There's Muddy Waters (the great Chicago bluesman) and then there's muddy waters (murky streams and ponds). A recent paddle on the Poultney River immersed me in the lower case variety. Since then clarity/turbidity have been on my mind (we'll skip the clarity/turbidity of my thought processes for now).
Holly, Tom and I launched our boats on the Vermont end of the East Bay Road bridge and headed upstream. The southern end of Lake Champlain reminds me of a hydra with its tentacles (the tributaries) coalescing to form the body of the lake. There's Wood Creek, the Mettawee, the Poultney and South Bay (feed by Pike Brook and South Bay Creek ) as well as numerous other small streams. On most maps the Poultney becomes East Bay somewhere below Carvers Falls. But it still feels more like a river and as we shall soon see there may be an interesting reason for that.
About those muddy waters, the simple explanation lies in post-glacial history. Large meltwater lakes once occupied what is now the Hudson-Champlain lowlands. As the glaciers receded turbid streams carried vast amounts of sediment into those lakes with the finest of these sediments, the clays and silts, drifting towards the low centers.
Today, over 10,000 years later, most of the high elevation streams and ponds are clear with a light load in suspension. But lower sections of Fort Edward, Fort Ann, Kingsbury and Whitehall have the heavy soils that cloud the water.
Timothy Dwight who traveled the Northeast extensively in the early 1800's was not pleased with this area. Of the route from Granville to Sandy Hill Dwight wrote, "...the few streams were a succession of puddles, lying in a loathsome bed of clay between steep, ragged banks, and of the color of dirty suds...A person accustomed only to the limpid streams of New England can form no conception of the disagreeableness of this fact."
Below the falls at Carvers the lower river was at one time more of a deep water bay. According to research by Paul Marangelo of the Nature Conservancy this changed dramatically in 1783 when the Poultney broke thru a ridge, changing its course and washing a huge amount of sediments downstream. There was so much material deposited that it turned a bay navigable by schooners into a shallow stream just barely passable by canoe.
