In Harmony With the Creator

Here's a series of photos I took from the shoreline of Heart Lake at the Adirondack Loj at sunset, relaxing and marveling with Corinne over the changes in the sky in just over 15 minutes.  The science of how light reflects off a still body of water and of how the sun rays are refracted as they take a longer path through the earth's atmosphere at sunrise and sunset are well known.  But what I responded to in those moments was not the physics of light but the harmony of nature with its Creator God.  The sky started out cloudy but as the clouds lifted the setting sun splashed some clouds in pinks and peach colors, blue sky appeared, and some of the clouds remained gray.  Nature seemed to be responding in tune with its Creator's design, and it was beautiful and peaceful in line with the Hebrew word Shalom.

Then I considered the state of humankind. Of all the created world, humans were to be God's crowning creation.  

I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 

what is man that you are mindful of him, 

and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little

lower than the heavenly beings,

 and crowned him with glory and honor

Psalm 8:3-5 

So as wonderful as creation itself was intended to be, we who were to be the capstone of His creation, seem to be more out of touch with our Creator than the rest of creation.  What went wrong?  He gave to humankind something that he gave to nothing else in the created world - a free will.  With that free will, Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating the fruit from the tree at the center of the garden, Cain killed his brother Abel, Isreal abandoned God and clung to idols, and the Jewish leaders and Romans conspired to murder His Son, Jesus.  If God knew all this was going to happen, why did He allow it?  He could have made us like the rest of creation which seemed to me at that sunset moment to be in harmony with the Creator.  But God has made us for himself, to experience fellowship with Him. That kind of desire does not derive from compulsion but from a heart that desires such a relationship.  So if He intentionally created us to experience fellowship with Him and our waywardness has separated us, what can be done to restore it?

God sent His Son, Jesus to perform the work of atoning for our sins, and putting us back into a right relationship with the Creator God (Romans 3:21-23).  While enjoying these long-awaited summer months when we are outdoors near our homes or vacationing in remote and beautiful places, and marveling at God's Creation, think about the door God has opened for us in Jesus to be brought back into harmony with Him.

         

The Marcy Dam Breach and Its Effects

 

While hiking in the Adirondack High Peaks on July 13, 2021, we came across what's left of the Marcy Dam that breached during Hurricane Irene in August 2011.  The top view looks downstream and the bottom view looks upstream.  There used to be a bridge that spanned across the top of the dam that served as a route for hikers on their way to Mt. Colden, Mt. Marcy and other High Peaks. It turned out that as my son, Tim, shared his photos on social media that he learned a good friend of our family's had crossed over the top of this dam with his children hours before it failed.  The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) has decided wisely, I believe, to not rebuild the dam. They instead have built a new stone crib bridge to replace the function that the dam provided.  We crossed over that bridge as we made our way to Mt. Colden.  The dam itself, constructed of timber cribs filled with boulders and faced wtih timber planks was not well suited to such a harsh environment and aggressive stream conditions.  A replacement dam, constructed to NYSDEC dam standards would cost $10M or more and would still be a safety hazard for people and infrastructure located downstream of the dam.  

As we approached the dam from upstream on our way back from Mt. Colden, I noticed that the banks of Marcy Brook were severly eroding and many trees had fallen into the brook.  The breach of Marcy Dam also triggered a channel avulsion that changed the brook's geomorphology in a dynamic manner that can be explained by the relationship developed by E. W. Lane (Lane, 1955).  In his emperical relationship, there's a balance between stream energy (represented by the product of stream discharge, Q and channel slope, S) and sediment yield (represented by the product of sediment discharge Qs and median sediment size, ds) as shown below:   

Q_s * d_{s ~} Q * S

Prior to the dam's breaching the channel slope, S, upstream of the dam had flattened and sediment had been deposited in the upstream zone.  When the dam breached, the slope began to re-steepen by increasing the sediment discharge, Qs from in front of the dam, but that erosion also extended upstream as I observed from the severely cut banks and downed trees.  A change to any one variable in Lane's relationship on one side of the equation requires a change to one of the variables on the other side of the equation.  In this case, channel slope, S increased while stream discharge, Q, remained unchanged, thus the sediment discharge, Qs must increase since median particle diameter would be unchanged by the dam breach.  Streams in a pristine environment, such as the Adirondacks, don't typically display this dynamic unless there's a significant and dynamic change.  Eventually the stream will return to a quasi-equilibrium and the banks upstream of the dam will eventually cease to erode.