Meet the Research Site

Welcome to the Third Avenue Pond, our research site of choice for our capstone projects. The photo here shows north as "up" and is approximately a quarter mile square. It's not a very large area at all.

Starting at the bottom is the Little Brown House. This is the office of the Upper Big Sioux River Watershed Project, which monitors the river, Lake Kampeska, Lake Pelican, and the surrounding polluting areas like CAFO's and such. The Little Brown House sits on the south shore of the Third Avenue Pond.

In the center of the pond is Goose Island. In the spring and summer, the sandy beach on the west side of the pond through to the island is loaded with dozens, if not at times hundreds, of Canada geese. North of that is a serpentine body called Turtle Cove, which is much shallower than the rest of the water body. Originally the Third Avenue Pond was a quarry of some type. I am not sure how Turtle Cove factored into it (access road?) or what led to the formation of Goose Island, but hey, that is what exploration is all about.

Bordering the pond on the left hand side is the Big Sioux River. Interestingly enough, the bank cut between the two water bodies is so high that the two do not intermingle, with no inlet or outflow channels at all. It's difficult to see the difference in this satellite photo due to the time of day it was taken, but to give you an idea, we easily got 60cm on the turbidity tube on a Third Ave sample, where we got 21 cm on a sample from the Big Sioux five minutes later around the same time of year as the photo above.

That bank cut includes an area not noted on the map called the Crazy Hills. The Crazy Hills is the wooded area between Turtle Cove and the Bramble Park pond, and is a natural formation of small, steep dirt mounds closely packed together. The dirt bikers love it, unfortunately. The Crazy Hills area also includes one of the only wooded wetlands in all of eastern South Dakota. It's home to a variety of animals, including at least one small herd of deer, right in the middle of town. We know that there are at least two herds along the river.

North of Turtle Cove is the Kiddie Pond, which is the children's stocked fishing pond. To be blunt, this place is nasty. You can even see from the satelite photo the color difference between the Kiddie Pond and Third Avenue. Even worse is to the northwest, the Bramble Park Zoo pond. This is the waterfowl enclosure for the zoo, and to their credit they DO try very hard to keep it clean. However, with the huge influx of migratory birds they get every year, as well as the permanent injured residents, they are fighting a losing battle.

So that is our hopeful research site. No, its not as illustrious as the Titanic or the Dead Sea or Antartica, but that, in my very humble opinion, is one of the things that makes it so alluring. People are so ignorant of what is even in their own back yards, never mind (for the time being) what shipwreck full of riches, either monetary or intellectual, might be at the bottom of the ocean. If we can interest the town in our study, especially the children . . . well, if we can inspire just more person to say "I wonder what is really over here", it's all worth it.