Arrived home this afternoon from our annual family vacation to the Wisconsin Dells. Probably the coolest part of the trip was getting to stand in the now-empty Lake Delton. On the Ducks tour, I learned that the lake was drained in just four hours, causing an area of the Wisconsin River to go from 65 feet deep to a mere 6 feet, due to all the sand Lake Delton washed out. I ended up taking a number of pictures, as that’s something I’ll probably never get to do again; I’ll process and post those when I get some time.

Being able to walk in a lake that I’ve visited and fished at almost every year since I was a little kid was a very surreal experience. The lake was largely overgrown in many areas with patches of grass, and the rest of the parts were sludgy, unstable expanses of sand and dirt. Stepping in many of the areas, you could look down and see the whole bed of sand shift under your feet. My foot got sucked down in more than one place, and, not surprisingly, apparently a woman wasn’t careful enough and was sucked into one of the sinkholes at some point after the flooding.

We also caught a walking stick.