There’s a plethora of early maps of Portland, many of which I’ve recently included and cataloged here for reference. One of those maps I’d never seen before recently, oddly, is this sketch-map made by William Clark (yes, he of Lewis & Clark expedition fame) from April 3, 1806, featuring a sketch of the Multnomah River, “given by several different Tribes of Indians near its entrance into the Columbia.” The original link comes from this Oregon Encyclopedia article on the Wapato (Wappato) Valley Indians, found whilst researching native settlements in Portland, notably those around the important confluence of the Willamette and Columbia but getting a feel for pre-settlement use of waterways. The map is found in Volume Four of the Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806, which constitutes the return trip of the Corps of Discovery from Fort Clatsop on the Oregon Coast back towards the east. The entry and fold-out map includes a remarkable amount of information including natural and hydrological features, as well as references to many of the tribes as alluded to in the title.
It’s amazing to see the detail of the map and density of information, in what I assume was field drawn, probably in a canoe, fending off bears while simultaneously collecting plant samples. I jest, but I’m constantly amazed at the ability of early explorers to represent places quickly and with much For me, at least, it was much easier to conceptualize graphically if you rotate the map so north is facing up, so the subsequent enlargements flip this over. This enlarged view shows the key features at the confluence, perhaps not drawn to scale, but remarkably accurate, including to the east, both the Washougal River (noted as Teal) and the Sandy River (noted as the Quick Sand). There are also notes on the various encampments on river banks, such as the Nechacolee and Nechacokee around Blue Lake in Portland on the south bank, Shoto up around modern day Vancouver Lake to the north and many more smaller encampments of the local Multnomah and Kathlamet tribes. To the west, around Wappato Island (modern day Sauvie Island) which was home to Multnomah, Clannahqueh, Cathlahcommahtup and others on Sauvie Island on the Columbia River, and around the other side of the island, known as the Multnomah Channel. See this additional post from the Oregon Encyclopedia for Lewis & Clark’s estimate of the Portland Basin Chinookian Village tribal populations here as well for more detail.
The same zone taken from a Google Earth image shows the general location of and features. The fidelity of the geography is a bit off (it’s a sketch map) but it’s all there.
Further south, the geography is a bit more sparse, but does include the upriver span of the Willamette (called here the ‘Multnomah River’) and it’s connection to the Clackamas River (heading east) including encampments of Clackamas along that river, and perhaps mis-estimating a bit how far away Mt. Jefferson actually was (see below)… and ‘The Falls’ which denotes Willamette Falls, which was an important settlements along this important confluence, and Charcowah, and Cushhooks near the Falls….
The same view of current day area, again with a bit of misalignment of the rivers, which probably comes from the map being adapted from a drawing done by a local tribal elder, but the general features there.
The text supplements the map somewhat, with stories of meeting a group of Shah-ha-la Nation and showing them the Multnomah:
“we readily prevailed on them to give us a sketch of this river which they drew on a Mat with a coal, it appeared that this river which they call Mult-nó-mah discharged itself behind the Island we call the image canoe island, as we had left this island to the south in decending & assending the river we had never seen it. they informed us that it was a large river and runs a considerable distance to the south between the Mountains.”
Clark takes a party to explore, and encounters huts from various tribes, along with harvesting of wappato and roots via canoes along the rivers, and found the hidden entrance to the Willamette (which he refers to as the Multnomah River, along with the tribes on Wappato Island and noted the depth of the. He mentions that he “…can plainly see Mt. Jefferson” which may allude to it’s proximity on the one map. As he continued to explore he mentions being “satisfyed of the size and magnitude of this great river which must water that vast tract of Country between the western range of mountains and those on the sea coast and as far S. as the Waters of Callifonia…” which if not totally true, does allude to the size of the Willamette drainage in at least draining a fair portion of NW Oregon. He continues by visiting a long house, and learns the constant refrain of deaths from small pox and starvation. He asks for a map of the area and the people from one of the elders. “I provailed on an old man to draw me a sketch of the Multnomar River and give me the names of the nations resideing on it which he readiliy done, and gave me the names of 4 nations who reside on this river two of them very noumerous. The first is Clark-a-mus nation reside on a small river… the 2.d is the Cush-hooks who reside on the NE side below the falls.”
They note the entrance to the Multnomah river being “142 miles up the Columbia river” from the Pacific, include the sketched map, and then are off, up-river, continuing eastward.
The New York Times did a recent story on How the Ice Age Shaped New York with a tagline “Long ago, the region lay under an ice sheet thousands of feet thick. It terminated abruptly in what are now the boroughs, leaving the city with a unique landscape.” This resonated with me and reminded me of posts about Minnesota’s Lake Agassiz, as well as the Waterlines presentation last year by Dr. Stan Chernicoff on Seattle’s own geological history and how the ice age covered the city with a deep layer of ice ground away over time and as it melted 10-20,000 years ago, influenced and left many traces on cities.
New York City experienced similar issues, with a two-mile thick ice layer forming over two million years back, covering the area region encompassing much of the city and all of Manhattan, with the terminal moraine reaching the zone bisecting parts of Staten Island and Long Island, until warming and retreat 18,000 years ago.
The story of many areas is the same, the depth and weight of ice shifting bedrock, and creating waterways, kettle ponds and lakes, as well as retreat leaving glacial erratics and other rubble strewn through the zones. However it’s more distinct in New York City, as pointed out in the article: “While the line of glacial debris across the northern United States is often poorly delineated, the hilly ridge around New York City tends to be quite prominent. Its maximum height is roughly 200 feet, about that of a tall apartment building.”
The ridges and hills determined where people settled, as they avoided these areas and found flatter ground, and I remember the specific outcrops left in place in Central Park as features, but perhaps also to avoid having to blast or remove them. (see header image above) The article mentions that many place names are derived from this rises, appended with Hills, Heights, and Slope and also its usage in local building materials. The proximity of the terminal moraine to New York City is unique, but that glacial history has been forgotten over time. As mentioned:
“Despite the ridge’s prominence and early allure for scientists, it turned out to be no rival for skyscrapers and urban distractions. The moraine that shaped the city was all but forgotten. “Clearly, it’s not on the radar,” said David E. Seidemann, a professor of geology at Brooklyn College. “The educational system here doesn’t emphasize earth science. And there’s so much else to do. I’ll go to a Yankees game over geology any day.”
But the hidden remnants paint a fascinating picture, capture by geologist and environmental educator from the American Museum of Natural History, Sidney Horenstein, who also does tours of these phenomena. He found documents showing that geologists working in the 1800s found in terms of the variation of hill to flatland geology: “Ridges, mountains and even flatlands are typically rooted in rocky strata, such as the bedrock that underlies Manhattan and makes it ideal for erecting skyscrapers. But early investigators found the hilly ridges to be composed of clay, silt, sand, pebbles, cobbles and boulders, all jumbled up together.”
The walk through reports (such as the fascinating Natural History of New York published in 1842) established a chronology of more focused work on things like history of glacial floods, and fills in gaps on geological processes, even showing the emergence of terms to describe processes, like ‘Ice Age’ which was starting to be more widely used in the 1880s.
A 1902 USGS large-format map provided some spatial information as well
The maps used colors to show variations of geology amidst the emerging city grid, and identified the terminal ridge. As the article points out:
“At first, the city used the stony ridge for woodlots and rain catchments. Slowly, the uses expanded to reservoirs, recreational areas and, in time, neighborhoods in which buildings and houses were built on strong footings and foundations for stability. Today, despite the wide development of the ridge’s lower slopes, a Google Earth view of New York City — a composite of images from April, June and September — shows the glacial relic as an intermittent band of green.”
A larger image of one of the maps from the folio is seen below, via NYC99 gives an indication of the rich data available – click to enlarge (image source from Texas A&M Library).
Similar to the Missoula Floods that broke through a massive ice dam and carved out the Columbia River basin, New York also had a flood termed ‘biblical’, as glacial retreat happened around 13,000 years ago, where a “... towering wave of destruction crashed down through the Hudson gorge and proceeded to smash the southern end of the local moraine to smithereens.”
It’s interesting to draw parallels between how the glacial impacts are similar on the east and west coasts, but also how they differ due to variations of geology and topography. The hidden history isn’t just hydrology, but a combination of physical and biological processes working in tandem, over millennia. We’ve done much to erase and obscure, but traces remain, indications of these long and large processes are tucked away under our feet, waiting to attract our gaze.
“…millions of people live on or near the glacial ridge. In all, it runs for roughly 30 miles beneath New York City. Invisibly, it links three boroughs, offering mute testimony to the power of vanished ice.”
HEADER: Umpire Rock in Central Park – this and all other images, unless noted, via NY Times
Some news on the project front, which partially explains the slow output on this end lately in terms of hidden hydrology updates: I’m moving from Seattle back to Portland. As regular readers know, the project origins are firmly rooted in Portland, including plenty of documentation and expansion of ideas around Tanner Springs Creek (seen below), and maybe I will finally track down one of those elusive ‘I Kayaked Tanner Creek‘ t-shirts of legend. Anyway, happy to announce this news, and Portland folks, let me know if you’re interested in some exploring in coming months.
There’s also a plethora of other areas to explore, and also to compare and contrast the unique dichotomy of Portland as a river city and Seattle as more of a ocean & lake city, and what that means/meant for development. On that note, one item I’ve not announced is some of the work figuring out the best format for a Hidden Hydrology Atlas that will span both Seattle and Portland – so stay tuned for more of this as technology and funding aligns. For now you can see the early version of the online example of interactive maps I’m testing out using a combination of Mapbox and my GIS database of information. Early days, but the potential is there, and it will expand into something more comprehensive and multi-media.
While I did get to explore a number of Seattle hidden streams, there’s so much more to do and lots to document for Ravenna, Yesler, and Green Lake, and hopefully coming back up to do more investigations. In the interim, one of my explorations I documented here in Seattle from last summer, Licton Springs, was the departure point for an essay I wrote recently for The Nature of Cities that was just published this week. Read ‘Map and Explore: Hidden Hydrology’ for some thoughts on exploring our places and connecting with our culture, geography and ecology.
So, stay tuned as projects, posts, and explorations will all pick up over the summer months. And as always, thanks for reading. See you all in Portland soon.
The Atlas for the End of the World is a great model for a compendium of research and mapping on a focused topic, which has relevance to my endeavor here at Hidden Hydrology. While the content, scale and goals are different, the structure of information in the format of the ‘atlas’ and the combination of mapping, data, and critical inquiry through essay all resonate as a great precedent.
The project was conceived by Richard Weller from The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), with collaborators Claire Hoch and Chieh Huang. A summary of the project, launching in 2017, comes from the site:
“Coming almost 450 years after the world’s first Atlas, this Atlas for the End of the World audits the status of land use and urbanization in the most critically endangered bioregions on Earth. It does so, firstly, by measuring the quantity of protected area across the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots in comparison to United Nation’s 2020 targets; and secondly, by identifying where future urban growth in these territories is on a collision course with endangered species. By bringing urbanization and conservation together in the same study, the essays, maps, data, and artwork in this Atlas lay essential groundwork for the future planning and design of hotspot cities and regions as interdependent ecological and economic systems.”
Some background on the project is found in both Précis which provides a roadmap to the site, as well as an essay “Atlas for the End?” which alludes to the first modern atlas of Ortelius, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Epitome of the Theater of the World) and the dawn of a new, albeit already populated, world, ready for exploration and exploitation. As mentioned: “In 1570, when Ortelius published his atlas, the European imagination could literally run wild with whatever might be ‘out there’. Now, a mere 450 years later, that vast, mysterious world of diverse peoples and species is completely colonized and irreversibly altered by the material and conceptual forces of modernity. Whereas Ortelius marked out modernity’s territorial beginnings, this atlas—by focusing on the remaining habitat in the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots —rakes over its remains.”
The extensive essay lays a formidable foundation for the research, touching on the impacts of the past 450 years and the loss of biodiversity through urbanization, and the identification of hotspots, as well as how cities play a huge role. As quoted:
“Although it is not yet well monitored, it is increasingly appreciated that the metabolism of the contemporary city, no matter how divorced it might feel, is interconnected with the sources and sinks of the broader landscape. It follows then that environmental stewardship is as much a matter of urban design as it is landscape ecology. As Herbert Giradet insists, it is in cities “that human destiny will be played out and where the future of the biosphere will be determined. There will be no sustainable world without sustainable cities”.7“
The themes touch on the foundations of the shift towards the Anthropocene, and our changing ideas about nature, stewardship, and it’s relationship to the profession of landscape architecture, touching on McHarg’s environmental ethics of the 1960s and also discussing the work of biologist Daniel Janzen and work on restoration of biodiversity using a metaphor of the garden. “Janzen’s ‘garden’ is not an idyllic scene constructed for contemplation, nor does it trade in images of pristine wilderness. Wildland “gardenification” as he refers to it, is just damn hard work. As Janzen explains, it involves “fencing, planting, fertilizing, tilling and weeding … bioremediation, reforestation, afforestation, fire control, proscribed burning, crowd control, biological control, reintroduction, mitigation and much more.”36 Janzen’s garden is a continual work in progress.”
The ideas continue in discussions on the role of protected and connected ecosystems, and metrics, in this case, using the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). From the text: “The overarching framework for the project of protecting and reconstructing a biodiverse global landscape is provided by the United Nations Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020. The key mechanisms of this plan are brokered and administered through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), one of the three ‘Rio Conventions’ emerging from the UN Conference on Environment and Development (the ‘Earth Summit’) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The primary objective of the CBD is that “[by] 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people”. To this end, the focus on hotspots provides a locus for where these values intersect globally, as represented with ideas of protection (and lack there of) and the ability to access massive quantities of data collected through remote sensing and being able to map it using available technologies (while cautioning against the objectivity of mapping as a practice).
A concluding essay “Atlas for the Beginning” talks about the shift to our new reality of the Anthropocene. A globe view shows “What’s left: the world’s protected areas as of 2015” which illustrates a bleak view of the fragility of the worlds ecosystems. The takeaway is a research agenda that includes more data and analysis, as well as developing methods of action, including a “…longer term research agenda is to establish a knowledge sharing network of demonstration design projects across the hotspots which bring landscape architects, environmental planners, conservationists, economists and local communities together to focus on areas of conflict between biodiversity and development. These SEED (systemic, ecological and economic design) projects will show how landscape connectivity can be achieved and how urban growth can be directed in ways that support all forms of life.”
The use of data visualizations, or datascapes, allows for unique comprehensibility of issues, as seen above. “The datascapes show that if the global population were to live (in material terms) as contemporary Americans do, there would be a major discrepancy between levels of consumption and what the earth, according to today’s technologies, can reasonably provide.” One such visual on Carbon Forest (below) shows the theoretical sequestration potential and equivalent size of forest to accommodate current populations, or, in actual numbers, “The 216 billion metric tons of CO2 emitted by a hypothetical global population of 10 billion such Americans would require 9.9 trillion trees to sequester its emissions. 2
The series of world maps are both beautiful and informative, spanning a range of topics both physical and social… a wide array of topics.
Each comes with a short blurb and reference. The map on Ecoregions is described as: “The World Wildlife Federation defines an ecoregion as “relatively large units of land or water containing a distinct assemblage of natural communities sharing a large majority of species, dynamics, and environmental conditions” 1. An ecoregion is a biome broken down even further. There are 867 ecoregions comprising the world’s terrestrial and marine ecology. Nearly half of the world’s terrestrial ecoregions (391) are within the hotspots.”
Another interesting subsection is a feature Flora & Fauna, with “the photography of Singaporean artist Zhao Renhui, Director of the Institute for Critical Zoologists, from his 2013 artwork Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World 1. The guide presents a catalogue of curious creatures and life-forms that have evolved in often unexpected ways to cope with the stresses and pressures of a changed world.” The species are both amazing and somewhat disturbing, such as the bionic AquaAdvantage salmon (below), “…a genetically modified salmon that can grow to its adult size in 16 to 18 months instead of three years. The AquaAdvantage salmon has been modified by an addition of a growth hormone regulating gene from a Pacific Chinook salmon and a promoter gene from an ocean pout.”
Read more on the project via this post on the ASLA Blog, as well as a relevant article by Weller from the innaugural issue of LA+ Journal, entitled ‘World Park‘
I’ve been inspired by the work many others have done to capture the qualities of coverage of waterways at national scale both in the US and the UK, and beyond the mapping, appreciate their investigations into the unique distribution of place names, or toponyms. The language of the waterways informs more local hidden hydrology endeavors, and understanding regional vernacular variations provides a snapshot into our varied relationships with water. While a glance at the Pacific Northwest via these other maps shows that the predominant name for waterways is probably going to be either creek or river, I wanted to dive a bit deeper to see what other names are used to denote waterways. To accomplish this, I spent some quality time with the USGS National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) to unlock a bit of the secrets of regional variations.
For starters, the NHD is an amazing resource of information, pulling together a comprehensive collection of data on flowlines, watershed basins, and more and the ability to get data from a variety of formats for small to large basins and states. From their site, the purpose of the data is to: “define the spatial locations of surface waters. The NHD contains features such as lakes, ponds, streams, rivers, canals, dams, and stream gages, in a relational database model system (RDBMS). These data are designed to be used in general mapping and in the analysis of surface water systems.” The first steps are a bit daunting, as the State of Washington included data with over 1.3 million flowlines, seen below in aggregate. The flowlines aren’t any one single waterway, but are the individual segments that make up each creek.
While the data preserves local basins shapes by sprawling outside state lines, I wanted to make this unique to Washington, so needed to clip it to the state boundary. This ended up being a bit of a task for my rather slow computer to crank out the clipping, so I had to think of some alternatives to simplify the dataset. Interestingly enough, over 80 percent of the flowlines (around 1.1 million of them) are unnamed, and while I’m sure are perfectly lovely bits of creek and river, they don’t help in our purpose in terms of deriving place names. Eliminating them also serves the dual benefit of reducing the size of our working dataset quite a bit. After trimming to the state boundaries, we ended up with a nice workable set of around 170,000 flowlines that have names, seen below.
Per the NHD FAQ page, “Many features also are labeled with the geographic name of the feature, such as the Ohio River. The feature names must be approved by the Board of Geographic Names (BGN) in order to qualify for inclusion in the NHD.” More on the BGN and the wonderful assortment of place names that exist in these lists beyond their descriptor (which is perhaps the fuller idea of toponyms), in this case we break down the list and see what comes to the top. Not surprising, but the use of the terms Creek and River dominate the landscape of Washington, accounting for 98% of all named flowlines.
Of the totals, creeks truly dominate, with around a 75% chance that a trickle of water in the state will be referred to as a creek. The larger, less numerous rivers make up 23% of all flowlines, and the map above paints a wonderful portrait of the density of waters. Separated out by type, you see the branched structures of trunk and stem that pumps water through most of the mountainous west side of the state, with the larger, drier plains to the east more open. All total the combined length of these equals over 30,000 linear miles.
1. CREEKS
2. RIVERS
So we live in a creek and river area of the world. Amidst these dominating toponyms are a distributed layer of types of flowlines that make up the remainder of the story of Washington, that final 2 percent, emphasized in a darker blue below.
The secondary naming of these includes the most common, isolated and color coded, with a legend denoting the eight most common alternative flowline names.
The relative percentage as a portion of that slim 2% of state flowlines, include:
Slough (30%)
Fork (16%)
Canal (16%)
Ditch (9%)
Wasteway (4%)
Branch (4%)
Run (4%)
Stream (3%)
The remaining 14% are composed of small portions that include Lateral, Brook, Drain, Slu (a variation of Slough), Gulch, Channel, Siphon and it’s alternative spelling Syphon, Washout, Waterway, Swale, Glade, Pass, Gate, and Range. Many of these as we see, are geographically located towards the center of the state where agricultural landscape has created larger modifications and creation of waterways (described in the NHD data under the names like Artificial Path, Canal Ditch, and Connector). There’s a split between more traditional waterway name variations (i.e. Slough, Fork, Branch, Run, Stream) and those that mostly utilitarian, capturing the poetry of industrialization (i.e. Wasteway, Ditch, Canal, Siphon, Lateral). Removing the background landform, you see the composite of the different stream types as a whole, with creek/river in blue and the remainder by color.
For a more local view, the NHD data is a bit less sparse, not capturing the same amount of complexity is smaller urban waterways, plus without the other water bodies like lakes the geography seems somewhat off. The purple to the west in the Olympic Pennisula shows a density of flowlines referred to as streams, and the darker red denotes a number of local sloughs that exist in local river systems. It’s harder to see, but you can catch the Ship Canal in this group, and the slightly lighter red fork in the center is the infamous Duwamish Waterway, the lower stretch that runs through Seattle and ‘lost’ its designation as a river – interestingly enough it’s the only flowline in the state with that moniker.
I was expecting the dominance of creeks and rivers in the nomenclature, but was also really surprised that these combined to make up so many of the collective flowlines. Perhaps early settlers and place-namers lacking a bit of creativity. It was also a good surprise to find a wealth of other place names in Washington, albeit many used to describe man-made features, including the most poetic name of wasteway, but enough fun to find an occasional branch, fork, brook, and run, which are more common elsewhere in the United States, per the other US maps.
These are pretty basic graphics exported from GIS just to give a feel for the data, so I’d like to play around more with representation, perhaps some sort of heatmap. Also I’m eyeing Oregon for a comparison, and maybe wanting to dive into the waterbodies as well beyond linear flowlines, so more fun to come. Who knows, an atlas of the whole country with a top ten of their most common names of each state. Or maybe not…
A fun story about an interesting project being developed to provide a version of street view, only for rivers. From the story on knkx, “‘FishViews’ Mapping Tool Provides Virtual tours Of Local Rivers” which announced they had “…just finished mapping its sixth Northwest river, the Stillaguamish. Other tours include Lake Washington, Lake Union, Shilshole Bay and the Locks. They’re all enabled for virtual reality headsets and you can cruise along at your preferred speed, or zoom around the panoramic images with your cursor, like you might on Google. You can even take a peek underwater. There’s definitely a “gee whiz” factor.”
From their site, FishViews aims to explore waterways and waterway data with virtual reality tours, but they also have a ton of other practical uses. Focus areas at this point include Seattle area and some more remote locations in the Cascade Range and Olympic Pennisula, including their first, the somehwhat recently dam-free Elwha River (seen in the header above). Additionally zones in Texas around San Antonio and Houston have also been mapped by the FishViews team. You can access via guess account, or sign up for full access to some of the info – and other than having to sign in over and over again, I’d highly recommend losing a few hours, as it’s a lot of fun.
The interface is powered through ESRI storymap format, so has a pretty intuitive user experience of selecting through map icons or on a slider, with the ability to search as well. Lots of these early maps focus around the Seattle. One worth checking out is the Lower Duwamish, which encompasses the lower 12 miles of the Green River drainage, now so manipulated it lost its designation as a river and is now only “known as the Duwamish Waterway”. Each ‘tour’ has a bit of introductory info.
Probably few have the chance to boat the 12 mile stretch of the Duwamish, and it’s telling to tour the edges and discover the massive industrialization of the entire shoreline.
And also the moments of sublime beauty, which are reflected in a similar fashion to this previous post on the Duwamish River from the book ‘Once and Future River’, such as what may be the longest waterfront facade without a window, to the industrial beauty inherent in this context.
The access to metrics is sort of an interesting take, with a variety of info available in a pop-up, such as resistivity and conductivity, dissolved solids, temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen, as seen below for the Duwamish (at least when this data was being collected).
A few more shots, including the area connecting the Ship Canal to Lake Union.
And for smaller lakes, a nice coverage around the shoreline of Green Lake – also showing, similar to the beauty of Street View in capturing art – there’s some amazing shots of these aquatic resources as well.
In Portland area, they done an initial mapping of the Willamette, which is a nice tour around the city. An option as well to have the scene data in the lower corner also provides some context – but it drives a lot like Street View.
The ability to animate by linking the frames together is not a terribly enjoyable experience – although you can adjust frame rate. Think along the lines of a boat ride with a queasy stomach,but is a nice way to tour through a route to see what it holds. A view of the northern section of the Willamette shows this in action.
The underwater view is probably a lot more interesting in shallow water rivers and creeks, but pretty much looks a lot like this in both Portland and Seattle.
Although I was secretly hoping for robot fish, the technology for FishView’s capture technology is similar to information gathering for Street View, with a similar 360 camera rig, along with a variety of other sensors.
While the cameras are catching the views up top, they are employing some selective sub-surface cameras, as well as customized data logging equipment. Their process also does surveying and “…collects data below the surface. We deploy leading edge sonar technology for mapping, imaging, and exploring underwater. We use EPA standards for detailed water quality assessments and HD photography for below the surface insights. All tailored to our Virtual Reality Platform.”
The company also provides these services, per their site: “FishViews offers interactive 360° virtual tours and virtual reality for aquatic resource management. We incorporate a wide variety of hydrologic survey methods in order to produce a personalized, high-quality presentation that works specifically for your waterway data survey needs. From a stand alone 360° panoramic tour, to a comprehensive virtual reality model of an entire waterway, we create virtual platforms giving hydrologic data a home, complete with a custom-designed user interface. Our individual approach will ensure all your hydrologic survey requirements are met.”
The possibilities of this seems pretty intriguing. There’s obviously a scale aspect of , but the examples from Green Lake (seen in a VR snapshot above) Lake Union, and the Ship Canal and Locks and Discovery Park shoreline are all great explorations of urban waters in a way yet to be seen – a true key to unlocking some hidden hydrology.
And thanks to @pugetpeople for the tip on this one!
I tweeted a bit back that I’m reading the book Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained: Rethinking City-River Relations, and so far it hasn’t disappointed. More info for sure on some of the great content on cities and rivers forthcoming. However, an intriguing concept mentioned in the intro was the Japanese concept of shin-sui, which the authors loosely define as “playing with water”. They mention these in an overall trend of cities refocusing on their urban rivers, and specifically of ways to encourage people reconnecting with these urban waterways. The authors bring up urban waterfront parks, and mention these “shin-sui” parks as a way of connecting with natural processes:
” “Although these projects were conducted for recreational rather than ecological purposes, they helped to turn people’s eyes back to nature.” (18)
Translation being a tricky thing, there’s multiple meanings that emerge when one starts digging into the concept of shinsui (and someone with a grasp of Japanese beyond my total lack thereof please correct me). Online definitions, include water references, summarily – flood, fuel & water, inundation, as well as having meanings for adoration, cooking, salary.
Another reference in a book that popped up in a Google search, Japan for Kids, has a great way of describing the parks a friendship: “A new concept in neighborhood playground is a ‘shinsui park.’ Shinsui means literally ‘to be friendly with water.’ A shinsui park is one with plenty of water attractions that provide children with a chance to get use to water by playing in it.” (127)
The designs for these transcend the mere “splash play” or water park, but do share some of the same elements of interactivity and immersion. Owing to the diversity of density of Japanese cities, they are often narrow, but it does show the potential for even abstracted water courses to co-exist with urbanization.
Otonashi Shinshi Park is one of these very urban examples, located in the northern area of Tokyo and literally wedged in a channel between development. You get a feel for the scale and elements, in this case a high-walled channel that opens up to some more interactive and tactile elements.
A little more lush version from photographer Andy Serrano is found at Oyokogawa Shinsui Park, which he describes: “The park runs alongside the Oyoko-gawa River in the Sumida Ward of Tokyo, and is a popular place for local residents who play, walk, fish, and even swim there. With the Tokyo Sky Tree looming nearby, cherry blossom season gives visitors a taste of Japan’s dual natures: historic traditions side-by-side with ultra-modernity, natural beauty next to futuristic technology and architecture.”
The Tanada Shinsui Park on the Houzuyamma River in the village of Toho in Fuuses some vernacular elements to create a “River pool…for the infant and elementary school children [and the] …”Koinobori pool” river pool is a pool that uses the difference in height of the rice terraces.”
Another urban example is sculptural pools of the Arima River Shinsui Park near Kobe, Japan, which is located near Arima Onsen, one of the oldest hot springs locations in the country.
As mentioned, these few examples I’ve show are not about restoration, and vary from just parks by the river to ones with active recreation elements focused on water. While natural edges occur, many are somewhat channellized, highly designed and very abstracted river environments — akin the art-side of the conceptual continuum of restoration. The goal here is more recreational, but, as the editors of Rivers Lost mention, they may provide a powerful precedent for engaging people of all ages with their natural waterways, and informing urban residents on the natural processes
A recent announcement that the Department of Interior is planning a massive reorganization has received a bunch of attention. While Secretary Zinke has done a number of dubious things in his short time at Interior, this one at least, having some origins based on the concepts of John Wesley Powell, initially made me pause to consider if it may have merit. If you can stomach watching Zinke talk for over five minutes, the video from DOI explaining the move is here. Or you can read this, where I first read about the concept, via an article Outside Magazine: “Ryan Zinke’s Watershed Plan Is 140 Years Too Late” To summarize the background:
“The latest object of the interior secretary’s affection is John Wesley Powell. A Civil War veteran who lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh, Powell is best known as a geologist and geographer who led expeditions in the American Southwest, including the first documentedfloat down Grand Canyon.Those travels inspired Powell, in an 1878 report, to recommend the West be settled in a fashion that would organize the desiccated territory by watershed. Doing so, he argued, would make for a more collaborative and ecologically sound way of managing resources, especially in a region where the most precious resource is water. “
This basin map, seen below from an old NPR story about “The Vision of John Wesley Powell“, shows the “Map of the Arid Region of the United States showing drainage districts, 1890-91”, which is the impetus mentioned by Zinke, and explained per the article: “In 1878, Powell published his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, which laid out a concrete strategy for settling the West without fighting over scarce water. Powell wanted to stall the waves of homesteaders moving across the plains and mountains. Instead, he wanted to plan settlement based in part on the cooperative model practiced in Utah by Mormon settlers, who tapped mountain snowmelt and the streams, lakes and rivers it created with irrigation ditches leading to crops. Powell wanted to organize settlements around water and watersheds, which would force water users to conserve the scarce resource, because overuse or pollution would hurt everyone in the watershed. Powell believed this arrangement would also make communities better prepared to deal with attempts to usurp their water.”
While some see it as pure politics, and view it with skepticism, others acknowledge some merit. Per Outside: ““Intellectually, the idea of organizing more in terms of the landscape in the West—that works,” says John Freemuth, executive director of the Cecil D. Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University. “But the devil is in the details. The damage that could be done to relationships and how agencies do business, that doesn’t look like it’s been well thought out yet.” There is mention of the complications of the current water system, where far away water is transported hundreds of miles to other locations, which perhaps makes basin boundaries obsolete, and is antithetical, in essence to Powell’s original notions, (thus the ‘too late’ tagline). As mentioned. ““For Powell, the water would not be taken out of the watershed or out of the basin and transferred across mountains…hundreds of miles away to allow urban growth to take place,” Donald Worster, a Powell biographer, told NPR in 2003. “So L.A., if it existed at all, would have been a much, much smaller entity. Salt Lake City would be smaller. Phoenix would probably not even exist.”
The Washington Post also weighed in, mentioning on January 10th the “Interior plans to move thousands of workers in the biggest reorganization in its history”, and some of the implications of “the largest reorganization in the department’s 168-year history, moving to shift tens of thousands of workers to new locations and change the way the federal government manages more than 500 million acres of land and water across the country.” In short, the “…proposal would divide the United States into 13 regions and centralize authority for different parts of Interior within those boundaries. The regions would be defined by watersheds and geographic basins, rather than individual states and the current boundaries that now guide Interior’s operations”.
Skeptics are probably right to wonder if this is an effective change, but some of the criticism of it being hard to do, moving offices, costs, issues like splitting states into two zones sort of miss the point, if the goal is a broad basin-specific planning mechanism. The concept that there’s a political agenda is obvious, and some of the talk of this being a covert way of downsizing government and eroding the mission are valid. Other criticisms, such as removal of Bureau of Indian Affairs offices, as mentioned in the article are more troubling. As quoted: “This proposal is concerning because it appears to eliminate the Navajo Regional Office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). “A change of this magnitude should only come after extensive, meaningful government-to-government consultation with the affected tribes. On its face, this looks more like a dismantling than a reorganization.”
Environmental groups as well echo the idea that it may seem ok on the surface, but is at it’s root political. As quoted: ““A regional approach to managing Interior might indeed make sense, but the jury is out on this reorganization,” Sharon Buccino, senior director for lands at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an email. “Virtually everything Secretary Zinke has done to date has been to advance fossil fuel interests — above the stewardship of our public lands, preservation of wildlife and protection of clean air and water.””
It’s dubious whether this would happen, but there’s some intriguing notions it brings up, perhaps in a less divisive political climate, as to where this could actually be beneficial. The Washington Post article linked to the overlay of current bureau configurations and the proposed idea of ‘Common Regions’, as mentioned. The patchwork of overlaid jurisdictional boundaries would obviously be a change, but fundamentally there’s some wisdom (perhaps Powell’s wisdom) at work in thinking about this
Whether it goes anywhere is dubious, as it’s an interesting idea wrapped up in massive government reorganization that brings with it so much baggage as to sink it before it starts. As Outside concludes, “Perhaps it’s best to think of Zinke’s watershed-based West as a thought experiment.” Or possibly, it’s a question of being too soon, and that a more thought-out approach could possibly be implemented over the course of the next decade to address concerns but keep it from just being that unrealized concept.
BEYOND POLITICS
I’ve long been a proponent of the concept of transforming political boundaries more in line with hydrological ones, as the idea of connecting choices made with the impacts to watersheds, first presenting the concept in a presentation at the 2006 National ASLA Conference. The genesis of the idea is the that these basins and watersheds are nested systems, with larger units encompassing many smaller elements, and in turn being encompassed by larger systems. The idea of neighborsheds (i.e. neighborhood watersheds) involve a small scale redrawing our local boundaries using subwatersheds instead of arbitrary street or orthagonal boundaries that we currently employ. This provides an opportunity to reimagine our local places in alignment with nature, and also helps residents understand their place at a scale that is knowable. The connection to local flows provides a context, and the nesting systems allow one to link thier actions to the larger whole.
There are some obvious organizational structures in place that adopt this nested, such as the idea of USGS Hydrologic Units (HU) that organize elements like the Watershed Boundaries used in the National Hydrography Database. The map below shows the largest resolution, the regional scale, of which there are 21 in the United States, know by a system of codes, or HUCs.
Some info via a really good page on Wikipedia on Hydrological Codes, this scales down from the original 21 regional HUs, to 222 subregions, 370 basins, 2,200 subbasins, 22,000 watersheds and around 160,000 subwatersheds. The range in scale is also interesting, with a Region averaging a size of approximately 177,560 square miles, a typical basin spanning 10,000 square miles, down to 220 square mile watersheds and 40 square mile subwatersheds. The Pacific Northwest is HU-17 expands to grab most of the Columbia River basin flowing west from the Rocky Mountains (which also reaches far up into Canada but is not shown on this map).
This breakdown the the nested scales provides a nice summary of that breakdown.
The Water Resource Inventory Area (WRIA) structure in Washington is an extension of this idea as well, with the ability to delineate a watershed focus on conservation. An image of WRIA boundaries overlaid with county lines in Washington State is instructive as to the difference between political lines drawn.
These denote the smallest HU scale of subwatershed, which as we discussed are around 40 square miles each, which is still rather large, but at least somewhat more comprehensible than larger basins. The WRIAs for the Puget Sound show the very organic structure of basin-focused districts (which is also the final scale of the Hydrological Unit map showing Subwatersheds), with the only hard-line in this case being the Canadian border to the north.
An zoomed into the smaller scale around Seattle, the two districts include WRIA 8, the Lake Washington and the Cedar River Basin, which encompasses much of the City, and the WRIA 9, the Duwamish-Green River Basin which drains the south segment of the city. While it may complicate things as a current city and a county boundaries and require some intergovernmental agreements from many parties, the ability to isolate hydrological areas makes planning for these watersheds in terms of impacts to ecosystems much easier. In some sense these could be a reimagined county structure by these subwatersheds, which isn’t actually a bad idea, if only as a though experiment.
The nesting could continue infinitely and get down unit you get to the smallest drainage, which could encompass a few blocks in the city. More on this to comes as I continue to expand on the neighborshed concept. While the politicized proposal from Interior seems doomed to failure, there is some merit to these types of proposals that transcend politics and assess the concept of watershed specific boundaries in terms of thinking outside the box, and inside the basin.
As I alluded to in the previous post on smaller lakes, the large Seattle lakes provide the form and contribute to the overall sense of place. River cities are shaped differently than coastal and lake cities, and the relationship with water differs due to this morphology. In either case, any urban waterway will exist in balance with many factors of urbanization, industrialization, influencing the ecological and social connections between hydrological and other systems.
In addition, because these larger water bodies exist in tandem with anthropocentric activities, they accumulate a mix of the odd and off-beat. And while I was excited about the idea of “Searching for the Mystery Sharks of Seattle”, those particular mysteries ended up a bit further outside the realm of our local water bodies. However, in Seattle, there is still evidence of some strange things in both Lake Washington and Lake Union, worth a bit of exploration.
One endeavor is the Center for Wooden Boats and their Underwater Archeology Project, starting in 2008. A good overview of this is the form of a post from 2011 by Dick Wagner “Beneath the Waters” recounts some of the finds, including a range of boats from back into the 1880s, as well as cars, motorcycles and even a Vespa scooter.
A video ‘Shipwrecks of Lake Union: Seattle’s Hidden History” the explorations from 2012: “This short video documents the Lake Union underwater archaeology project that The Center for Wooden Boats Founding Director Dick Wagner has been helping lead for the last several years. CWB is working with the UW’s Burke Museum, The State Department of Ecology, and others to locate and document vessels and other historic artifacts. Using the latest in underwater technology, divers and amateur archaeologists have been scouring the 40-foot-deep lake, looking at more spots where sunken vessels lie.”
The wreck of the J.E. Boyden, which is one of the finds of the Underwater Archaeology Project above, is located in the south part of the lake, “One of the oldest and best documented wrecks in Lake Union, the J.E. Boyden was built in 1888 and has been on the lake bottom since 1935.”
The Global Underwater Explorers Seattle group, which educates divers. From their site: “our exploration projects will have the ultimate goal of gathering consistent observational data and documenting the degradation or appreciation of our submerged resources over time. Through data analysis, we aim to drive policy-changing efforts to conserve, protect and create public awareness for our submerged resources” They also maintain Project Baseline, which is an interactive online map which displays bathymetry of Lake Union and Washington, with documentation of these wrecks as well as unknown and unexplored underway element. The Lake Union area in whole, which also shows the lake to be quite shallow, maxing out at about 40 feet at the deepest points.
A zoom in on the south section offers some interesting underwater topography, and the information about the Boyden, with a pop-up of info. Go to the map and check it out and you can see the distinct shape of the boat on the surface.
There’s definitely some novelty to the concept of shipwrecks, and the information appeals to a certain geeky longing that seems visceral to the water. As summed in the Seattle Magazine article there’s more to it that that:
“The effort to record these old wrecks is not simply a matter for scuba heads or boat geeks. Lake Union is the heart of Seattle’s maritime origins; filling in the story of its transformation from a pristine natural lake to a center for industry (including sawmills, brick making and boatbuilding) to a recreation hub through photos and film is of tremendous value.”
LAKE WASHINGTON
As for Lake Washington, the significantly larger water body, it doesn’t take much digging to uncover a range of good stories and mysteries. A 2014 KUOW Story is a good starting point: “What’s On The Botton of Lake Washington? Planes, Trains And…” hints at the diversity of subsurface elements, including planes “ Lake Washington is like a treasure trove for old plane wrecks. There are at least seven at the bottom of the Lake. They’re a frozen piece of our wartime history, a time when mock air battles raged over these waters. Midair collisions would send airplanes crashing into the lake.”
SHIPS
One there’s no shortage of, much like Lake Union, are ships, many of them either lost in accidents, or purposely scuttled. Per the KUOW story, “…there are about 400 boats beneath the surface: ferries, barges, three Navy minesweepers, mostly in the shallower waters off Kirkland, where the Lake Washington Shipyards used to be. Now, it’s a graveyard for wrecked boats. “These are full-on, full-sized ferries on the bottom, right underneath all the yachts that are parked there now,” said diver Ben Griner, also aboard. As for the minesweepers, one day they were docked, the next they were gone.”
For as long as there’s been water and something staring into its depths, there’s been the desire to dive in and see what’s underneath. Overlapping with the Global Underwater Explorers (GUE Seattle), is the Maritime Documentation Society, (link is to Facebook, as their original link is bad) is one of those groups that do this on a regular basis, with a mission. From their page, it is focused on “exploration and documentation of existing, undiscovered, and natural historic shipwrecks. Our goal is to create public awareness and expand the wealth of history for present and future generations.”
Some good videos are also found via DCS Films, which is ‘Dedicated to Advanced Technical Diving and Underwater Cinematography’ is a good resource to see what its like submarine, and they have some info on Lake Washington Relics. A clip from a story from “KCPQ 13 on the artifacts of Lake Washington A joint effort of the Maritime Documentation Society, DCS Films, and GUE Seattle” offers a bit of the footage.
Similarly the afforementioned GUE-Seattle has some great info about explorations on their blog, along with the maps shown before. Some of the stories of the dives are a fun read, to understand that equipped with a bit of info such as a general location and some scans, the fun is in exploration. One such as this exploration of LW250, an unknown object, seen here in the bathymetric view.
And the interesting perspective of the side sonar imagery, seen below.
From the post: “We found a well-preserved wooden sailboat in good condition and it was a pleasure exploring it. As is true with most fish stories and dive stories, this was the most spectacular boat even found. It had a hole in the deck with treasures of very old bottles, ledgers of misplaced bank funds, police ID badges, a revolver, and an attaché case chained to the railing…..actually it had none of that, but it was as exciting as if it did. Just to be there on this boat that no one had ever seen was thrilling. The boat actually had a Washington state registration number and the last year sticker on the side was 1983.”
A snip of the GUE-Seattle Bathymetry shows part of the Lake (it’s a really big lake) showing a range of underwater explorations, and also the relative depths, as you see see beyond the east side tidal zones, the edge of Lake washington falls off sharply from the Seattle shoreline (on the left side of the map).
And while the shipwrecks are cool, I’m really fascinated with the bathymetric info as an interesting exploration of hidden hydrology that goes beyond creeks and rivers – especially as there was so much manipulation of the Lake levels amidst the re-plumbining of the entire region, this information provides some great clues to a history unique to a lake-shaped city.
AN UNDERWATER FOREST
My interest in this topic in general was piqued by the May 2011 KUOW story “The spooky, underwater forests of Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish”, which describes 1000 year old forests off the edges of areas of both lakes. Remnants of an 1100 year old seismic event, areas of these forests were discovered The caption helps explain this image : ” This image is a close up of the standing timber on the south end of Mercer Island. The image is generated using a side scan sonar towed behind a boat about 20 feet off the bottom. The trees are visible mostly from the shadows they cast.
There was a video I do recall seeing, but all the links now seem to be gone. It was bit disorienting, so aside from a glimpse of something tree-like, it was alot of darkness and blurriness, which makes one thin. Ben Griner of Coastal Sensing who explored the Lake via sonar and underwater is, quoted in the story “…describes the drowned trees off the southern coast of Mercer Island as a thrill to swim through (although he gets not everyone would see it that way). “It’s certainly a disorienting dive,” he said. “A lot of people call it really freaky. Other people describe it as exciting and interesting.” The lake is pitch black at that depth — and being underwater can mess with one’s sense of movement. Griner said it’s sometimes difficult to tell if the water is moving or he is, and divers often bump into things. “Because of how long the forest has been under water and how busy the lake is, most trees are just the trunks now,” he said. “It can be a little creepy, but it’s really fun to swim through the trees.”
From the Wikipedia page, the location of the underwater forests are located in yellow, adjacent to Mercer Island to the south, and another segment. Per the page, the earthquake from around 900 C.E. created “The landslides on heavily wooded land created “bizarre submerged forests” of old-growth timber, preserved by the cool water and low oxygen in the deep lake.[1][5] These sunken forests were known to early European settlers of the Seattle area, for whom the snags could be a hazard to ships on the lake, and as early as 1919, nearly 200 of the sunken trees had been removed from depths of 65–132 feet (20–40 m)”
David Williams, who does his usual engagingly thorough job of discussing this topic back in 2014 on a post “What Lies Beneath – the Secrets of Lake Washington” discusses ships, and these Submerged Forests as well, explaining a chapter in the story (also mentioned in the KUOW story).
“Mostly forgotten, the trees merited public attention in the 1990s. In 1994, John Tortorelli was caught salvaging wood from the submerged forests. Unfortunately for him the state Department of Natural Resources owns the trees, plus he damaged an underwater sewer line. Found guilty of three counts of theft and three of trafficking in stolen property, Tortorelli received a jail term of three and a half years”
The post includes this map, highlighting the locations of the souther sections identified above.
COAL CAR ENDNOTE
As many discussed the other submerged worlds of ships and forests, both the KUOW article and David Williams mention coal cars on the bottom of the Lake as well. Williams elaborates on the the eastside coal connection, which saw a constant stream of “… coal was loaded on railroad cars at Newcastle and lowered 900 feet by tram to Lake Washington, where the cars traveled on a barge to Union Bay and then on a tram over the narrow neck of land now crossed by SR-520. A second barge carried the coal cars across Lake Union to a train (Seattle’s first) that carried the coal its final mile to a final tram, which lowered the ore down to a massive coal bunker at the base of Pike Street. It was on one of these trips across Lake Washington that the barge dropped its load of coal cars now sitting at the bottom of the lake.”
With that frequency, the accident was bound to happen. To verify this concept, a cool shot from Coastal Sensing shows the scattered remains of perhaps these same “Coal Cars in Lake Washington Seattle. Lost in a storm while transporting coal from Coal Creek to the small city of Seattle.” (read more about this here).
There are some that shape Seattle, including Lake Washington to the east (see above header image), a massive 21,500 acres of lake area and a max depth of 214 feet, draining a watershed of over 550 square miles and defines the entire inland edge of the city. In the medium size category is centrally located Lake Union, (below) which encompasses 580 acres, a max depth of 50 ft, and a similarly larger watershed. These, along with the Salish Sea to the west, and the Ship Canal and locks, literally form the hourglass shape of the City of Seattle and make up much of the story of the city in terms of water.
Nautical charts aside, we will have plenty more to come on these in terms of history and form, as well as some new efforts that have unlocked some mysteries hidden in their depths. For now, In addition to these large lakes, there are a number of small lakes that dot the landscape, remnants of the glacial action, namely in the form of kettle ponds. King County has a site for Lakes Data and Descriptions, which includes both, but of particular interest is the page for Small Lakes Data and Info, which allows access to information on these lake, including some simple yet compelling bathymetric maps. Green Lake falls into the small lake category (and also has been plagued with water quality issues. The bathymetry shows the current shoreline, which has a lake surface of 259 acres with a contributing watershed (although no contributing streams anymore) of 1875 acres.
For a slightly different visual,this 1938 W.P.A Sanitary Survey map (via the Seattle Municipal Archives page) shows a color coded look “Showing Depth Contours of Green Lake as of 1936”.
Those familiar with the story will know that the shoreline of the lake was changed a bit around the turn of the 20th century, and the addition of the waterfowl named island by said WPA also was not an original, but more on the historic manipulation of the shoreline of Green Lake at a future date.
For now, another interesting resource on the King County Lake site charting of various lake metrics, including water quality. As I mentioned, water quality issues, mostly in the form of toxic algae growth, have been problematic in Green Lake, with a peak issue in 2013 and a spike in 2016 Some historical data shows the situation in 2016, which shows a spike in Chlorphyll-a, which is an indicator of algae growth, and subsequent nutrient and temperature charts.
The smaller lakes in North Seattle also appear, including the smallest (yet deepest) Haller Lake, which has a surface are of 15 acres, with a max depth of 36 feet.
Bitter Lake has a surface area of 19 acres with a depth up to 31 feet.
Both are probably similar in size today as they were in the 1800s, based on the historical maps. The land uses and while the land use has changed, also probably have similar catchment zones. Maps on the site outline these watersheds, for instance the 331 acre drainage of the lake. As mentioned on the site: “This map shows the area of the watershed relative to the area of the lake. Generally speaking, the larger a watershed is relative to a lake, the greater the influence land use practices on lake water quality.”
An interesting tidbit on this was discovering the amazing Lakes of Washington by Ernest E. Walcott published in the early 1960s which was the basis for much of the bathymetric info included on the King County site and other resources. I’ll expand on at a later date, but in that vein, while outside of the city proper, the range of bathymetric maps, so I snipped a few pages out of this document, which includes lakes in King County that are part of the Lake Stewardship Program – just for a flavor of different lake forms in comparison (at least formally, as they do vary in scale) – all of which are derived from the work of Wolcott.
And if you still need your Lake Washington bathymetry fix, one I did find, for the more artistic (or looking for a gift for that special map nerd) are these fun wood fun maps (found amongst other local and national water bodies) sold on Etsy by ‘Beneath the Sail’
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An interesting tidbit on this was discovering the amazing Lakes of Washington by Ernest E. Walcott published in the early 1960s which was the basis for much of the bathymetric info included on the King County site and other resources. I’ll expand on at a later date, but in that vein, while outside of the city proper, the range of bathymetric maps, 
