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Walking the Watershed [Nature] 
Posted on April 18, 2018 @ 09:31:00 AM by Paul Meagher

Last weekend I decided to walk the watershed at my ridge top farm property. The lowest area of our property has a marsh area that eventually turns into a running stream. It is the headwater area for the stream. The stream then runs for about 500 feet to the end of our property onto our neighbor's property.

As I followed the stream down I noticed 5 tributaries that joined the stream. In some cases these "tributaries" appeared to contribute almost the same volume of water so it would be difficult to say which stream was the "main" stream. A watershed does not have to end where the water meets an ocean or lake. You can arbitrarily stop at any point in your journey down a stream and say that you are only interested in the watershed before that point. For me, the end of my journey and my watershed was about 2 kms (1.25 miles) down the stream where the first large pool of water forms. Because it is next to a road called MacKillop's Road, I decided to call the watershed the MacKillop Pool Watershed.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me that intimate knowledge of a watershed is now within my reach. All I had to do was follow all the tributaries back to their headwaters and I could better understand how the landscape creates the flow that is observed draining into the MacKillop pool.

I walked one tributary which took me far into the woods and increasingly into wilder country. Some bears are waking up and some coyotes are roaming so I decided to stop my journey before reaching the end. I'll finish the walk with a partner in the near future to see where the headwaters lie.

The next tributary I walked was the first tributary that meets the stream after it exits my property. I followed that stream quite a distance to a neighbors farm where the stream originates around a wet area of his field. I encountered the most debris so far on that tributary which I intend to clean up on my next walk when I have something to transport it out with. One of the main causes of debris in this area is the open fields and wind blowing stuff off properties that end up in low points in the landscape such as streams. One item that blew into the stream was Santa Claus (and some white silage wrap).

I still have 2 or 3 more tributaries that I will need to walk in order to visit the full MacKillop Pool Watershed. I'm looking forward to what I might observe and learn on these walks.

Fallen trees, dense alders, and spruce thickets are some of the obstacles that I frequently encountered as I walked the watershed. It is not a walk you do for pure pleasure. I carry a Fiskars billhook to help me get through really dense areas (and if I encounter some animal that wants me for a meal). One way to walk a watershed is by looking for "reaches" along the watershed. The term "reach" is used in geology to refer to a level, uninterrupted stretch of a stream. I find myself wanting to use the term "reach" to refer to the land beside and/or accross the stream that looks like the best way to get to the next point along the stream. When you are in the midst of many obstacles to your path, your plan is reduced to trying to "reach" the next viable point ahead.

The term "reach" is one that might be useful for entrepreneurs to have in their vocabulary. On the one hand you have a business plan which tries to map out the equivalent of a watershed, and then you have a reach which is how you actually navigate that watershed in a world full of obstacles. From where you are at, you need to continually look around you and figure out what is the best way to get upstream. There is no point in planning too far ahead given the uncertainty of the obstacles in your path so you look for a "reach" that at least keeps you moving in the right direction. And as you find and cross a series of reaches, you may eventually achieve the goal of getting to the headwater.

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