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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.
Sandy wrote: Kind of gruesome really.
So is jamming a stovepipe of mouth parts into your private parts skin layer after first cutting a hole with the same mouth parts, then siphoning off your blood. All the time leaving a good dose of skeet saliva to fire up your allergic reactions, and maybe leave a few choice viruses or spirochetes or other miserable things behind.
I usually allow the damned things to land and maybe start to cut in before I SMASH the miserable SOBs into skeet Hell. They ruined my time at Grouse Lake the other day.
My apologies to all for overreacting last night. What I meant to say was “I wish you were mentally and physically incapable of cluttering up this forum with your spam.”
I am not surprised that Brian is having to work endlessly in the background to fend off these “people”.
I wonder how many people remember what it was like in the early days of the Internet. Absolutely NO ads whatsoever, just free and easy communication. I knew it was too good to last; it was just disappointing in how fast it was corrupted. That said, I would gladly pay a monthly fee to some entity if I could get the benefits of the Internet without the ads and hacking and spam.
I think the clubs should gift Brian (and his helpers, if any) with an annual financial bequest just to show our appreciation of the endless work going on to keep these sites working well.
I’m glad I’m old. I had and and still have NO interest in clicking on the excrement some pinhead has under his or her post. If they don’t feel it’s important enough to put into the body of the message, I ain’t interested AT ALL.
But boy I sure agree that I have zero interest in anyone who would scab on advertising to their post. No, I take that back. I wish they were dead.
Sorry Mark, I don’t. Most of the Secchi readings I have were gathered by the US Geological Survey, mostly in the 1970s prior to large scale wilderness designations when they could set down on the larger lakes with a helicopter with pontoons and gather data in a hurry. They tended to skip the smaller lakes.
Vlad –
Yes, that 10-ft value looked suspicious to me, too. I think they were reporting from one or two of the other Granites in the group. Disregard it.
That’s hilarious Brian!!
Let’s see – no Section 31 in Township 40N Rge 16E; Joker Mountain; Three Fools Creek….
Vlad –
Not sure which Big Granite you mean. Skagit County? The single USGS reading I have from the two larger Granites are around 10 feet – not very clear.
Caroline’s reading was 85 feet. I thought about that lake when I first posted this stuff yesterday – one of my all-time favorite lakes. Not just because it is gorgeous, but because I had some wonderful trips to it.
[attachment=2]1712203L_LakeHigh_1_091784.jpg[/attachment] This shot taken in 1984 from near the top of Preacher Mtn shows the intense blue.
[attachment=1]1712203L_LakeLow_3_091684.jpg[/attachment] This Fall shot shows Gerry Erickson in the lake’s SE corner. His wife Juel soaks up the sun on the rocks by the lake’s edge. A very quick clue to a lake being damned clear – note how the lake edge in the shallow water looks blue even in 5-8 feet of water.
[attachment=0]1712203L_LakeLow_5_080997.jpg[/attachment] In August of 1997 I took my son Eric to the lake and more or less re-created the Gerry photo. You will see that blue edge in many of the super-clear lakes. Big Snow comes to mind….
The standard measure in the limnological community is the depth at which a Secchi disk can be seen when lowered from a boat under more or less standardized conditions. Believe it or not, good ol’ Lake Serene on Mount Index has one of the deepest readings I can recall, something like 90 feet.
A Secchi disk is an 8″ or 10″ (I forget which) metal disk with two opposing quarters painted gloss back, the other two pure white. The disk is lowered straight down until it can no longer be seen by the viewer. Particles or bugs in the water scatter light reducing the transparency. Wing Lake has a LOT of soil particles in the water, and its transparency was an inch or two for me a few weeks back. Many of our granite-basin lakes have very little nutrients and sediment input or plankton/algae production, so their water is very clear.
An interesting side note – the deep blue color seen in lakes like Crater Lake in Oregon (Mount Mazama) is caused by absorption of all but the blue range of the light spectrum – this effect is magnified with increasing transparency. Take a look at Boulder Lake in the Sultan Basin to have your socks blown completely off.
OKAY I looked up some data in one of my Excel files. Here are the Secchi depths for a series of lakes to give you some idea of the higher values:
Big Heart 82 ft; Malachite 85; Serene 92; Boulder (Sultan) 62; Angeline 92; Rachel 80; Summit (Pierce Co) 70; Upper Klonaqua 59. The overall mean reading for 246 lakes scattered around the state’s mountains was 18.8 feet, so 80-90 feet is darned clear, relatively speaking. Although Boulder was “only” 62, that lake has a remarkable color, to say the least.
Gary –
You might review this guidance, which we spent a fair amount of time developing:
http://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/high_lakes/
Good luck!
Bob
Right Brian. One also has to consider the oxygen demand of the decomposition of a lot of organic debris (mostly in the fir needles I would assume, but also some demand from bark, soil detritus, etc.). It would be interesting to study this stuff.
What do you mean by “dormant”? Not to sound flip, but a lake either can support fish (all or part of the time) or it can’t.
High lakes that are shallow and/or have limited flow-through can sometimes become uninhabitable by trout due to loss of volume by an avalanche. My experience is these cases are relatively rare. It is more often the case that “marginal” lakes due to shallowness or small volume can winterkill or summerkill in some years when conditions are adverse. The basic underlying problem is usually inadequate dissolved oxygen after a period of inadequate flushing or wind mixing. Summerkill is abetted by the fact that warmer water holds less oxygen in solution.
The fact that a lake does not currently posses fish may or may not be related to avalanche occurrences. A good deal of information about each lake is needed to make these kinds of determinations, and that is why Brian and I launched the formal survey process decades ago.
Hope this helps!
The study team will make several trips to the study lakes in 2007. We have already made an initial trip to assure access (it was surprisingly easy), and sampled the two study lakes using hook and line. We are 99% sure we saw some tigers in one of the lakes, but they have not had an obvious beneficial effect yet. Stay tuned.
