Salmon Falls
Shan and I never made it to the Berkshires this past weekend, which was completely due to a profound laziness that we shared on Sunday. Thankfully, May gives us sufficiently long spells of daylight, so we were able to salvage the afternoon by driving up to one of our favorite places, Shelburne Falls. The Mohawk Trail in general is our favorite stretch of Massachusetts, starting with the French King Gorge Bridge in Erving & Gill, all the way to Mount Greylock in North Adams. Shelburne Falls is right in the middle of these two landmarks, tucked deep down in the Deerfield River valley, an old New Englandy kind of town which has that unique western Mass mix of old farmers and old hippies that keeps it quaint yet modern enough to not blink out of existence.
Being the aficionado of water bodies that I am, my favorite feature is of course the Deerfield River and the Salmon Falls below the dam. Salmon Falls is remarkable for its torrent that gushes from the dam's sluiceway, and even moreso for its famous glacial potholes - a grand feature of many of our New England rivers. Thoreau makes note of them along the Merrimac, including the very famous Basin on the Pemigewasett in the White Mountains, and he also comments on those at Shelburne Falls which he had apparently examined in detail on some previous excursion (I will have to scour his journal for an account of that trip!). I don't have a picture of the potholes, but then again, no picture of mine could possibly capture the beautiful contours created by the marbled veins of sandstone and limestone that have been smoothed and carved out of the rock here for millenia on end...and are still being carved. This picture of the sluiceway outflow is still impressive, and the grotesque pumphouse in the background is an appropriate reminder of the constrained grandeur of the modern extent of the falls. A picture of the dam itself with the dry and barren potholes in the foreground would provide even further sorrow or disgust.
The falls - meaning the rocky area that represent what used to be the entire falls, which extends about 250 feet to the right of this picture - is named Salmon Falls, simply because the Indians used to set out their weirs to catch salmon here. To think of the full capacity of these falls as they once flowed is awesome in itself, but to further imagine a population of salmon so plentiful as to run up this river in great numbers is purely baffling. Nowadays the salmon (and the Indians) are completely extirpated, thanks to commercial fishing and myriad dams throughout the Connecticut River watershed just like this one! And our reintroductions scarcely return more than 200 breeding fish each year (186 last year). Besides that, there is a dam downstream of this one that prevents even the accidental salmon from ever returning to this ancestral location, where many an exhausted spawner triumphantly mounted the monumental falls. Yet again, Thoreau has already weighed his sentiments on this subject, back when the major dams on the Merrimac were fairly new constructions - "Perchance, after a few thousand years, if the fishes will be patient and pass their summers elsewhere, meanwhile, nature will have leveled the Billerica dam and the Lowell factories, and the Grass-ground River run clear again, to be explored by new migratory shoals." I regret that I won't be around to see that.
Being the aficionado of water bodies that I am, my favorite feature is of course the Deerfield River and the Salmon Falls below the dam. Salmon Falls is remarkable for its torrent that gushes from the dam's sluiceway, and even moreso for its famous glacial potholes - a grand feature of many of our New England rivers. Thoreau makes note of them along the Merrimac, including the very famous Basin on the Pemigewasett in the White Mountains, and he also comments on those at Shelburne Falls which he had apparently examined in detail on some previous excursion (I will have to scour his journal for an account of that trip!). I don't have a picture of the potholes, but then again, no picture of mine could possibly capture the beautiful contours created by the marbled veins of sandstone and limestone that have been smoothed and carved out of the rock here for millenia on end...and are still being carved. This picture of the sluiceway outflow is still impressive, and the grotesque pumphouse in the background is an appropriate reminder of the constrained grandeur of the modern extent of the falls. A picture of the dam itself with the dry and barren potholes in the foreground would provide even further sorrow or disgust.
The falls - meaning the rocky area that represent what used to be the entire falls, which extends about 250 feet to the right of this picture - is named Salmon Falls, simply because the Indians used to set out their weirs to catch salmon here. To think of the full capacity of these falls as they once flowed is awesome in itself, but to further imagine a population of salmon so plentiful as to run up this river in great numbers is purely baffling. Nowadays the salmon (and the Indians) are completely extirpated, thanks to commercial fishing and myriad dams throughout the Connecticut River watershed just like this one! And our reintroductions scarcely return more than 200 breeding fish each year (186 last year). Besides that, there is a dam downstream of this one that prevents even the accidental salmon from ever returning to this ancestral location, where many an exhausted spawner triumphantly mounted the monumental falls. Yet again, Thoreau has already weighed his sentiments on this subject, back when the major dams on the Merrimac were fairly new constructions - "Perchance, after a few thousand years, if the fishes will be patient and pass their summers elsewhere, meanwhile, nature will have leveled the Billerica dam and the Lowell factories, and the Grass-ground River run clear again, to be explored by new migratory shoals." I regret that I won't be around to see that.
posted by Pete at 7:20 AM
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