Volunteer

Join the Turtle River Volunteers. The Turtle River Volunteers organizes efforts to control Curly Leaf Pondweed and other aquatic invasive species.

Why Volunteer?

  • There are few better ways to spend a summer morning than being out on the river with a group of congenial people doing a good thing for the lakes.
  • Once you’ve pulled a few handfuls of Curly Leaf Pondweed, you will become much better at identifying it, and you’ll be able to recognize it if it appears on your shoreline or your fishing spots in the river, Pike Lake, Lake of the Falls, or the Turtle Flambeau Flowage.
  • If CLP gets a toehold in your lake it will be with us forever. It thrives in shallow water and we have a lot of that in LOTF and TFF. If it grows thick enough you can’t even get your boat in the water or cast a fishing line. It’s a stinking mess when it dies off and decays. At this point, we have mostly isolated patches in Pike Lake and the river, which our hand harvesting efforts are keeping in control. We need to keep it up.

Have Fun on the River

The river trips are canoeing with a purpose. These stretches of the Turtle River are unspoiled and beautiful. We are floating over or standing on sandy bottoms, in comfortably cool gently flowing water, shaded from the hot summer sun by overhanging trees, observing a huge variety of vegetation up close, and coexisting with fish and other wildlife.

Turtle River Volunteers

We encourage any interested person to volunteer to help control CLP on Pike Lake and the Turtle River. This page has the information you need. This is a joint effort of Iron County, the connected lake associations, and all other volunteers.

The Rice Lake Association also has need of volunteers for action on Rice Lake. See their website.

For large harvesting operations, as on Rice Lake, best practice is to pull CLP early in the growing season before it develops turions which can detach and spread the CLP.

For isolated patches on the river and lake, our experience is that the best control method is to pull them each several times during the summer, not letting them grow to maturity with turions, and to be very careful to capture/net all dislodged plant parts.  At some patches which were originally extensive, we are seeing regrowth of only a handful of small plants.

Our goal is to establish a much larger set of active volunteers, who can repeatedly go out in small teams.

We divide the river into several manageable sections. In a long day, more than one section might be treated.

  • Area 1 – Rice Lake
  • Area 1a South Outlet Bay – From the Rice Lake Channel to the Rice Lake Rapids at Arrowhead Resort.
  • Area 2 – From Arrowhead bridge upstream to Rice Lake Rapids. Launch and takeout at the bridge.
  • Area 3 – From the Arrowhead Bridge downstream to the Leiterman residence south of the power Line. Launch at the bridge, pull while moving downstream, and paddle back upstream to takeout at the bridge, or at the residence. We have permission, but notification and confirmation is appropriate.
  • Area 4 – From the Power Line downstream to the Turtle Rapids. Launch at the residence or the bridge, paddle downstream to the power line, pull while moving downstream, and either walk canoes though the rapids to takeout at the river landing, or paddle back to takeout at the residence or bridge.
  • Section 4b – From Pike Lake upstream to the Turtle Rapids. This section can be easily accessed by canoe from Pike Lake or the river landing.
  • Pike Lake, Areas 5-8 – The CLP patches on Pike Lake are usually treated via boat provided by lakeshore residents.
  • Turtle River, Areas 9-11 – Lake of the Falls to Pike Lake – Patches of CLP have been discovered downstream of Pike Lake, above the crossing of the powerline near highway FF.
  • Lake of the Falls – To date, no CLP has been discovered in Lake of the Falls (LOTF), the downstream river, or Turtle Flambeau Flowage (TFF). A directed survey is planned for 2023 by the LOTF association and the DNR.

How to Join Us

We are continually recruiting people who are willing to occasionally or regularly join CLP hand-pulling crews on the Turtle River Watershed. Cindy Moriarity, the secretary of Lake of the Falls Association, maintains a Google group turtlerivervolunteers (at) googlegroups.com to facilitate communication. To join, send an email to the group managers at turtlerivervolunteers (at) gmail.com. Once you are in the group, you will receive emails with information from leaders who are organizing trips, and you may post emails to ask for or organize trips on your own initiative too. After a trip finishes, the leader should post a short trip report to the group.

Trip organization is flexible, with large or small numbers of people, on both weekdays and weekends. Dates are often negotiable and dependent on weather. Pay attention to emails for changes. The goal is to treat each section at least once a month, or better, every couple of weeks.

CLP Pulling Trip Guide

Read the page above for more information on how to prepare for and conduct a pulling trip.

Reporting

The initial “Pike Lake – Curly Leaf Pondweed (CLP) Project” DNR grant has completed as of Dec 31, 2022, so we no longer need to collect DNR volunteer labor worksheets to document in-kind contributions. However, we still need to track volunteer hours and activity.

The leader of each trip should submit to the Secretary a trip summary including:

  • Date and number of hours.
  • Description of the trip, including the lake or river section.
  • The name of each participant.
  • Equipment/watercraft used.
  • GPS coordinates and number of plants of all new CLP patches discovered.

Collecting and Using Data

It is important to collect GPS coordinates and characteristics on each of the CLP patches we discover.  This is how the ArcGIS maps maintained by Zach Wilson and the Iron County Land and Water Conservation Department are generated.

Ideally, every time a patch is discovered, monitored, or pulled, we should collect another data point for that patch, so that we can determine whether the patch is growing, shrinking, or even gone, and to show that information on the combined map.

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