Camp Nebagamon

By Joe Crain

After the very hot and dry summer, September has brought us a welcome return to cooler and closer to normal temperatures along with a good bit of drought relief. Now I realize that for many of you who spent four or eight weeks with us up at camp this summer, you may think that this was the perfect camp summer with nothing but sunny hot days with little to no rain to mess up the project periods and special activities in the evenings! Sure, the lake may have seemed a bit warm and the swimming zone a bit shallower than usual, but hey, shallow water makes for a good game of Push Ball, right? Well for those of us that live here year-round, nothing but sun with no rain is a bit unnerving. When you live in the middle of a forest you start to get a little concerned when the rain doesn’t com. We saw a good example of that this summer up in Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park in Mid-July, when a lightning strike set off a forest fire. That fire was the cause of a few days of haze and a smoky smell at camp. And closer to home, the Greenwood Lake fire that was set off by a lightning strike in mid-August has just been declared 80 percent contained after burning nearly 30,000 acres. Thanks to the hardworking Forest Service, it has been declared to no longer be a threat to the residents in the area just this week.

In my opinion the perfect camp summer has a good mixture of moderate temperatures with a few down-right hot days mixed in to keep the lake at a cool, but not cold, temperature. As for rain, once or twice a week would be perfect, enough to keep the grass and trees green and the fire danger low, but not so much that I have to climb onto the mower every other day. Well, as I mentioned this month has brought the temperatures back into the normal range with highs in the mid 70’s and nights back into the comfortable range of 50-60 degrees – “good sleeping” weather as they say around here.

Now, the return of the rain has been a bit more erratic and troublesome for us. Our current drought has ended as the saying goes: “when it rains it pours.” According to the weather station in Brule, WI just 9 miles east of Lake Nebagamon, from May to August the area had received only 7.5 inches of rain, half the average 15 inches. My unofficial rain gauge here in Nebagamon had recorded only 4 inches of rain in that same period. But since September 1^st, we have had three big storms that dropped nearly eight inches into my unofficial rain gauge, and 4.5 inches of that came on Monday the 20^th of September alone! The latest Douglas County WI (the county C/N is in) figures I found put us still in mild drought at 4 inches below the annual average. As far as the stressed trees, you can really see a big turnaround with all of the rain fall this month. The birch trees in the area seemed to be taking the summer’s drought the hardest with leaves yellowing and dropping in mid-August, six weeks ahead of schedule. They looked like trees of late fall rather than late summer. Amazingly all of that rain seems to be greening them up quite a bit and they have stopped dropping leaves, but with fall underway they will soon be turning yellow and dropping their leaves again. Unfortunately, all of that rain has also got the grass growing again and I found myself back on the mower working my way through camp this week. But with the fall colors starting to show, the mower ride has been quite pleasant.

Needing to do some rain damaged road repair, it’s Caretaker Joe At Camp