Headwaters

Before I got around to where the clothes-optional couple were camped at the far end of the lake, there had already been a good deal of wildlife excitement. 

Straight away I surprised a great blue heron, and he me, as he leapt from the sedges on enormous grey wings, sounding for all the world like sheets flapping on a clothesline. A tiny western sandpiper sounded her peeping alarm and blasted off from the shoreline rocks, furious wing beats inches from the water’s surface. Much more calmly, a mama merganser led her fuzzy brown and yellow ducklings down off the rocks into the water, where they feel most at home. Along the south shore, where head-high bulrushes march out into the shallows, I floated above thousands of fingerling trout, like a starling murmuration, roiling the glassy surface. Why aren’t you ospreys fishing here? I said aloud to the duet soaring over the lake’s deep-blue middle.

It was June 16, my first paddle of the season on Little Lava Lake, the nominal headwaters of the Deschutes River. Usually when I come to Little Lava, I point my paddleboard down the outflow channel, near the boat ramp on the west side, to drift over gravel bars until the river narrows and speeds up and I have to turn around and return to the lake. But this day, for the first time in the admittedly brief time I’ve been paddling – coming on four years now – there wasn’t enough water in the outlet to float my board. Bleached deadfall lay across exposed rocks. There was hardly any water movement at all. 

The low water didn’t seem to deter the naked people. They had their tent set up on a lava rock promontory, camp chairs pointed at the sun. Their paddleboards were moored just off shore. Later on, I saw them scramble down across the old high-water line – black rock above, gray below – to ease into the chilly water and swim out to their boards. The lake level appeared to be three or four feet into the gray.

A fisherman farther down the shore told me he hadn’t seen the water this low in years. What was going on? It had been a numerically average winter on Mt. Bachelor, with about 450 inches of snowfall at mid-mountain. Most of the automated Snotel sites in the Upper Deschutes Basin had recorded average, or nearly average, snow-water equivalents for the season. (The Snotel system measures the amount of water in the snowpack by weight, rather than snow depth.) I knew that Little Lava and its nearby bigger twin, Lava Lake, were both largely spring fed, drawing from a basin stretching north and east to the summit of Mt. Bachelor. Was it possible snowmelt had not reached the lakes yet? There was still a lot of snow up high. Mt. Bachelor’s massive cone hulked above, its western hemisphere patched half-white, like a paint horse. South Sister, taller but farther away, sported her usual solid early-summer snowfields. Maybe the water just hadn’t made it down this far. 

Or maybe an average snowpack was not the key metric. What else might be going on besides snowmelt? Other deficits? Issues of timing, or (shudder) of a changing climate? Maybe my experience was simply too limited. The Atlas of Oregon Lakes website said that sometimes high water didn’t come to the high lakes until late summer. 

On my way home, unable to think through the mystery, I stopped in at the Lava Lake Resort and talked with Joey Franzee, whose family has run the place – selling bait and beer, renting boats – since the 1980s. He seemed a little down. “Lowest it’s been in 40 years,” he said. He blamed last year’s dry summer. All the lakes were down last fall. Wickiup, the biggest reservoir on the Deschutes Project, emptied completely for the first time in its history. “Then comes winter. Frozen water doesn’t move,” Joey said from behind the counter, his toddler daughter, Kenley, wide-eyed on his hip. “It’ll come back up. It’s coming up now.” The words were confident, but his face wasn’t showing it.

It’s nearly impossible to measure the inflow, the groundwater discharge, into these high lakes. Creeks on which to place monitors are short-lived or nonexistent; the rock is just too porous for much water to flow on the surface. I knew, and Joey confirmed, that Lava and Little Lava are filled from springs in “the wall” along the east side of both lakes. The wall being his term for the lava flows that created the lakes beginning about 18,000 years ago. They came from the Mt. Bachelor Chain, which erupted, south to north, over a period of about 8,000 years. (At 15,000 years old, Mt. Bachelor is one of the youngest volcanoes in the Cascade Range.) 

There’s an informative, and rather wonderfully written, U.S. Forest Service sign at the Sparks Lake boat ramp titled: “Where Does the Water Go?” Sparks Lake, 10 miles north and about 700 vertical feet higher, was created by the same series of flows that dammed Lava and Little Lava, but it has no visible surface outlet. “Instead,” the sign reads, “water leaks out through fractures and cracks in the rock. Listen carefully along the shoreline and you will hear gurgling and sucking sounds – the lake is literally draining away. The water flows through layers of gravels and older lavas until it encounters an impermeable layer of rock which forces groundwater to surface as a spring. This water goes to places like Snow Creek, Quinn Creek, and Little Lava Lake, the headwaters of the Deschutes River.”

The last sentence on the sign was penned with a wink: “Sparks Lake has a secret: It’s the unofficial source of the Deschutes River.”

Which just confirms what Jonathan Lamarche, a hydrologist with the Oregon Water Resources Department, told me. I had asked him if anybody knows how long it takes for the snowmelt to percolate down and reach Little Lava Lake. “The short answer is I don’t know,” Lamarche said. “The complexity of the hydrology and geology means it’s somewhat unknown.” I had read, on Wikipedia, that the spring waters filling Clear Lake, across the divide on the McKenzie River, took 20 years to travel from their source on Mt. Washington. Lamarche was doubtful: “I would ask the authors of that article to explain how the estimate was derived.”

He pointed me to a United States Geologic Survey study, done in cooperation with OWRD, which charted the time lag between peak snowmelt and peak flow into spring-fed streams. In sequences of wet years, the groundwater discharge came relatively quickly; during drier spells, it took longer to reach peak flow. Lamarche used a garden hose analogy. “If it’s full and you turn the faucet on, you get immediate outflow. If it’s mostly empty, there’s a delay.”

So the aquifers themselves are low? “Overall, since about 2000, we haven’t seen the sequences of wet years that help recharge the aquifer system,” Lamarche said. “And that is probably reflected in the lake levels.”

Natural climate cycles? Or the specter of climate change? Like all scientists faced with limited data, Lamarche answered cautiously on the latter. “Qualitative conclusion – yes. Quantitative conclusion – no.” As the planet warms, “the amount of recharge is probably going to be less.”

On the cool early morning of August 5th I went back to Little Lava Lake to see what might have changed. The air was completely still, the water mirror smooth. If I looked cross-eyed at the surface reflection, I could imagine myself paddling up Mt. Bachelor’s remaining snowy furrows. Redwing blackbirds still clung to shoreline reeds, but the males’ scarlet shoulder patches had faded from their breeding-season brilliance. The fingerling trout were gone, perhaps to cooler, deeper waters? Perhaps eaten by bigger fish? My mergansers, adults and the nearly grown babies, rafted together in the middle of the lake. I paddled out to get a closer look, but they were in no mood to let me near. With their uncanny ability to triangulate my speed and approach angle, they steered their little flotilla to a constant, safe remove. 

The nudist couple had been replaced by fully clothed campers. Same quiet camp spot on the north shore, but this time I noticed a lot of gear and clothing hanging up to dry. The night before, a dramatic thunderstorm had turned our street in Bend into a curb-to-curb river. I asked if they’d experienced the same. The man answered cheerily, “Yup. Rained hard for about an hour.” He hadn’t quite gotten the rain fly on in time. 

So there was another source of aquifer recharge, if not nearly on the order of a series of wet snow years. 

I had felt hopeful a few days before on the phone with Melissa Franzee, Kenley’s mom. I’d asked if the lake was still coming up. “Sure is,” she chirped. And I’d felt the relief (or was it just denial?) that for one more year, maybe, possibly, perhaps, the direst scenarios of a changing climate might be put off, held at bay. 

Paddling around at last to the Deschutes River outlet – there was water between the grassy banks! I dropped down to paddle on my knees, against the possibility of running aground, but it wasn’t necessary; my fin floated clear. Down I drifted, without effort, feeling the pull. It was barely discernible but definitely there, the beginning of the big slide, downhill to the Pacific. With man-made pauses along the way: south to Crane Prairie and Wickiup reservoirs, then the turn north, the irrigation canals, Bend’s logging-era Mirror Pond, Lake Billy Chinook, the mighty Columbia, and so on down the line. 

The ancient, inexorable cycle. 

Epilog: I wrote this story in 2018 for a publication that decided ultimately not to use it. Since then water levels have dropped farther in Lava and Little Lava Lakes. The Deschutes River outlet has been bone dry for years now.

The Writing on the Wall

In a lava-rock back corner of a bay on Sparks Lake there’s a standalone tower that calls to me every time I paddle near.

It’s a wall about a dozen feet high above water, the end of a slender, buckled spine of lava that juts into the cove. I like it for the clear, green water underfoot. And for the gnomish gardens growing in its crevices: lichen and mosses, red columbine, purple larkspur. And on top a proud, twisted, bonsai pine living, it would seem, on air alone.

But this morning what caught my eye were the patterns of light reflected onto the slightly overhanging wall. The sun was in the right place behind me so that ripples on the water’s surface danced as pure white light up the black rock. Ribbons of light waved back and forth like strands of kelp, white-light Morse code appearing and disappearing on the rock’s craggy contours.

I thought of hieroglyphics. Moving hieroglyphics. Animated dancing glyphs on a cartoon obelisk. Writing on the wall.

Meaning what? Silly boy. No meaning other than the play of sunlight, the reflectivity of smooth water, the receptivity of a stone tablet.

But could it not somehow be deciphered? Like the Rosetta Stone, might there be some key to a deeper understanding?

Silly boy, I thought, as it hit me: The ripples doing the writing, the source of those oscillating shapes, were the ripples being generated under my paddle board. My unconscious balancing, my little weight shifts, created the squiggles being reflected. The writing on the wall was my writing. I was writing that moment in light.