Cascade River State Park Flood Waters 001

This past week we’ve had some amazing amounts of water come down the North Shore rivers. Heavy rains and melting snow brought the rivers to record levels. You can see here that the Cascade River bridge came close to capacity. Any more and we would have had flooding over Highway 61. MnDot engineers were monitoring it to decide if they needed to close Hwy61.

In my 40 years along the shore, I have never seen so much water in the Cascade. According to Travis Novitsky the manager of Grand Portage State Park the volume of water reached a new peak for the Pigeon River. 96,000 gallons per second was coming over the High Falls.

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Cascade River State Park Flood Waters 002

This spot on the Cascade is normally a point that visitors walk on. The river is to the right.

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The second day it even got higher. You could feel the force of the water not to mention the noise levels.

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After the water levels started to go down, I was able to take some slow shutter speed photos creating motion blur. You can see the tree below the cliff. Dozens of sizable trees came down the river during the two days of flooding.

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Here is one of those trees caught between two cliffs.

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The Cascades.

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On the second day the river went down enough that we weren’t worried about the bridge washing out anymore. I walked down to the river mouth to photograph the moon rising behind the torrents of water entering Lake Superior. It was a beautiful evening and quite the sight to see. One lady came up to me with a smile on her face and said “I just drove seven hours to see this and it was worth it”.

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Cross River Flood Waters 001

The Cross River was also at record levels.

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In two days, we had received over three inches of rain along with the melting snow.

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Beaver River Flood Waters 001

The Beaver River put on quite a show.

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Beaver River Flood Waters 002

All of the North Shore rivers are still running wild.

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