The area is crisscrossed with old roads and stone walls and 100 years ago most of it would have been cleared of trees and in active use for various types of agriculture. There are a few places where the trees appear to be older; protected we guess by the general swampiness of the area. There are several small swampy ponds in the area, and seen yesterday (4/20/2014), one was looking particularly pond like (Image One). Image Two, a screen capture of Google Earth imagery from July 2013, shows the swamp with very little open water.
Image One
Image Two
One of our favorite places at Lincoln Mountain is the outlet of this pond/swamp. The main outlet flows from the lower right in Image Two. We walked over to take a look and found just a trickle of water. That seemed odd. Following it upstream for a short distance revealed the reason; one of the larger beaver dams that I've seen. It's difficult to convey the extent of this dam in pictures and I highlighted the "face" of the dam in Image Four. The dam is at least 75 feet long and 4 to 5 feet high in the center.
Image 5 shows the water backed up behind the dam. The striking thing about this dam is its' height. The dam is four to five feet high in the center. Also, this dam is not the porous structure that you commonly see. Very little water is flowing through the dam. This is clearly a multi-year effort and it could even be multi-generational. As of April 2014 the dam looks pretty solid, but, there's a lot of water backed up behind it and if it were to fail all at once a lot of water going somewhere in a hurry.
Large beaver dam
The face of the dam is highlighted in yellow
Water backed up behind the dam
