Close your eyes and imagine the Village of Bay City without a bay. Now fix that image in your mind and open your eyes again. If nothing happens, that mental picture could become reality in just a few generations at the place that brands itself as the “Gateway to Lake Pepin.” Currently saddled with two water quality impairments and a deposition rate for sediment ten times above normal, Lake Pepin on the southwestern border of Pierce County is facing a premature fill-in of its 26,000 acres, turning the currently watery space into dry land—but not if the Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance (LPLA) has anything to say about it. The local group works to advocate for sediment reduction upstream from Lake Pepin on the Mississippi River and its tributaries, as well as working on restoration efforts to improve the lake’s water quality.

“With sedimentation rates 10x above normal, the lake is in a fight for survival,” the group tells viewers at its website at https://www.lakepepinlegacyalliance.org. Per the LPLA website, sediment loads “the size of a city block filled to the height of the Foshay Tower in downtown Minneapolis accumulate in Lake Pepin every year,” which calculates out to 97,574,400 cubic yards when taking the length and width of the average Minneapolis city block times the height of the Foshay Tower building itself, not including the 160 foot high pinnacle extension. Sound like a lot of mud? There’s a reason for it.

Over the past century and a half or so, increased human activity upstream (including farming and increased fertilizer use), has led to a greater than average drainage of sediment into the Mississippi River basin, which is then deposited into Lake Pepin when the water slows as the river channel widens to form the lake, beginning at Red Wing. Presently, the head of the lake has an impairment for high turbidity, which refers to the upstream sediments causing the water to turn a muddy brown color impairing healthy river vegetation.

To try and fix that, the LPLA has partnered with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, producing a 53-page Draft Problem Appraisal Report that it then provided to the Army Corps of Engineers “to move restoration forward.” Detailed in the draft report are the effects of increased sediment deposition from upriver on Lake Pepin. Chief among these are less aquatic plant life overall and lower species biodiversity within the lake itself—along with the disappearance of the lake over time. So much for the problem. What of the solution?

Working with the Wisconsin DNR, the LPLA co-sponsored an application for a federal program that would boost funding to use dredge materials collected at low cost from the river itself and use them to construct islands and other habitat enhancers meant to improve the habitat for underwater dwellers and vegetation. In January of 2019 the Lake Pepin proposal was one of only ten such project proposals to be successful nationwide, and the only one on the Mississippi River. The habitat restoration project near Bay City, with is set to start soon, is made possible in part through the Continuing Authorities Program, which reduces red tape for the Corps of Engineers to do certain types of projects, including streambank stabilization and beneficial use of dredge materials among others. By creating deep pools for fish to live in over the winter, along with islands and planting native vegetation in and around the Village of Bay City, the project looks to make a better Lake Pepin for all, right from the Gateway.