Mirror Pond is a vanishing mirage. The body of water adored as an icon of Bend—its crystalline surface reflecting pine trees and snow-capped mountains—exists only on the city’s stylized logo.
The logo romanticizes a shallow, man-made puddle off Drake Park, a deepening heap of mud over which a clogged crook of the Deschutes River spreads out and collects dust as it drifts toward a 1910 hydroelectric dam.
Far from representing a community that lives in harmony with wilderness, Mirror Pond is a badly plumbed backyard water feature, a putrefying monument to the false dichotomy of humanity and nature. That water wants to flow.
Mirror Pond’s beauty was always superficial, the product of engineering aimed at subduing the savage river for civilized company. After decades of thickening with sediment running into the constricted river from a vast watershed and reservoir, the pond was dredged in 1984 at a cost of $312,000.
Today such an operation would cost $2 million to $5 million, members of the Mirror Pond Steering Committee estimate. If nothing is done, the rising silt will create acres of fetid mud flats. But if the community merely carves another pond basin, ongoing sedimentation will eventually require more rounds of exorbitantly costly dredging.
The steering committee, operating with $200,000 from the city and the Bend Park & Recreation District, is charged with choosing a solution and a way to pay for it. Options include dredging, upgrading the dam with a fish passage, removing the dam, and speeding up the river by narrowing its channel.
The committee plans to hire a consultant to produce renderings of the area under various scenarios. After asking the public which option it prefers, it would spend the bulk of its resources devising a plan to implement it.
That superficial approach assumes the community’s dominant value is maximum prettification and betrays the committee’s reluctance to confront an unhealthy attachment to this unnatural pond.
Since the committee must posit some working assumption to guide its initial expenditures, it should recognize that no one moves to Bend to settle into an Adirondack chair and admire a postcard image. People move here to live active lives amid natural beauty. Bend’s allure is precisely that it’s not removed from nature.
Bendites value wildness enough to conserve it. They get behind the movement to revive riparian ecosystems by removing dams and restoring natural channels. For the sake of coming generations, they want to know how stakeholders might work with water, soil and organisms to create an ecosystem that includes but does not submit to people.
The park district’s project manager, Jim Figurski, should get that. He prides himself on sustainable, environmentally responsible approaches to urban planning.
So should committee members Matt Shinderman, who teaches ecology and environmental policy at OSU-Cascades, and Bill Smith, whose company gave the stretch of the Deschutes running through the Old Mill District back to the people of the city as well as the wildlife that had been run off by yesterday’s lumber mills.
The committee must act from a courageous commitment to conservation. Instead of rubbing rouge on an outmoded icon, it should seek sound scientific guidance on restoring the ecological health from which genuine beauty emanates. Here’s a boot to get it moving in the right direction.
This article appears in Jan 3-9, 2013.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
I’m no river hydrologist, but I have been on and around rivers my whole life. I feel like a few basic un-avoidable truths are apparent here, even to a layman like myself. Mainly that sediment and biological detritus will collect in slow moving or stagnant pools. That in mind, here’s my plan for mirror pond:
1- Blow the dam. Now hang on, there’s more. Control the demolition so that the water level drops incrementally. I’m just assuming here, but shouldn’t the faster moving water carry much of the sediment with it? This could act as a flush, doing much of the work for us. Is there a time of year where this could be of a minimal impact to downstream ecosystems? There could also be some digging and dredging of the banks at this time. Yes it would be ugly for a while.
2- Re-construct the dam, but naturally with natural passages for water, fish and rafters. Anyone who has rafted rivers knows that there are fast sections, and calm stretches of slow water. This is natural. Can we re-create a section of slow, yet still-moving water? Can a dam be built from natural boulders, or a combination of boulders and concrete that mimics a natural water blockage that causes a section of slow water? Fish could travel up and down, and a fun yet safe channel for rafters could be added. I envision a Mirror Pond that moves along at a clip such as seen above the Galveston st. bridge. At a steady clip, but slow enough to be mainly flat water.
3- For the wide sections of Mirror Pond, water would still be slow moving along the banks. Maybe diagonal peninsulas of rock could extend from the banks towards the center of the river. These would force faster moving water on the opposite side. Then another similar rock jetty would extent from that side, and on like that. Constricting the channel, in my mind, would cause the river’s speed to increase a little in those areas. The available channel for the water would still be deep, thus helping the lower part of the river keep moving. All in all, the general idea would be to provide just enough channel for the river in just the right spots to keep the flow moving at a natural pace. If done just right, could there not still be a section of smooth water aside Drake Park to create a reflection? There’s got to be smart engineers out there that could figure this out, right?
My plan probably has flaws, but that’s my 2 cents. Why can’t we return the river to a natural state AND retain a “Mirror Pond”? As for cost, well, yes it would be very expensive, but this is the heart of Bend here. Millions are raised on sites like Kickstarter every day. If a solid plan that people like can be formed, I think the community of Bend would embrace fundraising races or events to help with the cost.