Algae is blooming at the head of the valley.
The water is almost fluorescent green right where the rapid mountain stream slows down to fill a series of deep pools surrounded by cliffs. The river is from a forested watershed, but I’d guess a bunch of nutrients washed into the water somewhere upstream. Fertilizer from the golf course? Wastewater? The cliffs hold warmth from the sun, increasing water temperature and allowing the phytoplankton to go wild on those extra nutrients. Above we have the water entering the canyon, here’s the water in the pools
and here is the water as it enters the valley floor:
Twenty miles downstream the same day, the water is clean. The excess nutrients grew phytoplankton that was eaten by fish and insects and other living things. What a world we live in.
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