Washington Bathymetry maps

[Anonymous]

I happened across these sampling of lakes they have done that have Bathymetry data (lake depth maps)
with them thought they might be of interest to some people here…

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/services/gis/data/elevat/lakebath.htm

King County has some data on lakes you might have fished at like Caroline, Derick, Wildcat, Loch Latrine, Phillipa, Mason, KullaKulla, etc…

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/eap/wsb/pdfs/WSB_43b_Book.pdf

Happy Fishing

[Brian Curtis]

Thanks for the links. I hadn’t seen those.

You’ve probably seen this Lone Hiker, but for anyone that hasn’t, another great resource is Ernie Wolcott’s Lakes of Washington. You can access a scanned version here:
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/eap/wsb/wsb_Lakes.html

[Anonymous]

No I did not see that whole list, I found them via a different path. These seem to be
a small subset of the ones you posted. Thanks for sharing.

[Brian Curtis]

There might be some repeats on the bathymetric maps, I didn’t look that closely. They do look like the same style, but I don’t think the high lake ones were in Wolcott.

[bob pfeifer]

Brian, I had seen and collected all of those state Ecology and federal EPA/USGS reports with their bath maps during my tenure with WDFW. According to Cummins, the USGS methodology included plopping down on the bigger lakes with a helicopter and doing soundings, and in some cases relying on some sort of infrared methods. I checked their maps a few times with some echo sounding on a lake, and they seemed to be reasonably accurate.

As you know, I recently uploaded quite a number of bathymetric maps into the Lake Finder. All of those maps were derived from rafting the lakes and using either individual soundings with a calibrated hand line, or better, running transects with a charting echo sounder. I could go into much more detail on the methods. You also know that Mike Swayne worked with me in developing truly terrific maps based on the raw data I provided him. Lepul and Snow (Alpental) are great examples for those who want to take a look.

I purposely did NOT sound any of the lakes the feds had already done. That saved a lot of work since they mainly did the larger, deeper lakes. Nevertheless, two of my biggest jobs were Snoqualmie and Snow, never mind getting all of the gear to places like Big Snow (Ruth) or Iceberg.

I uploaded the maps to possibly help the gang in their fishing trips. I had modeling objectives in mind, not so much providing fishing maps of a sort, but it was a lot of fun seeing the lake basin shapes up close and personal. Sometimes there were some real surprises.

By the way, you are correct – none of the later Ecology or USGS maps were in Ernie’s books. The only bath maps he had that I recall were the lowland lake maps that had been prepared by old Game by the area fish bios so they could calculate lake volumes for possible lake rehabs. The state/fed efforts were 10-20 years later.

[Author]

Posts