A leisurely walk to check out the Des Moines river below Red-Rock dam. Water levels are extremely low right now and in several spots, it appears one could easily walk across. It made me excited to think about the upcoming lake draw-down for a year plus to allow for construction of a new hydro-electric plant at this location. Draw-downs here create a huge amount of nice flat shore-line and it should be a blast.
Nearly 80° at the end of September? You have to be careful and avoid knocking people over as you rush out the door to get outside. Once you've made it - wow, what an evening! Just a few wispy clouds and the wind was totally flat.
Nathan, Sarah, Corrine and I got our boats out and put-in at the "Boxcar" ramp near Red-Rock's river/lake mouth. Sunset is before 7:00 now so there was limited time, but what a great way to watch it go down.
Corrine and I had a little free time this morning and decided to try some fishing. We went on a sand/gravel bar next to the defunct Ivan's Campground, referenced here. I saw pretty much no one else fishing except people heading down-river in boats, so that didn't bode well for our success in this area.
Fishing report - nada. It was still great to get out and wander around somewhere we hadn't been in a long time.
The river is so low right now that the little strip of water you see on the far left of this picture IS the river channel. It must be pretty deep right there as I saw some V-bottom boats cruising through it no problem.
Pylons from a collapsed bridge, left over from a couple decades ago.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Long time with no post again, I'll go with "work has been a zoo and I didn't feel like it". There, I knew this picture would come in handy for something. This isn't a real big zoo though, we just have a giraffe, elephant (possibly goring something?), and a bean-stalk.
Brewing has been going well - this was the third batch and used up all remaining ingredients we had. I now have five gallons each of nut-brown ale, cream ale, and some sort of tarted Belgian ale. There are LOT more steps than wine-making but it all goes so much quicker (no waiting for months and years), plus it's fun to do some actual cooking with it too.
A handy by-product of brewing is the spent grains, which birds seem to be a big fan of. This pile is even bigger now and there definitely aren't enough birds around to eat it. It doesn't seem to be spoiling yet so hopefully it'll last a while.
Plus it just makes you feel good to know that these baby birds are being fed with only the freshest beer grains.
I have no idea what this fungus is. It's been on our garage for a little while now and if ever I might have seen a magic mushroom, this would seem to be it.
Got some video of the out-flow from Red-rock this past weekend. It's about 22k cfs here. Should be at 30k by tomorrow I believe. This is still low enough that none of the camp-grounds or roads get consumed. The forecast looks to be somewhat drier moving forward, so that should help.
Corrine and I had a picnic (Arby's) dinner on the beach Friday night. The weather was about perfect and the sun kept peaking out every now and then. It becomes more obvious to me all the time how much I need outdoors and open spaces. Just this short trip really filled me up and made everything feel great again. I need to make a point of getting out away from town more so I can get some photography inspiration going again.
