View from the water looking back at the new boat launch area. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Ice skaters glided across the frozen expanse of Bare Hill Pond, while an ice fisherman sat huddled in the biting wind. On shore, Tom Gormley of the Bare Hill Pond Watershed Management committee pointed out changes to the waterfront since last summer. The parking area has been reconfigured and newly paved, the boat launch has been widened, and a complex new drainage system is expected to direct run-off water into swales and catch basins rather than into the pond.
The first phase of modifications to the beach is largely complete, according to land-use administrator and conservation agent Liz Allard. The second phase, Allard said, will be landscaping and plantings, which will begin when warmer weather allows. The plantings will be integral to absorbing and filtering run-off.
Gormley said that boaters should have a much easier time backing their trailers down the new, wider boat launch. He also pointed out the post-and-rail fence between the parking area and the beach.
“I like how the beach is more separate and protected now,” Gormley said of the new arrangement.
Along the edge of the woods above the beach and the playground area, a new trench runs almost the full length of the beach, getting closer to the water as the beach narrows. The trench was lined with a perforated pipe, then filled with coarse gravel. Its function, Gormley explained, is to catch run-off coming down the hill from the road and woods above.
Chairman John Lee of the Parks and Recreation Commission said his group plans to monitor how the new arrangement works for parking and boat launching. The commission plans to do a feasibility study in the spring, he said, in hopes of creating some additional parking spaces closer than the school lot. Among the other tasks scheduled for spring, the commission plans to replace the boat racks in two areas across the parking area from the beach.
Phosphorous levels in the pond are down from a decade ago, which was one of the major goals of the storm-water control projects that the Pond Committee has undertaken over the past several years, Gormley told the Press. He said that the Pond Committee is still studying the algae blooms that occurred at Bare Hill Pond in late summer and early fall last year; such blooms are usually caused by too much phosphorous.
