Mysterious Water

Wednesday, June 24th, Steph, Tammy, Erika (volunteer from Oberlin), and I had a journey into the town of Blacksburg for an early morning full of GPS collection. We had a lot of uncovered ground in which to collect points - the high school and a lot of recreational fields. This involved a lot of wandering and zig-zagging around the fields and on the running track. Luckily school is out of session, so only the few driving by had the priviledge of thinking we were delusional. Two known springs feed into Stroubles Creek, one of which we had previously found. This spring has been funneled into a central "spout" that is under a tunnel by the apartment complex Erika lives in. The other spring has been a little harder to identify. We believe that it might be covered up by a bunch of rocks in a separate apartment complex. But, we are unsure of this, for it might be simple groundwater flowing out of this area where we think the spring might exist. This means that the spring is actually further downstream from this area of mysterious flow we have found, and the construction at the apartment complex has actually extended the delineation of the creek due to storm water management and/or daylighting potential groundwater flow. We need to go back out with waders to access parts of the stream we were unable to on this adventure. The exciting part of this adventure (besides playing on the multiple playgrounds and picking blackberries) was a third spring we have discovered. This is a known spring, but most people have not connected this spring with supplying water to Stroubles Creek. Again, when we can go back out with waders we will be able to further investigate this spring, but for now, we believe this spring might feed into Stroubles Creek, and it is the supply of water from this spring that actually feeds the daylighted section of Stroubles by the fire house.