applied for Freda to the North inlet but never completed that permit process on our side as his business venture from the Gay side never went anywhere either so he never did anything and didn't want to spend money continue the $$$ permit process on our side)
But the Court decided in the Gay residents case (they sued him to stop they're sands from being stripped), that your property is where the Ordinary high water mark "would have been" (good luck determining that) had it not been contaminated by stamp sand. So where was it 120 years ago, and where would it be now? Nearly impossible, there'd have to be a compromise of well it's certainly is not where the sands meet the water now, but it's also certainly not say...at the mill cements edge either..
My friendly "neighbor" the guy with the house down on the water right next 15' off my surveyed property line, the gatekeeper dude who won't give me a key to his gate so I can drive down there (I have my own road now!) but continually uses my property to push in cement blocks and basic heavy trash in the lake to protect his house from the rising lake as he's lost 20-30' of shoreline and it's only 15' from his house....he also installed a makeshift stairway on my "cliff" (what he considers "his" yard). He and his relatives drive all over my sands and basically consider that whole area theirs. That guy has tried to tell me all the sands including the mill are public state land. "they built that mill in the lake"...uh...sorry dude , they certainly did not do that. And oh by the way, to get the open part of the sands, you have to drive on what is obviously real dirt/trees/forest as his "road" continues across part of my forest down there (so, my road) and onto the big sands, i've not told him he can't use it I just said since he was mentioning he thought the whole place down there was public (his) that uh, no it's not, this road, the mill, was all surveyed and part of this plot, and if it were public, then your house must be on public land too! Yeah he's a piece of work, even other locals don't really like him. I've had mine professionally surveyed and on file with the county, he never surveyed his, and if there's ever a real dispute (I try to remain as friendly as possible) the court usually rules in favor of who has a real survey, if he did have one done, the court takes mine first as it was filed first.
Anyway, technically the state could issue a permit or bring someone in themselves to strip away most of the sands down there and there's nothing we could do about it aside from fight about where the ordinary high water line "would have been" . I doubt it would ever happen it would be immensely expensive, the state has little reason to do it as our sands are not toxic like Lake Lindens were (they reprocessed those in the 60's with Chemicals), ours and Gays are just crushed rock, yeah it kinda kills the fish world close to shore, but...it's been that way for 120 years, so, the fish have adapted and moved out. A business venture could do it (the one guys company to use it on shingles as a it contains a miniscule residual amount of copper that repeals mold/moss, so instead of zinc strips on your roof, these would be a natural shingle that would negate the need for zinc strips). But that guy could not find any customer or buyer for his "extracted" or to be extracted sands despite spending several hundred thousand on getting the actual permits for the Gay side and if he spend that much on the permits I suppose he spent at least a few times that trying to get a customer. I suppose the Feds could do it is techincally part of the superfund site but they've basically annxed the non-toxic pieces from those superfund sites and stated they'll just "test" them every 20 years or so. Test them for what, I've no idea. The Feds did pay for the North Inlet disaster, where they spent 10's of millilons, and over a billion of pounds of CO2 (someone calculated) trucking in dirt from the sourthern UP, covering up the sands that collected there and planted field grass. That turned to a bigger disaster as they found that by covering the sands the amount of copper leaching into the water below quadrupled (not that it's really much anyway) because the sand were no longer allowed to breathe and accelerated the leaching process. They didn't cover it to prevent leaching they covered it to prevent migration of it further up the coast, but the leaching effect was known and they exacerbated it.
In stamp sand owners case it's a bit different. The MI DEQ considers stamp sand toxic (hence they wanted to truck it around the US and put it on people's roofs everywhere
)...so stamp sand is technically lake, contaminated by stamp sand. So you don't own that. Hence why they issued permits to at least one place to strip it (over in Gay, that company (one guy) also applied for Freda to the North inlet but never completed that permit process on our side as his business venture from the Gay side never went anywhere either so he never did anything and didn't want to spend money continue the $$$ permit process on our side)But the Court decided in the Gay residents case (they sued him to stop they're sands from being stripped), that your property is where the Ordinary high water mark "would have been" (good luck determining that) had it not been contaminated by stamp sand. So where was it 120 years ago, and where would it be now? Nearly impossible, there'd have to be a compromise of well it's certainly is not where the sands meet the water now, but it's also certainly not say...at the mill cements edge either..
My friendly "neighbor" the guy with the house down on the water right next 15' off my surveyed property line, the gatekeeper dude who won't give me a key to his gate so I can drive down there (I have my own road now!) but continually uses my property to push in cement blocks and basic heavy trash in the lake to protect his house from the rising lake as he's lost 20-30' of shoreline and it's only 15' from his house....he also installed a makeshift stairway on my "cliff" (what he considers "his" yard). He and his relatives drive all over my sands and basically consider that whole area theirs. That guy has tried to tell me all the sands including the mill are public state land. "they built that mill in the lake"...uh...sorry dude , they certainly did not do that. And oh by the way, to get the open part of the sands, you have to drive on what is obviously real dirt/trees/forest as his "road" continues across part of my forest down there (so, my road) and onto the big sands, i've not told him he can't use it I just said since he was mentioning he thought the whole place down there was public (his) that uh, no it's not, this road, the mill, was all surveyed and part of this plot, and if it were public, then your house must be on public land too! Yeah he's a piece of work, even other locals don't really like him. I've had mine professionally surveyed and on file with the county, he never surveyed his, and if there's ever a real dispute (I try to remain as friendly as possible) the court usually rules in favor of who has a real survey, if he did have one done, the court takes mine first as it was filed first.
Anyway, technically the state could issue a permit or bring someone in themselves to strip away most of the sands down there and there's nothing we could do about it aside from fight about where the ordinary high water line "would have been" . I doubt it would ever happen it would be immensely expensive, the state has little reason to do it as our sands are not toxic like Lake Lindens were (they reprocessed those in the 60's with Chemicals), ours and Gays are just crushed rock, yeah it kinda kills the fish world close to shore, but...it's been that way for 120 years, so, the fish have adapted and moved out. A business venture could do it (the one guys company to use it on shingles as a it contains a miniscule residual amount of copper that repeals mold/moss, so instead of zinc strips on your roof, these would be a natural shingle that would negate the need for zinc strips). But that guy could not find any customer or buyer for his "extracted" or to be extracted sands despite spending several hundred thousand on getting the actual permits for the Gay side and if he spend that much on the permits I suppose he spent at least a few times that trying to get a customer. I suppose the Feds could do it is techincally part of the superfund site but they've basically annxed the non-toxic pieces from those superfund sites and stated they'll just "test" them every 20 years or so. Test them for what, I've no idea. The Feds did pay for the North Inlet disaster, where they spent 10's of millilons, and over a billion of pounds of CO2 (someone calculated) trucking in dirt from the sourthern UP, covering up the sands that collected there and planted field grass. That turned to a bigger disaster as they found that by covering the sands the amount of copper leaching into the water below quadrupled (not that it's really much anyway) because the sand were no longer allowed to breathe and accelerated the leaching process. They didn't cover it to prevent leaching they covered it to prevent migration of it further up the coast, but the leaching effect was known and they exacerbated it.
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Well, my case (as well as all stamp sands) are a bit unique and have been tested in MI courts. In normal cases, The court generally defines any waterfront property owners property as something like 20' from the "ordinary high water mark". Nobody really calculates that as far as I know, they do calculate "lake level" but for any given shoreline it's probably difficult to know where the ordinary high water mark is, most people just look at the shore and go yeah, I can see recently water was there..so, there's your mark. In stamp sand owners case it's a bit different. The MI DEQ considers stamp sand toxic (hence they wanted to truck it around the US and put it on people's roofs everywhere
wonder how many more years they got out of that site because it was protected by stamp sands.
That's starting to look like Crisp Point.
Are they allowed to add fill to reinforce their former yard, or is that now considered public property? This high water rule is downright confusing...
The next morning we left Ken's place and headed back to Houghton.
Covered road is still covered. Very happy about that, as wide swaths of land on either side have flood damage. But the road itself seems unharmed.
Crossing da bridge.
Saying hi to Quincy Stamp Mill and the nearby dredge.
I haven't climbed over this one yet, as it has been protected by a sign. But the sign is gone now, so it might be a destination for a future expedition.
The mill building continues to deteriorate rapidly.
This corner is a flood casualty, but the rest of the building would still be collapsing even if the flood hadn't come through.
Even 5 years ago I could stand on that roof, and now I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
This corner is falling into the new trench cut by the flood waters.
Covered road is still covered. Very happy about that, as wide swaths of land on either side have flood damage. But the road itself seems unharmed.
Crossing da bridge.
Saying hi to Quincy Stamp Mill and the nearby dredge.
I haven't climbed over this one yet, as it has been protected by a sign. But the sign is gone now, so it might be a destination for a future expedition.
The mill building continues to deteriorate rapidly.
This corner is a flood casualty, but the rest of the building would still be collapsing even if the flood hadn't come through.
Even 5 years ago I could stand on that roof, and now I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
This corner is falling into the new trench cut by the flood waters.
I climbed down into the canyon to see the flood damage. The pipeline used to be subterranean.
2 years after the flood, the landscape hasn't healed very much. This valley used to consist of nothing but the concrete water trench. It was a steep climb down there, very different from the wide, lazy canyon found today.
Views from pipeline level (again, this used to be subterranean).
I didn't climb over to the old power plant, but it seems to be outside the flood zone.
Here's the trench. It's now taller than the ground on either side.
The missing building corner.
Hard to get a sense of scale, but here you can see the layers that were stripped away and carried downstream. This "wall" is more than twice my height, and it's not the deepest part of the canyon.
Back on the good side of the building. Can hardly see the new damage from the road.
2 years after the flood, the landscape hasn't healed very much. This valley used to consist of nothing but the concrete water trench. It was a steep climb down there, very different from the wide, lazy canyon found today.
Views from pipeline level (again, this used to be subterranean).
I didn't climb over to the old power plant, but it seems to be outside the flood zone.
Here's the trench. It's now taller than the ground on either side.
The missing building corner.
Hard to get a sense of scale, but here you can see the layers that were stripped away and carried downstream. This "wall" is more than twice my height, and it's not the deepest part of the canyon.
Back on the good side of the building. Can hardly see the new damage from the road.
I dug through my 2016 pictures looking for any shots of this canyon. I didn't take many, because the water trench wasn't very memorable (nor very visible). It was just another tiny gorge in the woods.
The approach to the concrete trench. The ground was built up enough that most of the trench was difficult to access. This shot could not be taken today without a drone, as the ground is no longer present.
Here's the accessible section of trench, where the ground approach was easiest.
I wish I had pictures of the more difficult section downstream of this spot. The ground rose steeply on either side of the trench, and it's an amazing amount of dirt that has been removed to carve that new canyon.
But at the time this trench wasn't of great interest, as we were focused on the power plant. Hindsight, eh?
The approach to the concrete trench. The ground was built up enough that most of the trench was difficult to access. This shot could not be taken today without a drone, as the ground is no longer present.
Here's the accessible section of trench, where the ground approach was easiest.
I wish I had pictures of the more difficult section downstream of this spot. The ground rose steeply on either side of the trench, and it's an amazing amount of dirt that has been removed to carve that new canyon.
But at the time this trench wasn't of great interest, as we were focused on the power plant. Hindsight, eh?
