Pond Building II

The bottom is pure clay and it is at the low spot of a large watershed, so the site was perfect. Pretty soon the water started showing up at the bottom of the pond. Here's my Dad, adding perspective.

And then, in November of 1990, it rained like nobody's business. It has never rained since then as much as it rained that month. Our 1/2 acre (?) pond was filled up in no time.

Here's the view of our pond from the neighbor's window. This slightly yellowed photo sat on my desk at work for the next 18 years.

Pond Building

The dozers came in the summer of 1990. Note the expert equipment operator on this massive machine in the first picture. First they scraped off the precious few inches of good topsoil and piled it up for Eric's and our future gardens. Then, they sketched out the dimensions of the pond, going round and round, creating our new road and the dike holding the pond away from the stream to its North.

At one point they asked us, do you want an island? We pondered for a minute, and then said Yes! We do want an island. This also helped as we did not have to displace tons more of the soil.

Here is a picture of the whole pond. You can see the blue camp-site tarp in the distance. This view is approximately the same as from our living room window today. The final picture shows my sister Rosalie (five feet, maybe) This illustrates that the pond is about 11 feet deep in places.

My next post continues pond building and filling with water!