Diversion

Day 182: Let's take a diversion from snowy weather and chilly temps, and step back one week exactly to last Wednesday when the sun was shining and people were out in shirtsleeves. I chose to spend the day on my bicycle, riding the full length of the "new" stretch of the Foothills Trail in search of invasive plants. It wa a fruitful mission (one could add, "unfortunately" here and be entirely justified), and it also yielded up a surprise in the character of this lovely old flume near the eastern terminus of the trail. I was curious as to its purpose, so did some digging with the Google shovel, and found out that it was built over a hundred years ago as part of the project which created Lake Tapps, a reservoir which on the last date I saw it held only enough water to fill a teacup, leaving plenty of room to spare for cream. Water from the White River reaches a diversion dam just above this flume, which then channels a portion of the flow into Lake Tapps. Ideally, Lake Tapps should be a municipal water supply, but low snowpack has led to this being problematic for at least the last decade. That said, I may have seen Lake Tapps during its low-water period (October-April) when the reservoir is let down, although if memory serves, it was in July or August when it should have been full to provide recreational opportunities. In any event, the flume is a testament to the quality of work performed by the Army Corps of Engineers who, it seems, were as painstaking with aesthetics as they were with functionality.