Growing up, living and working on a Minnesota resort, Northwind Lodge near Ely, MN presents challenges, wildlife, and some interesting stories next to the BWCA.
Last fall, we needed to put a new roof on Cabin #3. That cabin was there since the 40's and as a kid, my brother Bernie and I put at least two new roofs on it years ago after our dad had done the same prior to that. It finally developed a leak and I patched it but the whole roof was shot. I decided to insulate it and put a layer of osb sheeting over the top. Curt and I did that last fall.
I discovered that there were five layers of rolled roofing on that cabin! The roof itself was simply made out of ship lap pine and that also made the inside of the ceiling which had turned that really dark brown like old, varnished pine usually does. While walking around on the roof on 66 year old boards we were careful to make our feet bridge two boards while walking to prevent cracking or even going through an individual plank. I'm always amazed that lumber from 66 years ago still even has structural integrity. The boards were still springy and after a ton of running around, not one even cracked a little. I don't think any type of plastic would have held up the same.
I installed a simple framework, laid down the foam insulation, nailed down half inch sheeting and roof edging that I had to build for this job and put the felt layer on along with the shingles.
Upon inspection of the inside, I could see where some of the nails we shot down in the framing became an issue and I decided to put in a new ceiling in the spring. Well, spring sprang and in between rain, snow and bad weather, I videoed a condensed version of that particular job along with the end result. It turned out OK.
While I was sitting in Cabin 3 tuning my radio I happened to look outside the window at the spectacular view of blue water on Jasper with a backdrop of wilderness while an eagle soared overhead and one of our loons protested in the distance. I said to myself, "yeah, I could live here for a week or two!"
It's a pretty cool place.
Bring your wife or hubby! Come stay in Cabin #3 at Northwind Lodge! Click Here for our website.
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.
At least this time, I didn't have to do the felling. A two-man crew with a big fancy boom truck came in a took down a hefty spruce that died due to lighting and was right next to the power line. They were on contract for our electrical co-op here and their efforts were much appreciated. My chainsaw bar isn't big enough for the job and theirs was also even a bit on the short side. It was a shame to have to take down a tree of that size, but either we do it now while in control, or have it fall later while out of control. It was easily in the range of the power lines and with 7,000 volts running through it, touching the lines is less than desirable. The tree had to come down. I haven't yet decided what I'm doing with it but I'll be doing something.
I went outside this morning at 8 AM and I could hear the loons calling in the distance as a cold, north wind was bashing its way through the woods 20 feet outside our door. I let Delilah out ahead of me as I do every morning when walking to the office and she was in 3 inches of drifted snow! It's April 22, 2015 and while this is hardly unusual for northeastern Minnesota, I still find it difficult to write poetically about wind blowing snow sideways less than a month away from fishing opener. I'm also having a hard time with those computer models that show that we should be watching palm trees grow since this, with the exception of about four years ago, seems to happen every year for as long as I can remember. Hence the reason we still haven't take the plow off of the truck.
Still ready to go.
The beach on Jasper Lake
Great Day for a Water Bike Ride!
Looking east down the beach
Cabin 7
Cabin 3
Cabin 6
Straight north off the beach
Meanwhile, the loons, who spend their winters in Florida, are back wondering why they came home so early. C'mon, warm weather! We all want winter to leave!
Well, here's a shock and something you NEVER, EVER hear being addressed by all the climate change experts. CO2 is bad for the earth -well, except for all the plants that need abundant CO2 to live - but that doesn't count. Then, when CO2 loses its shock value, we talk seriously about methane. Millions of dollars in federal grants have been spent on studies of bovine flatulence - cow farts. Apparently, the beef industry, (you know, those people who supply those little round patties at McDonalds) has been killing Earth with bovine flatulence and something needs to be done, apparently. At least another million dollar study needs to play out for a good determination of all that ails this greatly suffering rock.
Bearing the weight of mankind in mind, Delilah was bugging me to go outside for a run. That little dog likes to burn up the ground, and she's been know to produce the occasional methane burst herself now and then, but that's for a different study.
Anyway, I hopped on the Skidoo and took the little dog out to where my dad and I were fishing earlier that day. We wandered around out there enjoying the peace and tranquility of Minnesota's great northwoods and I remembered to point out the methane bubbles in the ice. For the last few years, Jasper Lakes has been belching up methane a LOT. I'm sure that Jasper is not alone in doing so, but it's where I am all the time so I observe these things in this lake.
Funny part is that the water is about 1 foot low this winter. This past fall we had more beach than I'd seen all summer with the water being low so pulling the docks out was a bit easier. Out where we ice fish in the weed beds, over the years, it has been 7 to 8 feet deep only. Last summer, the weeds were SO thick, you could barely fish. It also looked like silt is filling in the lake. Top it all off with a few really big methane "burps" and I have a theory.
Jasper Lake is maintained mainly by spring activity. It also has a ton of silt that none of our neighboring lakes have, and that includes even Ojibway which sends water to Jasper via Jasper Creek. In 1976, that creek dried up for 1.5 years and Jasper dropped 4 feet low and stayed there with water going out still. There is only one way that is possible. Springs.
Bearing that in mind, these springs are geological events. Parameters and conditions deep in the ground can change due solely to the actions of Mother Nature. The planet does what it wants and that's it. We can wring our hands and raise taxes and implement ridiculous feel-good mandates all we want, but we have zero effect on whatever the planet decides to do next despite what the believers conclude by consensus. Jasper Lake has been filling up with sediment. The only incoming water comes from a spring-fed lake (Ojibway) with no sediment. So, where is the sediment coming from? Well it has to be coming from those springs that maintain the lake for real. Something changed below, and those springs are dumping minerals and sediment into the lake from far away
That is the first part of my theory. The second part lies in the fact that methane can be made from serpentinization of rock in the presence of water. The right rocks rub each other at ungodly pressures below with some water mixed in and we get methane building up. (You can look it up-it happens all the time) Plus, weeds, fish and bacteria rot on the bottom to form methane as well, but the serpentization method makes more sense regarding the massive volume needed to affect this lake. It happens everywhere around the planet and methane silently releases after the pressure builds up, all the time. Al Gore seems to leave that part and so do all the other enforcers of climate change belief.
The second part of my theory ties it all together in Jasper Lake. Where we fish, it has been about 7-8 feet deep historically for the last several years. This year, it was 10 feet deep. Deeper than we've seen it since I was a kid. We've also had more methane bubbles frozen in the ice than I have ever seen. This could also explain why I fell through the ice last winter when all the other ice was good. We fish in that same area all the time where methane can be observed bubbling up in significant volume with an underwater camera. It flows up out of the silt and is very visible on camera.
My theory is that we had, deep under silt, maybe hundreds of feet down, a large methane bubble building for years coming out of those springs that maintain the lake. The bubble or concentration built up pressure and lifted the silt up, thereby lowering the water level by default. Lifting up of the bottom of the lake, allowed the weeds to grow thicker than ever because they were closer to the sun than ever before. Once that huge bubble got close enough to the surface of the silt layer, it began to bubble up in the water and some of it got trapped in the ice allowing me to formulate this theory. When enough bubbled out in a lake (that was 1 foot low to begin with), the silt settled back down, and my dad and I are now fishing bluegills in 10 feet of water instead of 7 feet in a lake that is low in the first place.
So, a large methane bubble formed deep enough to be trapped by the silt that becomes denser as you go deeper due to pressure and gravity packing the silt into a fairly impervious carpet - to a point. The gas bubble lifted the entire bottom of the lake up, the weeds grew like crazy because they were closer to the sun. Then, the gas released when it overrode the density of the silt, and the bottom has now gone back down closer to pre-bubble years.
Meanwhile, Mother Earth has just released perhaps millions of tons of methane into the air and no cows were present. Maybe I could get my Congressman to give me a million dollar grant to study this theory about naturally occurring phenomenon with the "evil" methane being released.
Delilah, the resort dog of Northwind Lodge (well, and Cookie, too, but Cookie is a bit boring) lieks to run against the Skidoo. You can just see the bird-dog look she gets when I start the machine. She takes off for home every time. Fun dog.
Using what whatever snow is left in the yard to get the Skidoo to the water, I drove out on the ice on Jasper Lake on March 16 at 1:30 PM to set up a pup-up shelter for fishing. It was warm out at about 40 degrees but like every other March, it was windy. Blowing from the south, then the north, we ended up tying the 6 x 8 pop-up off from each end to my Skidoo and my dad's 4-wheeler. We were 100 yards off the beach of Northwind Lodge.
We made use of pre-drilled holes from the day before when we went fishing with Dave Oliver and Paul Haraldson, so setting up was quick. We got inside the tent along with Delilah and began paying homage to the gods of bluegills by staring down the hole. Boy, talk about getting a sore upper back and neck after doing that for 4 hours straight.
We dropped down various jigs a sparkly little spinners and they began to come in. There were fewer today, but they were running bigger. Nice sized, fillet-able fish swimming 5 to 7 feet below. Today's visibility was not as good as yesterday and we can never understand why.
Conditions were about the same with a partly cloudy day, but nonetheless, the sunnies below were bigger and a bit more picky. All of a sudden, a 5 lb northern pick glided across in the shallow depths below. The sunnies blew the popstand at that point and then some really nice sized largemouth bass came in for a look. Even though the sunnies are good sized, those bass come in and they are huge. 2.5 to 4 pounders stopping in to see if they want that tiny #14 tungsten jig with a little bit of plastic on the hook. It gets your adrenalin flowing because these are really nice fish. But nope, they swam by. After all that fish activity going by, it takes the bluegills about 30 minutes to come back after the head bluegill declares the coast to be clear.
I have 5 rods on the ice floor of our living room on the lake. Each is rigged with a different jig & different plastics. Most of the stuff I use is tungsten. When the school is passing through, one must keep their interest for them to stick around. So, if they are slow moving to one lure, crank up fast and drop another. Must have been the air-pressure, but they were only moderately interested in what we were offering. There was my dad setting the hook and saying "aarrggh!" and and me doing the same while declaring "dang it!". The fish below would suck in a jig completely. To hook them requires an immediate hookset. You're like a coiled spring with a trip wire. Trouble is that inexplicably, you can set the hook and miss them time and again despite their having inhaled the entire jig. We call it "flipping them" when we set a hook and it pulls them up and they flip a sideways somersault and swim away dazed but unharmed. To avoid frequent flipping, we tried letting them take it for one second and they spit it out in slightly less than one second. Their little bluegill tongues must quickly identify plastic. We finally moved to tungsten bead head flies made by Cortland with no plastic and caught a few, flipped a few more.
Then, in a blast of sunfish panic, those slow-moving fish dispersed in all directions like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Big northern coming through like a German U-boat on the hunt. The bluegills beneath his level could hear the "ping" as the big green U-boat glided methodically overhead. To hide, they descended deeper & deeper, closer to the bottom, holding their breath, beads of sweat rolling off their gill covers. Minutes changed to hours as that big predator swam between them and the two faces staring down the holes in the ice above watching and waiting. And waiting. And waiting.
Dang northern scared everybody off. We sat for another 30 minutes with 5 bluegills on the ice and nobody was returning back to that spot. My dad and I finally gave up. We knocked down the tent, loaded the sled and cranked up our machines and headed home. Had we caught every fish we saw including some very large perch, we'd have had fish laying all over the ice. There certainly is no shortage of fish in Jasper. Keeping them on the hook is the tricky part.
