How are ya' now?!?

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Greetings from the Staff at Minnesota Steelheader, the season is CHANGING! In a sure sign of spring, an enormous tom turkey sporting a brilliant red, white, and blue head tried to kamikaze my car as I was driving to work this week. I slammed on the brakes and honked, he just puffed up and yelled at me from the middle of the road, well, triple-gobbled anyway, but it amounts to the same thing. The chickadees and cardinals are singing their spring songs and sandhill cranes recently made a first appearance.

    Where I am we've had a couple of uncomfortably warm days though full of welcome sunshine. This led to lots of running water and our street becoming a temporary lake due to a blocked storm drain. I got out the tamper-bar, chipped open the grate and watched a spectacular whirlpool develop. The neighbor kids were none to happy with me, my efforts had ruined their carefully constructed hydro-engineering project but when I pointed to the rapidly growing whirlpool, they rushed over and started a new game. Soon ice chunks and snowballs were being sent to their doom after a wild ride through the whirling maelstrom to the delight of a growing crowd of kids.

    That particular drain empties into series of storm-water retention ponds connected by a channel. The channel runs alongside my yard and being a stream aficionado, I had previously constructed my own hydro-engineering project; a series of rock cribs that in early fall are surrounded by blooming spotted touch-me-not's that attract scores of migrating hummingbirds. The touch-me-not's won't poke their heads above ground until the snow is long gone, but as long as there is running water, the channel whispers and babbles and speaks of spring and trout and steelhead. 

    The North Shore streams, much like the touch-me-not's, are slumbering beneath a blanket of snow and ice. If there were such thing as a water neuroscientist, they might tell you that the rivers are in REM sleep and dreaming their watery dreams:


     But that's about to change. We're starting to see signs of them waking up with the gauges indicating increasing overflow from snow melt. And while the heavy snow pack makes life difficult for wildlife along the North Shore, we're currently looking at conditions that are setting up potentially ideal run conditions. Snow water equivalents along the North Shore are running around 4-10":

    It's hard to imagine but we are already in the deep breath before the plunge. One can never predict with certainty but we are now less than 25 days out from the historical steelhead return peaks on the Lower Shore. One great information source providing snow melt progressions, snow water equivalents and current conditions is the NOAA Regional Snow Analyses: Northern Great Lakes tool. You can follow the data by day, play it out for the prior two weeks, or watch an entire season. 

     MODIS satellite imagery is another good resource when trying to figure out early-season conditions. The 250 meter resolution in the images, provided there's no cloud cover, is plenty good enough to identify sediment plumes when they are blooming out into the lake, a sure sign of streams opening up.   It's all pretty fascinating stuff actually and beats sitting at home wondering what is going on:


     We are closely monitoring conditions and will keep you posted as we spot anything of interest. Until then, wishing you all the best in the season that is to come!

Minnesota Steelheader
 

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