jgreco;c-48517 wroteFrom the Deerfield Valley News via the CT River Valley Trout Unlimited Newsletter:
CT River Valley TU chapter will continue to press for Snow Lake removal
DOVER- A local conservation group has vowed to continue pressuring Vail Resorts, the new owners of Mount Snow, to honor a commitment made by previous owner Peak Resorts.
Under Mount Snow’s current Act 250 master plan, which went into effect about 10 years ago, Peak Resorts agreed to remove the dam on the North Branch of the Deerfield River at their now-defunct Snow Lake snowmaking pond and restore natural flow to the stream.
During the resort’s construction of its West Lake snowmaking facility, a spokesman for Peak Resorts said that the company’s intention was to carry out the stream restoration following the successful completion of the snowmaking facility, but the work never began.
According to David Deen, president of Trout Unlimited’s Connecticut River Valley chapter, the stream restoration agreement in Mount Snow’s master plan did not include any deadline, and the restoration was not included as a condition of Mount Snow’s Act 250 permit for their West Lake project.
At issue is Snow Lake’s impact on trout habitat, as well as the overall health of the stream. Deen says that trout require a habitat with cold, highly oxygenated water and, according to temperature samples taken by local Trout Unlimited members at various points along the stream before Snow Lake, at Snow Lake, and below Snow Lake, water below the Snow Lake Dam is several degrees warmer than water entering the lake.
The warmer water holds less oxygen, and Deen says sediment from stormwater runoff also reduces oxygen in the water and destroys spawning grounds. “Streams like the North Branch, in an era of climate change, are going to become more and more important for cold water species,” Deen says. “We’re Trout Unlimited, and it is the brook trout that we are concerned about, but brook trout and other species demand a high level of dissolved oxygen.”
Although Tracy Bartels (Mt Snow CEO) declined to speculate on any aspect of a future reclamation project, she expressed Mount Snow’s willingness to continue discussions with Trout Unlimited, the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, and other interested parties as the resort creates its next master plan.
Trout Unlimited did, however, signal their intention to participate in future Act 250 proceedings, including Mount Snow’s master plan process. The group appears to be taking a pragmatic approach with pre 250 meetings with Mt Snow executives.
Some of the into Snow Lake flow and water temperature factor is listed, since the basic watershed that supplies Snow Lake is the stream that runs from the condo areas below Snowdance under where the access road goes between the outer parking lots and the lots by the base lodge, down the hill between the lower access road and the Snow Tree condos and into a small holding pond just across Handle Rd from the old Snow Lake pump house. After a good rain storm, a great deal of what fell out of the sky flows across the parking lots, picks up sediment, and flows into the stream and eventually Snow Lake.
And due to that sediment flow, Snow Lake fills in with sediment, thus making it shallower and hence warms quicker.
The last time Snow Lake was somewhat dredged was in the weeks after Tropical Storm Irene hit the area almost a decade ago, and the Arny Corp of Engineers was staying in the Mount Snow lodging facilities as they helped clean up and rebuild the infrastructure in the valley. They had finished up all the road and bridge work they needed to do, and as the story goes, one of the former security guards who was a Marine Veteran and would go out of his way to make sure that whatever housing/comfort needs the Corp members needed was taken care of, and the members used their equipment to remove the sediment that Irene deposited in Snow Lake, and "magically" Snow Lake became much deeper than it was pre Irene! 😉
