Sucker Spawning in Jasper Creek

It was Sucker Fest at Northwind Lodge on May 5th and for about two days.  I was working in Cabin 3 when I went down to Jasper Creek to to see if the suckers had come up the creek in the morning.   None were present.  A bit later in the day, they decided this day to be their day.

The water was low in the creek to begin with so the suckers were pretty shallow.   Suckers like hot weather if they can get it in the spring in northern Minnesota, and they will usually pile up in the creek.  There were some bunches of males and females - males have a subtle to not-so-subtle stripe on their sides and tend to be a bit smaller.  Sometimes, it is hard to tell just by looking at them.

I  went down to the creek with my sidekick, Delilah leading the way and the video sums it all up.

The next day, the temps dropped into the 40's and then freezing and the suckers completely disappeared from the creek.  Then, somebody pulled the beaver dam out of Jasper Creek up at the culvert of the highway and the water became very high.  a major temperature drop combined with fierce rapids pretty much shut down the sucker spawn for 2015.  What you see in the video was the spawn for the season.  This is a good thing as we'd like to see sucker numbers drop as a lake will only support so many pounds of fish and every sucker removed opens up a space for another game fish.

Delilah had fun while it lasted.

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Runaway Ice in Jasper Creek

It's one of those years again at Northwind Lodge.  Last year we had too much snow and brutally cold weather.  This year we're having mildly cold weather (in relative terms) and not enough snow.  For those who don't know it, we rely on snow to be an insulating layer against the cold.  With low snow levels, the cold can penetrate the ground something fierce.  In this neck of the woods, our frostline for building code purposes is 84" or seven feet down.  Unfortunately, that is easier said than done and I do recall a few years back with low snow and cold temps that some people had their septic tanks move upwards from frost making it beneath the tank and freezing the water in the dirt.  The lifting of the tank would result in either breaking the main sewer line to the tank from the home or making the main line now move upwards thereby affecting the flow into the tank.  The residual water remaining in the sewer line, would freeze and plug up making for many unpleasant moments in the homeowner's basement.  With no simple remedy, this sort of thing makes a long winter feel much longer because our frost doesn't usually leave the ground here until mid-May.  So, when I hear our southern brethren tell me that it is just as cold in the Twin Cities, 265 miles to the south, I don't really agree.  Seven feet of frost is just one of the indicators as to the differences in global reality.

For Northwind Lodge, our low snow presents a different kind of problem.  It is mainly in Jasper Creek.   As it flows so beautifully through our property in the summer, it haunts us and taunts us all winter long with threats of overflowing its banks to threaten several cabins. The last major event required taking a chainsaw and cutting a 600 foot long ditch from the bottom (at the lake) all the way past the top of the falls.  We cut the ditch about 10 inches wide with one guy on the saw and another guy on the chisel, popping these huge blocks of ice out of the 16" deep ditch.  When the block gets pried out of the ditch, it sometimes would slide like a 75 pound bobsled down the ice.  We had to watch so we didn't wipe each other out with plummeting ice blocks.  Then, the excess water on top of the glacier gets routed into the big ditch to better focus it's erosive qualities.

When, this first appeared that it was going to happen back in the early 2000's as I expressed my fear about having to solve the problem to Annette, Jackie and Curt, Annette lightly scoffed and told the employees that "Joe overreacts."  She did not realize that "Joe" had done this disaster preventing maneuver long before we had been married and was far from exaggerating.

When the day came that Curt and I began to chainsaw the river, Joe showed Curt how the whole procedure is done.  We take the oil out of the oiler and loosen the chain on the bar.  The saw has to cut backwards in order to be effective.  If you've never cut two 600 foot lines 16" deep into ice climbing up a veritable glacier in screaming wind with your wool pants turned into ice stove pipes, you have not lived.  After Day One of the ice attack, Curt reported to work the next day with stories of brushing his teeth by jumping up and down while Jackie held the toothbrush to his teeth.  His arms were so tired from sawing, chiseling, prying, and sliding huge blocks of ice, that he couldn't hold his tooth brush.

We would finish with the ditch and in less than two days of -20 F, the ditch we cut would disappear completely as if we weren't even there with chainsaw in hand.  Then, we'd do it all over again.  I would cut, chisel, and ditch for hours after the employees left for home, trying to stay ahead of that incessant water.  Some nights I would go out with a head lamp and work some more in the dark.  At the time, we had the lodge open for skiers and the water was heading so hard to Cabin 8, that we put down sand bags that the county gave us to fight the onslaught.  Nothing says "wonderful experience" more than hand-shoveling salt-sand into jaggedy sand bags in a county gravel pit with the wind howling in below zero temps.  

We stacked the bags to re-direct the water and it built up against those bags almost immediately.  The ultimate was when a party from the Twin Cities arrived at an ungodly hour on a Friday night as opposed to a sensible check in time because they don't realize the issues that can surround wilderness existence.  I watched and waited for them and somehow they sneaked by me and parked their Subaru in five inches of ice water, front wheels right up to a row of stacked sandbags.  At midnight, I decided to get out of bed, get dressed and go over to their cabin to see if they arrived.  Sure, enough, they had been there, meeting up with the rest of their party (who KNEW all about the river, the ice, the water, etc.) and they parked their car and were in the cabin "shooting the bull" for hours.

The water was freezing almost to the rims of all four wheels and had to be encroaching the differential on the vehicle.  I knocked on the cabin door and suggested that the owner move their vehicle to a place that is high and dry for the 25 below night we were having or we'd be chiseling that car out of the ice by morning.  They thought it was kind of funny while not realizing how bad it really could have been.  I could not believe that they would park their car with their wheels in the water -anywhere- let alone at a cabin deep in the northwoods.  I just shook my head at the obliviousness that permeates so much of city-dwelling humankind.

One day, when the river was really kicking our butts and we couldn't get ahead of it, I asked 
Annette to don ice creepers and help with chiseling ditches.  She did; it helped immensely and that evening she was completely shot from pounding an ice chisel and climbing up and down a veritable mountain of unforgiving ice for about 5 hours.

And, by that point, nobody thought I was exaggerating about the creek anymore.  

Here's a video of our New Year's Eve efforts to try to stay ahead of the potential nightmare that it could yet become.  This is plan B and it should work.  I don't know what Plan C is yet and I hope I won't need it.

Happy New Year from Joe and Annette Baltich at Northwind Lodge, Ely MN.

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You run the Chainsaw

Run a chainsaw and a Bobcat right from your computer.  Well, maybe not.  But, if you were able to do it, it would look like this.

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Who Built This?

A while back, not too many years ago, a young guy in his mid-thirties came into  the store here to find out about possibly buying a new Souris River Canoe.   Being that our store is out in the woods on a beautiful lake here called Jasper, that alone is one thing of fascination for many of our store customers.   Most people on a shopping adventure end up going to the populated area and concrete jungle of Ely to wander the stores in a more civilized environment.  Our store at Northwind Lodge is not only sizeable with a great selection of products, gear and fishing tackle, but it is located almost at the end of the road, at our resort called Northwind Lodge.  We are surrounded by the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on three sides.  But for a few gift shops and maybe a pegboard wall with some tackle on it, other resorts around the state of Minnesota usually don’t have anything quite like this.  A beautiful resort with clean, housekeeping cabins on a small lake with few people AND a store.   As a result, Red Rock attracts people to Northwind Lodge not necessarily with the intention to stay here, but they are usually a bit surprised that the resort with housekeeping cabins is here on the Fernberg road.  We usually do a lot of explaining that Red Rock and the Northwind Lodge are under the same ownership but market them separately for the very reason that people are easily overwhelmed and confused with too many bits of information all tied up in one spot.

Well, anyway, this guy wanted to test paddle a Quetico 17 because he correctly heard that as far as general purpose, Boundary Waters canoes go, nothing beats a Souris River Quetico 17 for a whole host of reasons.   Based on my own in-depth knowledge of that canoe and  other brand Kevlar canoes, he would not even need to test paddle it. The canoe is unflappable for 99% of all general, recreation-use paddlers on the planet.   But, my being in a sales position always tests many peoples’ sense of skepticism before they buy something and he needed pudding with proof in it.  So, I flipped a 43 lb., Kevlar,  Souris River Quetico 17 up on my shoulders.  While ooo & aww’ing about me picking up the canoe, he grabs the paddles and PFD’s and to the lake we head from Red Rock which is on the outer edge of the resort and about 100 yards from Jasper Creek.  It's only a minute or two to the Northwind Lodge beach.

As we are walking along, he (and almost everybody else) asks from behind me if that noise ahead of us is a waterfall to which I say “yes”.   We make it to the trail from the road edge and to the first foot bridge that leads over the creek which is moving along nicely.  In the middle of the bridge he stops behind me to look over the 15 foot wide, gurgling swath of white noise as it sparkled furiously below in the leaf-filtered sun’s rays.   There is a look of marvel in his eyes as he yells to me, while I’m now across the bridge and turning the canoe to follow the trail to the lake amid the ash trees, “ Wow! Who did this?”

I said, “Excuse me?”  I expected that I knew where this big city kid was going with this, but I’d decided to play along.  The canoe on my shoulders was pretty lightweight so I had time to engage.

“Who did you hire to do this?  The layout and design?  It’s FABULOUS!!!” he  queried all excited about how beautiful Jasper Creek is.   I thought  “Wow!”  He actually thinks we hired an architectural firm named Hanson, Rogers and Flipperding to design Jasper Creek.  Then we hired a highly respected eco-excavation company (who burns love in their fuel tanks instead of diesel) to install it with tender care just like they do at Disneyland and the tourists are all dazzled by it.

To answer him I responded with a question, sort of, “Err, God?  Mother Nature?  Bhudda?  Pick whichever one serves your belief system.”

Photo courtesy of  Hanson, Rogers and Flipperding
(Landscape Architects Extraordinaire)

Then, a slightly sheepish look came across his face as he said “Ohhhh” as he realized that most of those rocks have laid there in that water for abouty 30,000 years or longer -  whenever the last glacier left us.

And, then we continued down to the lake and he noticed the resort cabins on the hillside overlooking the beach area.   He wanted know what this place was – with the beautiful creek and rental cabins nestled in the woods.  I explained that it is our resort, Northwind Lodge and as he took it all in at the beach, you could see the processing taking place.  Then he wondered how long I’ve had this place and I replied “for about 50 years – I grew up here, pretty much.”    He shook his head in amazement and declared “what a beautiful place to grow up” it was.  I agreed.

It was then that he remembered his original purpose, and we both sat down in that canoe and shoved off the shore to take that test paddle.   When we got back to shore after about 15 minutes, he said to me, “You already knew what I was going to find when I took this canoe on the water, didn’t you?.”   I just smiled.

He loaded up a new Souris River Quetico 17 on his car and off to the great blue yonder it went with him.  Before he left, he took a picture of the waterfall at Jasper Creek like so many people have done for my whole life here at Northwind Lodge, just outside of the BWCA, near Ely.

Jasper Creek Fall at Northwind Lodge

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