Lake Champlainan interactive resource

SITE NAVIGATION: START HERE

Getting on the waterFifty-four launches, beaches and fishing accesses, the marinas, the forecast and the bloom reports. Understand the lakeHow the valley was cut, how deep it is, and why the whole surface tilts back and forth for days after a wind. Its historyTwelve thousand years of occupation, the wars fought over the corridor, and every steamboat that ran here from 1809 to 1930. What lives in itEels that travel five thousand kilometers to spawn, the mussels, the blooms, the fisheries and the plankton under all of it. What it is doing todayFour USGS gauges and the Valcour buoy, read live, each number carrying the time it was taken. Teaching itSix tracks, twenty-seven stops and forty-four tasks, elementary through college.

CONTENT CATEGORIES

RECREATION

LIVEOn the WaterWhere to get on the water: every launch, beach, fishing access and marina on one strip, with the lake forecast, this week's bloom reports, what is happening on the lake, and the two states' fishing rules.

HISTORY

12,000 YEARSBefore 1609The lake had people on it for a hundred and twenty centuries before Champlain wrote it down. The archaeology, the Western Abenaki homeland of Bitawbagw, and the recognition dispute set out in two columns because it is not settled. JULY 1609Champlain’s Account of the Lake, 1609What he claimed to have seen, checked against the lake as it is — the distances in leagues, the islands, the fish, and the one battle that gave the lake its European name. 1609–1870The Wars on the LakeThe corridor everyone fought over, and the two naval battles in which the wind was decisive — Valcour in 1776 and Plattsburgh in 1814. 1809–1930The SteamboatsEvery steamboat that ever ran here, drawn from Ogden Ross's 1930 book — years in service, tonnage, and where six of them ended. The book itself, all 193 pages, and the census of 59 wreck sites. HORSEPOWER ×75The Lake’s Trade, 1795–1936Potash, wool, lumber, Adirondack iron — each with its collapse. And the series this page could not build: canal tonnage by year.

BIOLOGY

5,249 KMThe EelsEvery eel in this lake was born in the Sargasso Sea and has to get back there to breed. The migration route, the two fishways on the Richelieu, and what the counts at Chambly have done since 1998. THIRTEEN SEASONSCyanobacteria BloomsTwenty-two thousand volunteer reports, 2012 to 2024. Two bays account for nearly all of it. 4,112 TOWSThe MusselsTwenty-eight years of veliger counts, the water chestnut and the spiny waterflea — and three analyzes this page ran and then refused to publish, with the reasons. 4 KM AWAYThe FisheriesLamprey wounding, the end of lake trout stocking after seventy years, a sturgeon that has not recovered — and a round goby approaching from two directions, four kilometers (2.5 miles) off on one of them.

GEOLOGY

1.1 BILLION YEARSHow the Valley Was MadeA cross-section from the Adirondacks to the Green Mountains, run backwards through two collisions, a tropical sea and a mile of ice. THREE SITESThe Thrust, the Reef and the WhaleThe Champlain Thrust, where older rock sits on younger; the Chazy reef, among the oldest known; and a whale skeleton found ten miles (16 km) from any sea. WEBGLThe Lake in 3-DThe basin with the water taken out: four hundred feet (122 m) of trench, the Inland Sea shelf and the narrows at Crown Point, turned and tilted in the browser.

HYDROLOGY

LIVE NOWThe Lake, Right NowLake level at four gauges, the tilt between them, and the Valcour buoy's water temperature by depth — read from the instruments when the page loads, not from a nightly rebuild — with the outlook for each. LIVEThe SeicheThe lake in section, from four gauges and two thermistor chains, updated daily — and under it the internal seiche, a summer of the thermocline at thirty-nine depths and thirty-four summers of the lake warming at the surface but not the bottom. MAPThe WatershedEvery river and stream that ends up in the lake, colored by phosphorus, farmland, road salt or calcium — with the satellite over the water. COMPUTEDThe Water BudgetThe lake’s volume, computed from its own depth contours, closing the budget against eighty-eight years at the outlet, and finding a bay that takes a quarter of the phosphorus. SURVEYEDWhere the Lake FloodsLidar-mapped shorelines at each lake level from a normal summer to above the 2011 record. Almost all of the flooded ground is on one river's delta. 1816–2026Ice CoverTwo hundred and ten winters of whether the lake froze over. It closed every year of the 1800s and nine times since 2001.