Now I know that December 21st has not arrived, but it's winter at Quimby Pond.The pond totally froze about 4 days ago and the temperature is not predicted to rise above freezing for the next several days. So, it's winter. The freeze up was a little unusual this year, there were pockets of water (about 40 of them) all over the pond instead of the usual springs freezing last. There has been wind, so the ice is NOT perfectly flat, there are ridges and "fans" as you can see to the right. Some of you may wonder if any waterfowl got caught in the ice. Nope, I've never seen that up here. The loons left weeks before the freeze and the ducks seemed to have an instinct in that they stayed in the open pools, then left about 24 hours prior to the total ice cover.
Today, the snow is arriving. Predicted is 10 - 16 inches of the white stuff, known in Rangeley as "white gold", because the local winter economy is so dependent on snowfall.The association
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, we are The Friends of Quimby Pond. The vote was close, but the friends won out. We have an address: P. O. Box 647, Rangeley, ME 04970. We have another meeting of the steering committee on Dec. 16th at 6:30 PM. Dave Halliwell, from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection will attend. Anyone is welcome at these meetings. Please call me at 864-2179 and I will give you more information.
There are 3 things that we should accomplish at this meeting: 1) We need a mission statement. 2) We need to reserve a date for the watershed survey. It should be sometime in May, but we need to narrow down the exact dates. 3) I'd like anyone reading to chime in on this one. The DEP wants to set up the watershed survey a little differently. They want to (instead of sending one person as a coordinator) to send 4 DEP representatives here, one DEP person as the respective leader for each of 4 teams. I had promised people that the town or state government would not be involved in the survey. It would be cheaper for us to have the DEP have 4 people here, but at what cost? Would many of the pond folks object to having the DEP "inspecting" their property? The DEP (Kristin Feindell) tells me that the inspection would not be involved in the enforcement part of the department. I believe that we can change this DEP preferred type of a survey to one that is more private, but it may cost us a little more.
I thought that I would include a couple of aerial shots of the pond and a few facts (trivia perhaps).
Quimby Pond is located at latitude 44.988 and longitude -70.739. While the town of Rangeley claims to be halfway between the equator and the North Pole, Quimby Pond is closer to that designation. The maximum depth is 12 feet. My GPS estimates Quimby's elevation at 1782 feet above sea level.
Have a great couple of weeks. It's beautiful here (as usual)!
