Grassy Lake Water Trail, the state’s newest addition

Owen Theus looks for the next blue diamond blaze as he, his mother, Allison Ivey Theus (left), and Kirsten Bartlow, director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Arkansas Water Trails program, enjoy a three-hour float May 27 on the new Grassy Lake Water Trail.

Owen Theus looks for the next blue diamond blaze as he, his mother, Allison Ivey Theus (left), and Kirsten Bartlow, director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Arkansas Water Trails program, enjoy a three-hour float May 27 on the new Grassy Lake Water Trail.

Monday, June 9, 2014

MAYFLOWER -- A name like "Grassy Lake" triggers expectations of wide openness. And squinting. Westerners would think of waves of grain, but Arkansans imagine a weedy basin simmering in the midday sun and swarming with mosquitoes as that sun goes down.

In other words, nothing like the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission's newly blazed Grassy Lake Water Trail.

Not that there's no wide open space within the Bell Slough Wildlife Management Area. If squinting is your heart's desire, you can find a treeless marsh easily, on the east and on the west, seeded with millet, a great place to hunt ducks. But the latest addition to the state's official collection of recommended paddling routes threads in and among thick stands of tupelo and cypress.

"It's somewhat cooler in here, with the shade," Margaret Stanley Bartelt said before a recent midmorning trail float. And she was right. While the day was warm, the shallow water wasn't.

A retired microbiologist whose Little Rock residence is about 30 minutes from Bell Slough, Bartelt is the blue-blazed paddling route's volunteer monitor. During four years of dedicated exploration -- sometimes stymied by hydra-headed buckbrush, sometimes assisted by hunters' "secret" blazes, sometimes obstructed by low water and one time arrested by the sight of egrets feasting on trapped fish -- she selected a 3.3-mile loop and a half-mile spur that take about three hours to float but, combined, spend about 10 minutes in unfiltered sun.

She has found a lot of dappled sun and serious shade from Bell Slough into western Camp Robinson.

Bell Slough is a green tree reservoir, said Kirsten Bartlow, the Game and Fish Commission's director of the Arkansas Water Trails project. Through gates on Bell Slough, "the water level is managed to attract wildlife -- ducks -- and keep the trees alive."

Lake Conway drains into Palarm Creek, and Bell Slough drains Grassy Lake and also empties into Palarm. So in rainy times the whole Bell Slough WMA can flood, including a short segment of Grassy Lake Road that passes below Interstate 40. But that doesn't mean Grassy Lake's good for paddling year-round.

Wildlife managers close drainage gates on the slough in September through the end of duck hunting in January, to hold water so the open western section becomes a magnetic wading zone for migrating ducks and geese -- and duck hunters.

Debbie Doss, conservation chairman for the Arkansas Canoe Club, said that after the gates open in January, the forest drains slowly. "From that point, it is rain dependent and will fluctuate. ... The trail can be paddled at very low levels, but it does go dry toward the end of the summer. The part of the trail out toward the seasonable flooded area becomes impassible sooner."

During duck hunting season, "you can't get in here," Bartelt said, gesturing around the gravel lot at the access on Grassy Lake Road, empty except for the paddlers' cars parked near trees.

"It's an intensely competitive place to hunt ducks.

"But the rest of the year, there's no one here."

And rain does help the trail during the summer, because "there are a number of beaver dams along the Bell Slough Spur section of the water trail," Bartelt said. "These beaver dams help keep water in Grassy Lake."

Prime time for paddlers thus is spring, early summer and fall. As Doss put it, "I would say that there are, at max, about two months at the end of summer that it is too dry to paddle at all."

READY TO FLOAT

Hunters still mark their own secret paths through the trees, wrapping a branch here or there with foil, placing an aluminum can just so or nailing up reflective squares.

When Game and Fish first began posting the Arkansas Water Trail blazes, vandals took a few down. (Bartelt thinks they don't want other hunters copying their routes.)

Even with all the blazes in place and her years of experience in this flooded forest, Bartelt always carries a scuba compass (waterproof) and her GPS device. "It's easy to get lost in here," she said.

At the end of the entry trench, paddlers can go right or left on the Grassy Lake Loop. "I tend to go clockwise more often than counterclockwise," she said. "I like to paddle early in the morning, and going counterclockwise often means having the sun in my eyes as I paddle east on the first leg of the loop. And that makes it harder to see birds.

"However, I check the weather before deciding which way to go. With a strong north wind, I'll go clockwise, and with a strong south wind, I'll go counterclockwise. Most of the water trail is very protected from the wind."

But once in a while she ventures into the adjacent wide open areas, passing over a huge beaver dam that blocks the end of Bell Slough Spur and into the seasonally flooded eastern section, or paddling west of Grassy Lake Loop in Camp Robinson into open water she calls "Big Grassy."

"I like to have the wind at my back there."

HEARABLE WILDLIFE

The small group had the trail to themselves May 27 -- except for the constant backdrop of birds calling to one another, and fish or frogs (or something) that lurked in the dark water unnoticed until -- ploop! -- a pock appeared. Bartelt, Doss and Bartlow identified redheaded woodpeckers by the rates of frequent hammering.

A recent convert to bird watching, Bartelt's birding list names 75 species -- 73 encountered on Grassy Lake and two from the nearby Vernon nature trail. "The list does not include robins, mockingbirds or house sparrows," she said. "It does include Carolina wrens and cardinals. Other people have identified birds that are not on my list -- Little Blue Heron and merganser."

Great Blue Herons she has seen aplenty during nesting season. The water trail meanders below a heron rookery.

"I like how she told us a retired person should learn a new language, and she's learning bird calls," said Owen Theus, a fourth-grader who missed school at Pulaski Heights Elementary School to go paddling with his mother, Allison Ivey Theus.

Beaver signs were everywhere: lodges large enough to serve as rest stops, oddly gnawed trunks and also beaver "sits": twigs and soft vegetation piled on the ends of logs that jut above the water.

SERENE BLACKWATER

Where more light filters in, underwater vegetation thrives, but little or none of it looks like grass. It's stringy, pinnate aquarium plants. (From photographs, Theo Witsell, botanist for the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, identified some of it as Persicaria hydropiperoides, aka swamp smartweed or wild water-pepper.)

The boaters passed semi-solid floating mats of winter kill, dark brown and greenish, great camouflage for water snakes. (Owen began spotting cottonmouths while the boats were still traveling the tenth-of-a-mile-long trench that leads from the gravel access to the first turn of the big Water Trail loop.)

Water-soluble molecules called tannins leach from this dead plant matter, staining the otherwise clear lake brown.

"We call that blackwater," Doss said. "People always want to know if it's polluted, but it's not. It's brown from the tannic acid dissolving out of organic matter."

In one especially picturesque section of the loop, the high canopy of water-loving, leafy trees shades out undergrowth almost entirely. Gray trunks rise from the tea of tannins, the blackwater glazed in a thin film of pollen or dust. Every dip of the paddle opened a black mirror.

Doss explained that the relatively narrow circumference of the cypress knees shows that although the water level fluctuates, the trees don't have to brace against extreme high water. With no current, fine particles stay afloat as the lake slowly drains.

"One time we came in early spring when the water level was dropping and all these trunks were ringed by stripes from pollen," Doss said. "It's like they were all wearing rugby jackets."

As in some kind of storybook miracle, the group encountered no mosquitoes: none. A spider web, one small cloud of gnats, six snakes (five cottonmouths and one rat snake), but no mosquitoes.

"I almost never have a lot of insects around me in here, although a friend of mine says he has," Bartelt said. "Well, one time, there were mosquitoes."

ActiveStyle on 06/09/2014