Bar-K fence on Rock Lake -- when to be removed?

[joeryan80481]

When will the fence on Rock Lake be removed?
The ice must be getting thin.
(And why was the fence put up?)
Thanks,
Joe Ryan

[Sal DeVincenzo]

I wonder the same thing Joe.

No apparent connection or collaboration with the Bar-K Association and the BB like in the old QT days.
Declined by the board members when the new BB started.
Feels like the larger community lost something that day.

You can post this question to them directly on their website via email. 
Please let us know what you find out.

[JamieP]

Similar but different....I was wondering about the fish in RL. There seems to be dozen that are dead and bobbing at the surface or washed up ashore....is this something that happens every year?

[Kirk C. Watkins]

The fence was put up to slow the erosion of snow from the winter in order to allow for better retention of the moisture during the spring thaw. The concept was good, but the folks that put it up are very busy with life, so maybe we’ll try asa community to get it down asap.
And there will always be a loss, during the thaw, of fish numbers. It’s okay, they tend to turn into fertilizer.

[JamieP]

Cool! Thanks for letting me know Kirk! I don’t remember seeing that many in the past.

[KlausW]

If you want to reduce evaporation from Rock Lake, just stop the bubblers that keep the ice from freezing over and speed up the melt out in spring.  Open water surfaces evaporate way more than frozen ones.  Since many fish appear to die anyway, the main rationale for keeping the bubblers going may need to be questioned as well.  The fence did not help much with the drifting snow on Rock Lake road, did it?  Mind you we had a cold and windy winter (that is not quitting yet either), but below normal snowfall.  My 2c.

[joeryan80481]

The fence ended up in Rock Lake by the end of April 12, and it must have been blown across the lake -- the next time I saw it three days later, the fence was on the eastern shore.  Some time after that, it was apparently removed from the eastern shore.  

If the purpose of the fence was to retain snow and increase water input to Rock Lake, here's a rough estimate of how much water might have been added to the lake.  The snow pile on the leeward side of the fence was about 150 ft wide and maybe 10 ft across by 3 feet high at best, so that's 4,500 cu ft of snow.  It seems that a typical ratio of snow to water is 10:1, so that's about 450 cu ft of water.  The area of Rock Lake is about 3 acres, which is about 131,000 sq ft.  Dividing that 450 cu ft of water over 131,000 sq ft means that about 0.0034 ft, or 0.041 inches, of water was added to the lake -- that's a little less than 1/24 of an inch of water.