Outdoors: Technology helps, but know your stuff, too | Sports News


Outdoors: Technology helps, but know your stuff, too | Sports News

Same with Lake Waco. Before the 7-foot pool rise in 2003, I spent countless hours surveying and cataloging areas around the lake and up the tributaries that would have another 5 to 10 feet of water piled on top in the future, so if my memory and imagination got foggy, my photos would remind me. I just wish I could find where I put those things.

Of course, nothing stays exactly the same, and after nearly 20 years, some of those areas, especially those rivers and creeks, have certainly changed. A moderate flood can cut a new river channel with ease, and entire bends in a river can be completely cut off by a powerful flood, turning a bend into an oxbow lake in a single event.

Oxbow lakes are created in slow-running streams when the flow moves in a winding, meandering path, as water finds the easiest way downhill toward the sea. A significant flood can push the water flow over the bank and erode a new pathway straight through to the next bend, cutting off an entire C-shaped water body from the stream.

Oxbow lakes are found all over the world, and go by different names, but they’re a reminder that nothing in nature stays the same forever. So even if I found those pictures, some of them would be outdated.

Charlie Pack had the right outlook on technology – rely on your own mettle and then double-check it with a device. He’d pull up on a spot, eyeball the shoreline, turn and scan another shore, then turn on his GPS, and dang if he wasn’t within a few feet of his brush piles every time I watched him locate them.


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