My Office Today

[Rally]

Lamar,
Could be, and there are lots of HUGE rocks in this area. The hillside I walked into has many boulders on the surface and pretty much straight up and down. You can kinda get an idea from the last couple pictures of the terrain here. The beaver are really just filling in the gaps between the hills to flood it and give them access to the Birch and Poplar. You should see the wolf trails going from pond to pond over the hills. I'm sure they used to be deer trails, but they are wolf highways now. Found wolf hair on the bottom of two Balsam blowdowns they were walking under.
I just looked back at the second picture up. If you look across the pond, by the Balsam, those big lumps around it are all big moss/ grass covered rocks. The bottoms of these ponds I'm draining are all sand and rocks also.
It's a neat area, in that if you go just East of that pond, and just West of the other pond upstream from the East pond of the contract, there is a big bog that feeds both areas. The water flows both East and West. The East pond is close to a bend in the river and flows to it, but the West pond also feeds to the river in a more roundabout way. If you saw the flowage overview it resembles a women's figure, who has a big rear end. LOL

 

[Rally]

Just one adult female at the Middle East pond that has the U shaped dam. Nothing patched at middle West dam, so likely my suspicions were correct about the last two beaver I caught downstream were from this pond. Time will tell.

 

[fiver]

those ponds look like they might have had some decent Brook trout fishing.

 

[Rally]

They would have two strikes against them from the start. First they aren't suppose to be ponds, just a small creek about 3 feet wide, and second the otter in the area would make pretty short work of them. We have a ton of otter here, and I can see a trout creek from my house. They have dumped fry in there too and the otter eat them as fast as they put them in there. If you look back at page one where the timbers are thrown up on the bank, that is about how big it is suppose to be. They put roads in with culverts, beaver plug them, and make a whole new world. The forestry sells the timber, maintains the road long enough to get it out, and then forget about it for twenty five years, repeat.
Back in the 30-40's, the CCC programs dredged a lot of ditches through this part of the country trying to drain bogs and encourage farming/habitation. The crews stayed on the draglines for long periods of time. They started through a bog and built chord roads with the dirt they dug out of the bog, so made raised roads higher than the bog. The wind seeded them with Poplar, and in a couple years they had beaver heaven. Miles and miles of straight ditches, about 6-8' deep, with a whole grid of ditches all moving toward the Mississippi river, or a series of ditches all going into one main ditch that was draining to the rivers.
Back then beaver were rare, and trappers were restricted to 5 beaver harvest per license, then ten, then like now, unrestricted with seasons running from end of October to middle of May. Nobody thought about beaver taking over or getting over populated when these programs were initiated, but in effect they built beaver heaven. Now their is no beaver market, and a beaver population beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Let the fun begin!!

 

[RicinYakima]

Kind of like wolves here; 4 pairs ten years ago. Now they "recognize" 124, but reality is about 500. Only wolves with collars are "recognized" the rest are feral dogs.

 

[Rick H]

You do shoot feral dogs don't you?

 

[popper]

Rally - bro sent me a mp4 today, what you need. Articulated backhoe that climbed down ~200' below on 45deg hill to small stream at bottom and cleaned the riprap out. Talk about guts. Operating on the hillside! Machine is neat, 4 wheel and 4 ram/claws to move on. Plus a extendable 3 axis 'shovel/bucket'.

 

[CZ93X62]

You do shoot feral dogs don't you?

Who, me? Nah, not much.

 

[Creeker]

Couldn't get me on that hoe popper.

 

[Rally]

Popper,
I could use it tomorrow. The DNR here has several Marsh Masters. Some day I'd like to buy one at their auction, I'm sure it would be in nearly new condition, because all they use them for is to look at contracts I'm going to do. LOL They come with a 12,00 lb winch on them and will go anywhere here.
Those ferrels are called "Government Coyotes" here, and some come with their own jewelry.

 

[fiver]

makes you wonder what that guy does on weekends.

 

[Rally]

This is the EC dam I opened yesterday. No more beaver anywhere so spent most of the day moving the water. I think it was Bret that asked how I tore them out some time back. Dams like this, about 6’ tall, I start on downstream side, usually where the original stream bed was, or where an overflow had made a new bed. First I clear out all the long sticks, which in a old dam like this is easier than a new dam because the bottom sticks/ logs are rotten and can be broken rather than have to be cut with a chainsaw. Old dams like this one also tend to be porous, due to leaks or Otter boring holes through them in the winter, beaver often bore holes through old dams and have swim through holes or resting platforms too. I am pretty lazy too so try to find a thin spot and start there. After the sticks are out of the way I just start chopping out an area that will be big enough to drain the pond. The trick is to dig out the depth and width needed before getting too much water flowing through the cut. I like a steady flow or enough to wash out the dirt and debris from around my feet to make working there easier, like pictured above. Note the dark loam soil, that is what has washed over the dam and rotting sticks, not what is in the bottom of the pond. Most of it is bog/ peat that the beaver put on the face of the dam but each rainfall raises water levels in the pond and overflows and then settles amongst the sticks put in the dam by the beaver. Beaver dams are really just filters for and in the flowage.

This is after I get the width and more important, the depth I want. Tough to tel from the picture, but I am to the layers of clay the dam has formed over the years from filtering it out of the water and mud the beaver push up onto the top and face of the dam over the 20 years or so the dam has been here. I increase the water flow a bit and watch it uncover the rock and sand that is the real bottom.

This is the same dam as last picture but looking from the top. You can kind of see the difference in material at different depths in the notch. The rest of the work from here out I do from the top of the dam while standing in the notch. I dig the fork into the layers of clay and leverage them out in chunks and let the water carry them downstream, hopefully they don’t take me with them.

A little clay removal with the fork and it starts to run. At this point I start raking all the soft mud off the front of the dam into the notch and the water carries it away. My biggest worry are any floating stumps, trees, or large chunks of bog making it’s way into the notch, especially while I’m standing in it! These ponds are full of waterlogged trees/ limbs that are suspended in the ponds, but start moving when I create a current. There are an abundance of pieces a floating bog that float into these notches I cut and partially stop water drainage. I’ll go back here and check tomorrow for just that reason.

This is at the far West of the contract, and is the dam I was using as a water control structure, to limit the amount of water leaving the flow-age, and to keep it from washing out the road and collapsed bridge. That is all clay left in the notch now and has had water washing over it for about two weeks now. Clay like that is pretty durable and what really holds the water back.
If you look upstream/ top center, you can see dam #2 and the notch I cut in it. I think there is a picture of that pond drained above in an earlier post.

This picture is looking upstream from control dam and a little West so the viewer can see the two dams in a row and the notches I cut in them. The second dam was holding the most water (about 3/4 mile) and the closest dam was to make sure it did. I cut out about24” more clay out of the control dam to drain the remainder of water in that pond, then walked up to the pool between the next two dams pictured above.

This is a picture of a sandbar on the bottom of the pool between the two dams. Appears either the bear or wolf appreciated the last beaver I caught there. I dug out about another 18” of clay on the big dam and washed the tracks away.

I walked back to the control dam/ road and this is what I saw! Seems something washed up under the bridge and plugged it up so the water overflowed the road anyway. Lol it had some sod on it so I’ll see tomorrow if it washed it out.

 

[fiver]

lot of tannin in that water.
there has to be a ton of under water wood there.

 

[Ian]

Prolly more like most of a national forest's worth of wood under there. It's amazing how much water there is in the middle of this continent so far from any ocean or sea. Been watching the flooding in Michigan too, terrible stuff going on there.

 

[fiver]

A friend once posted a pic of North Carolina when we were discussing fishing.
she was like well I have very few choices but here is what's close.
I was like wow, umm do you guy's even have a place that's dry enough to build a house.
she goes,, well I do have to drive almost 1/2hr maybe 45 minutes to many of them. [like 8, and most of them I know about because they are great fisheries]

yeah, okay, I live in the wet part of the state and it's an hour to the nearest place worth fishing.
once I leave this immediate area it's more like 3hrs. to the next closest one and they get further apart from there.

 

[Kevin Stenberg]

Rally i hope the mosquitoes up there aren't as plentiful as here. Just 3 days ago i could work outside without any repelant on. Today there are clouds of the pesky things. An these are the large ones.

 

[Rally]

Kevin,
It's pretty dry here, but raining as I type this. Hasn't been hardly any skeeters, but the knats are bad. The day I tore those dams out the knats chewed me up. Had repellent on but the water washes it off pretty fast. My Boonie hat has so much bug dope on it it is almost stiff, so that keeps most of them off my head, but they chew up the backs of my arms. Can't swat them and pull sticks at the same time.

Ian,
Funny you would say that, because just North of me the water starts flowing North. The Mississippi River is three directions from my house.

Lamar,
Lots of fishing here. Look up Itasca county Mn. Surface area is probably 50% water. I fished a little yesterday at a little pool on one of my rice contracts yesterday. Caught five little Pike in less than 20 minutes. With this rain I may go catch some crawlers tonight, then go fish some Walleye soon.

 

[Ian]

Did the road wash out?

 

[Rally]

Don't know. Going there tomorrow. The wife and I spent the day cleaning up her shop. Sawdust all over everything after finishing her shop.




This was bare studs when I started it in mid January. All 6” t&g Oak paneling I cut off my place and had sawn. Had just shy of 16000’ of lumber sitting where all her junk is at now. Had to move all that out to start. I have to put a coat of varnish on her workbench, install an electric opener on one door, and paint/ treat floor. Will make and install the base board when the floor is done. She filled it up as fast as I got it done, and she gets to move it all out to do the floors! Lol Also install light fixtures, when she decides what she wants!!!

 

[fiver]

you need to get her some nice boxes for those shelves.
at least some old coke crates or the like painted/stained type stuff.