Beaver Pond 3 11 11

Friday, March 11^th I rode my ATV back to the pond where I hadn’t been for a few days due to snow depth.  The first photo is of the pond north of the roadway crossing it.  That’s the old original beaver house protruding through the ice near the top right corner.  It can be noted that the melting snow and ice runoff is now flowing across the surface of the pond atop the ice layer remaining.  It comes past the beaver house toward the left of the photo and then circles back to pass through the sluice pipe under the roadway.  Did you note the two sort of forlorn looking cattails in the right foreground?  They’ve had a long hard winter to get that way.

The second photo shows the water leaving the sluice on the south side of the roadway.  The ripples in the water denote its movement over to the dam still covered with snow.  Under that snow though, the water is passing over the dam and cascading down the six foot wide stream on the four foot lower side.  The ice appears whiter under the fast flowing water, as opposed to the remainder of the pond, due to the erosion effect.

This stream flows over to where I wrote about my short swimming experience those many years ago.  It then turns a more southerly direction again where it ultimately flows into the Oswegatchie River at Heuvelton.  Our beaver pond water then goes with the flow, continuing on to the St. Lawrence River at Ogdensburg.  Some forty miles later the St Lawrence enters Canada versus being the border with the United States.  The Akwasasne Native American Reservation is located at that point.  Our beaver pond water then continues through Ontario and Quebec until it is unceremoniously dumped into the Gulf of St. Lawrence to become a part of the Atlantic Ocean.  Sooner or later it will be again evaporated into the atmosphere to once again fall as rain somewhere on earth.  Possibly within another million years some of it will again fall onto a local meadow that drains into this same beaver pond completing a never-ending cycle.  Maybe next time by I’ll drink a glass of this sparkling fluid.