A photographic and informational overview of the Walnut Creek watershed, part of the Raccoon River basin in Iowa. Key water-related issues are presented, along with ecological strengths.
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Introducing The Walnut Creek Watershed
1. Introducing the Walnut Creek Watershed Photo by Jim Riggs Unless otherwise credited, all photos & text by Lee Searles
2. Location in the Raccoon Watershed WALNUT CREEK Map source: IA DNR
4. Tributaries, contd. LITTLE WALNUT NORTH WALNUT CUMMINS LIVING HISTORY BLUE KAREN ACRES ROCKLYN LITTLE WALNUT CREEK INDUSTRIAL
5. Des Moines Waterworks Independent public utility, formed 1871 Serves over 400,000 people Water sources: Raccoon & Des Moines Rivers Direct intakes Parallel floodplain intakes
6. Water quality assessment parameters: Known pollutants: agricultural & urban Hydrology: flood stages, particle loads Emerging contaminants Pharmaceuticals: livestock & human Graph source: DMWW
7. DMWW Water Works Park: about 1500 acres Public events, such as the Asian Festival Environmental education Bill Riley Trail Arie den Boer Arboretum www.dmww.com
11. Communities Des Moines Ashworth Park & Pool Bill Riley Trailhead Greenwood Park DM Art Center Seven southwestern Neighborhood Associations Ingersoll Park, Linden Heights, Salisbury Oaks, Waterbury, Waveland Park, Waveland Woods, Westwood Waveland Golf Course Glenwood Cemetery
12. Communities Windsor Heights Corporate presence: WalMart Hy-Vee Kum & Go Parks: Colby & Lions Also elementary school grounds (pocket parks)
19. GREEN DARNER Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawning trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics, sucking whirlpools, drowned voices, stopped hearts. -- Barry Lopez
27. Unidentified DRAGONFLY It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! The sun shot out from its silver side. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was fleshflake, feather, bone. -- Annie Dillard
30. FOX TRACKS, Greenwood Park I think of two landscapes--one outside the self, the other within. The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. The shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes. -- Barry Lopez
41. RING-BILLED GULLS, DMWW Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. -- Norman McLean
42. Ecosystems OUTSIDE CUTBANK PROFILE In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong, nothing can surpass it. -- Lao-Tzu
62. Urban Photo by Jim Riggs Recreational uses: water trails Inhibited by log jams, highly variable water levels
63. Urban Asphalted parking & streets: runoff Stormwater management Extremes in water levels after heavy rains
64. Urban Raccoon/Walnut confluence with Union Pacific rail line in foreground, late spring 2008 RAIL RIGHT-OF-WAYS ARE COMMON LOCATIONS FOR WATER PONDING & MOSQUITO BREEDING, ALONG WITH DENSE GROWTHS OF INVASIVE PLANTS.
65. Urban Hazardous materials spills FLYING J TRAVEL PLAZA HAS BEEN SUED BY THE IOWA ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR REPEATED SPILLS INTO WALNUT CREEK.
66. Urban Lowhead dams & other obstructions Downstream from South Valley Drive