Water, Part 1

With the spring melt comes water.

I've spent my career in the water business. From guiding canoe & fishing trips in the Boundary Waters, to consulting oil and natural gas companies on how to assess and manage water, to studying water's interaction with metal-producing mines, to administering wetland and storm water laws and ordinances; I've spent much of my life thinking about water. In my opinion, it is earth's greatest resource. After all, we are primarily water. We owe our entire existence to the primordial volcanic waters that birthed algae. Water is life and life-giving. With the early, gentle spring melt of 2010, I find myself in awe by the flow of water under and over our land.

According to the local, state and federal governments, there are no "streams" located on or relatively near the property. But let me tell you, there are three. Granted, all three are ephemeral (flowing seasonally, versus perennial meaning flowing year-round). Two streams provide the eastern and western property lines of the property. One meanders down the heart of the land. They are all minor; about 6" to a foot deep. With the spring weather they are all busy anostamosing their way through the rocky abandoned shoreline substrate. They flow down the gentle 10 or so degree slope until they reach the next lower shoreline berm where they pool up a foot or so in depth; slowly infiltrating back into the type 7 wetland ground where the liquid originated until it channelizes back together. And so it flows, all 6-800 some feet between the watershed divide on top of the hill down to Superior.

Whether my personal or professional life; I strive to manage water as sustainably as possible. The way water interacts with the land is a lot like humans: it's fluid, it changes with time and time is the great unknown variable. Regardless of what the weather man says, you never truly know if it will rain tomorrow...

Today it's raining. The stream gauges are climbing. Winter is flowing back into Lake Superior. I'm soaking wet...