Afternoon Walk At Lake Dillon
After being cut at lunch, I took Sasha to Lake Dillon. We parked the car at the marina beside the sailboats moored like zoo animals, with no possibility of currents or crossings. It was 71 degrees by 2 P.M.—the sixth time in seven days Summit County has set a record for this time of year. I put on my Chacos, and let the dog nose our way to the water. We squished through the reaches of mud between us and the shy lake, who had retreated deeper into her bed than I’ve ever seen before.
The papers proclaim:
“Lake Dillon froze late—
ice melt device fell through,
before two months passed.”
When snowpack lets go early, the watershed exhales winter too soon. Warm days like this one accelerate the melt, and tributaries reach out like arms to rake down the thawing soils. Instead of soaking in with all the nutrients, the water’s pulse runs off downslope. This overland flow elopes with silts and clays, hastily deposited in cloudy fans at the water’s edge.
Aristotle wrote of watersheds in 350 B.C.E. in his treatise Meteorologica (Book I, Chapter 13) that mountains are porous. Giant sponges that retain and release water.
Organic debris, mainly uprooted willow, colonize the wrists and elbows of these tributaries. This skeletal vegetation strews about like tumbleweeds on the Nebraska highway. Sasha seizes one with her teeth, and drags it toward a finger of stream.
A red nun and the NO WAKE SIGN direct my steps on the expanding shore: navigation aids to nowhere. A couple with a black labrador stroll out to an island I’ve paddled to before.
“Boating season will be majorly compromised.”
The Summit Daily says 160 slips will be unavailable on the reservoir’s Frisco side. The boatless platforms stretch like Roman aqueduct ruins, their arteries silted.
Sun on Tenmile Range,
mountains, vast and porous, hold
water, then let go.