Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to share some photos of the beautiful lake cleanup that my son and I were doing the other day!

Shoreside Cleanup Walk

With the coming of the autumnal season, one of the big things in the area that I live in is draining most of the reservoirs and lakes down to a much shallower level.

For the longest time I was very confused about this practice because I thought it was foolish, it drained a lot of the water and put a lot of pressure on the fish species because there was much less water to go swimming around in. As I got older, and in the last two years or so I've realized that what they are doing is actually a pretty decent thing.

The main point of draining the reservoirs and lakes is to allow the water that melts from the snow in the winter to fill them back up. This reduces the amount of flooding that we get and the overflow of water into the rivers and causing other issues. It also gives the people who live on and around the lakes and reservoirs a chance to do some cleanup!

The lake was sadly not very kind to us this year as far as fishing goes. There was all kinds of bacteria blooms and shit that put a lot of negative pressure on the people who use the lakes around us recreationally. Most of them weren't really allowing people to fish because of the really high levels of bacteria, something that was dismaying for sure. We made due with what we got though and did other things and fished in other areas instead. It wasn't as fun but we got to enjoy what we could.

With the lowering of the water though, it exposed and hopefully kills a lot of this damn bacteria lol so that next year we can enjoy it. We spent a few hours over the weekend going around the shoreline of the area and cleaning up all kinds of trash. We got dozens of cans, lots of fishing line and a number of broken fishing lures. It was an overall great trip as far as cleaning shit up!

Most importantly though, I used it as precious time to be outside with my son. These days there is a lot of stuff going on that forces us to not be outside as much, such as long work hours and having to do all kinds of other things besides spending time in nature, the way we are supposed to.

The clean up served many purposes for me and my son though! It got us outside in the beautiful, fresh autumn air, got us some sunlight and vitamin D exposure which is something that we know we need more of in the colder months, and we got to pick up a bunch of shit that unfortunate people left behind.

The trash aspect of it was what I was most passionate about. I always get annoyed when we are at a fishing spot and we walk around to see cans, bottles, empty fishing containers, broken fishing line, broken fishing poles and so many other items just thrown on the ground. Some of it is certainly people who forgot or lost something so I can't say everything is intentional. There is a lot of it though where it's just sadly people being assholes and throwing their shit on the ground. That annoys me a lot!

We did get to relax a little bit though. We visited the water fall that you can only see in the autumn and winter months when the water is down. It's remarkable how much they drain the lake! It's easily several million gallons of water that get drained out of this thing in the wintertime! The really dark line on the wall there is where the water is normally up to. With it flowing right into the lake, that means the water line is that high throughout the entire body of water which is amazing. The horizontal support beams for the bridge there are normally completely invisible in the summer months because the water is above them by a foot or so. Pretty cool to see how they connected all these things to create this massive elaborate system of connected reservoirs, lakes and ponds. I know that we've done a lot of foolish things but this is not one of them to me!

The area is full of a lot of nice flat spots which is good to get a little bit of an understanding on. When the water is at the normal levels, it's good to see the underlying structure and areas around! You find the good fishing spots, like the areas where there are decent dips in the height where the bigger fish like to sit and wait. There are also a number of fairly shallow areas like this one where the kibbies love to hang out, so you know that if you have a kid with you, throw a few casts over here and catch some decent panfish if you're so inclined.

This area here is pretty fun in the winter time too, when the lake is completely frozen. The people who live in the area use this spot to play ice hockey which is fun. We don't participate in the hockey but we do walk around the area to see how they are having fun. We did it two years ago and it was great, so we are hoping for some decent freezing temperatures this year where we will get a foot thick of ice to do these types of things!

Two full bags of shit pulled out of the place! The next time we go, I'm going to bring a contractor trash bag. There ended up being a bunch of stuff that we couldn't pick up because we simply didn't have room in the bags haha. We won't make that same mistake again!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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