Spraying to all fields, and attempting to stay off the political hot buttons as we move into the holiday season…
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There’s a little bit of history waiting to be discovered east of town.
I’m talking about Foster Lake, at its lowest level, we’re told, since the dam was built in the 1960s.
I wasn’t really thinking about the past a couple of weeks ago when some relatives stopped in for a few days. We decided to take them out to see some water, since they’re from central Colorado where there isn’t too much of that. It was a bit late in the afternoon, so a run out to, say, Cascadia Park didn’t seem feasible. We settled on Lewis Creek Park.
As any of you who have visited Lewis Creek in the off-season know, you have to park at the entrance and walk in. And when the lake level is down to winter pool, you can go out where the forest used to be before the Santiam River was dammed. It’s interesting to see all those stumps, 50-plus years old and hardly decayed because they’ve been under water most of the time.
But it’s really interesting right now.
If you’re familiar with the dive platform that’s usually way out in the lake, the one the kids swim to from Lewis Creek, well, it’s not very far out there any more. Just an easy stone’s throw from the shore.
There is more of the original terrain exposed now than there ever has been, one of the Corps of Engineers folks told me recently. It’s what may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see what the river originally looked like. The river bed is clearly cut out, as is Lewis Creek.
What’s really interesting, though, is all the items you can find lying on the muddy lake bottom – stuff that’s fallen out of people’s boats. Lots of red waterskiing warning flags. Lots of bottles, even some that look like they’ve been there for quite a few years.
I found somebody’s cell phone – a Samsung that didn’t look that old, in case you’ve lost one while sitting in a boat. There are sandals, old cans, lots of things if you like treasure hunting. I told my wife it would be fun to bring a metal detector out there. I’m sure people lost coins in that lake in the 1960s when quarters made of silver were still circulating.
One caution: The mud isn’t real stable and you’re going to get dirty. My kids found one spot where they sank to their calves. But generally, it wasn’t too bad and it was a lot of fun, walking around on the bottom of the lake.
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Speaking of the outdoors, if you’ve been a recent reader of this newspaper you may recall how Shane Ullrich, the local barber who has written about hunting and fishing in these pages, has complained about the junk people leave at logging road gates. Well, I hate to be a bad echo but it’s still true, as anyone who has been out there in the last month or two can attest.
I was at one particular gate a couple of weeks ago, trying to fill my tag, and just about tripped over the two deer rib cages that were simply dumped there, right in the middle of the road in front of the gate. Not to mention a whole lot of beer cans, plastic wrappers, a lot of dirty paper (that someone had apparently used while butchering their deer) and some kind of electronic amplifier thing from somebody’s car stereo. Don’t ask me what that was doing there, especially with the cut wire hanging off it. Maybe it fell out of somebody’s pickup while they were loading their venison.
Point is, and I hate to sound preachy, the sign next to this logging road graciously granted permission for the public to enter the company’s property but it requested that, among other things (no motorized vehicles, no target shooting), that people not litter.
So, 25 yards from the sign, amid ATV tracks going around the gate, we have a nasty pile of garbage. I personally appreciate landowners allowing the public to hunt and hike on their land, and I’d hate to lose that privilege because some people can’t read or refuse to.
By the way, last I saw it, that stereo booster thing was in the garbage can behind our office if anybody’s missing one.
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Redistricting is back on the table for the Oregon School Activities Association (known to most of us as the OSAA). As you may recall, there were ruffled feathers all over the state back in 2006 after the OSAA redrew the state map for high school sports and other extracurricular activities, forcing some teams that weren’t used to riding buses for long periods of time to travel great distances to compete against schools their own size. After some legal challenges by schools in Eugene, the plan was affirmed and Sweet Home has been in the five-team Val-Co League for the past three seasons.
The problem with being in a five-team league is that you have to play the same teams over and over again while schools in larger conferences are seeing a much broader range of competition. Also, because the Val-Co only has five teams, we only get two teams in the state playoffs in certain years. That hurts when you have a young team that is really improving near the end of the season but, thanks to early-season losses, can’t quite make the playoffs.
The OSAA has recognized some of these problems and is seeking to remedy them for the next four-year block, 2010-2014.
The rule makers have decided to keep the six classifications, but are looking into enlarging leagues. A very preliminary draft, for instance, keeps the current Val-Co teams together but adds Elmira and Junction City, which would bring the league up to the size of, say, the Capital Conference.
They’re looking for feedback, so if you’re interested in providing some, visit http://www.osaa.org/governance/committees/default.asp and click on the most recent updates on the Classification and Districting Committee’s activities.