We have a nice man made lake in Winston-Salem NC, called Salem Lake. There is a walking/biking trail around it, about 7 miles long and a lot of people use it daily for their exercise. The original damn was getting old and a few years back city decided to replace it with a new damn. It took them about one extra year to replace it than was originally advertised, but it is back now and lake at its full level.
I took this photo couple years ago about one month or so after they drained the lake. The surface was all clay like slimy dirt, and it broke into this shapes, similar to what you see in some deserts after they have rain. Walking on it was very tricky as it was a bit soft and if I applied to much pressure, the clay was giving up and my shoe was going into it, not something I wanted to do. And yeah, those cans grabbed my attention from the trail above the lake, I think that is why I climbed down to the bottom of it, to take this photo.
A few weeks later this whole area was overgrown by wild vegetation and it was like that until they filled it back with water. Those cans might very well still be down there, waiting to be discovered by archeologists a few thousand years from now.
You must be one of very few people who have walked on the bottom of a lake 🙂
I didn’t see any other prints down there, so probably yes, not many ventured down to the bottom of it
A few years i have done the same,walking on the buttom of a lake in the Belgium Ardennes (Butgembach )when they are working on the electric installation.
It is kind off cool to think that there was water there just a bit ago and now going back it is all under again.
My only concern with dams being emptied then filled again is that 99,9% of the time the people dont clean out the silt and garbage that accumulates on the bed of the dam. Over years the silt builds up and the depth of the dam get less and less. This means that there is less and less water in the dam and soon the dam starts getting areas where the sand starts protruding above the water like little islands. Then grass and reeds and weeds start growing which traps more sand….
The silt could have been removed and used for landfill in areas that needed it. It is normally very fertile and plants grow very easily in it.
We had a man made dam in a town called Centurion some time ago. I used to participate in tri-relay swims there years ago. Today there is a small trickle of water flowing through the islands that have formed there. It is no longer an attraction as it used to be. I only like it because there are lots of birds nesting there now.
PS – your photos are still a great inspiration!
when I see such things I always try to put it in relation with big shit politicians do to the world and how it affects the behaviour of the ordinary people.
Our reservoirs when drained or at a very low level because of drought often reveal old watercourses and quite often old small roads (lanes). Some will even reveal the remains of buildings. When the natural lake of Haweswater in the Lake District was turned into a much larger reservoir in the 1930s, a whole village was flooded. The army practiced house-to-house fighting in the abandoned buildings before the area was flooded. Before long, they needed it.