WXPR The Stream

Michael Anderson uses a long bit on a drill to bust through the ice on Silver Lake in Eagle River. “That would be a good depth for an ice castle right now,” Anderson says, measuring about 15 inches of ice. That’s plenty for harvesting and forming into blocks for ice-castle building. But there’s a problem. A deep layer of slush on Silver Lake makes it inaccessible to the machines and trucks needed to transport ice blocks. Without the ice blocks, there’s no ice castle downtown, and that means

It’s not difficult for Norm Pestka to picture what used to be here. After all, the land that’s now underwater was dry just a few months ago. “It’s been fine here for years. They lost 45 feet in one storm. The beach was out there, literally,” Pestka said, motioning to a patch of Lake Superior now submerged. Pestka is standing on private land just outside Ontonagon in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Lake Superior stretches out before him. It’s mostly open water, save for some ice, snow, and floating

The waters of the Biron Flowage are no more than ten feet from the porch of Mike Spranger’s second home. “This is the reason we bought it,” he said. “The water is right there.” The 1,500-square-foot house is just ten minutes from Spranger’s main residence in Wisconsin Rapids. He and his wife bought it in 2015, mainly as a refuge for their four grandchildren, who took to the water immediately. “I tied some floatation devices, like tubes and things like that, off from the end of the pier. They

An amphibious vehicle called an Argo has eight wheels, two treads, floats on water, and can go just about anywhere. Has Noah Lottig found a place it can’t access? “Not yet. We’ve tried. We have not found a place where this will not go yet,” said Lottig, an assistant scientist at the UW-Madison Trout Lake Station in Boulder Junction. A fifteen-minute ride on the Argo allows Lottig and two graduate students to access an undeveloped, frozen bog near Sparkling Lake in Vilas County. Lottig has been

Nearly two months ago, the DNR recommended the City of Rhinelander make full PFAS testing results available on the city’s website. As of Thursday afternoon, those testing results still weren’t posted for the public to see. In a Nov. 19 letter to Rhinelander City Administrator Daniel Guild, Steven Elmore, the program director of the DNR’s Bureau of Drinking Water and Groundwater, wrote the DNR recommended Rhinelander post “all PFAS results on the city website as soon as reasonably practicable.”

For Northwoods artists Mary Burns and Debbie Jircik, creating art is sometimes more than putting paint on canvas or throwing clay to be fired. Instead, it’s pulling on waterproof boots, slogging into Northwoods bogs, and collecting large pails of water. “We didn’t see anyone doing any of this kind of work, where they were actually going out in the field, collecting water from bogs and lakes, and comparing how…that affects those dyes,” Burns said. Burns is from Mercer, and Jircik is from Eagle

Gary Laguna’s keyring jingles often as he sorts through the right key to the right door. He has to open them in a variety of places as the lead water operator in Hurley, Pence, and Iron Belt, three communities in Iron County. With 18 years of experience, Laguna is in charge of ensuring a reliable flow of water to customers’ faucets and doing near-constant water quality testing. While he plays a critical role in water customers’ lives, Laguna says many people don’t have a clear understanding of

A Rhinelander High School science class set out to create a PFAS water filter while competing in a national competition. The class won’t advance in the contest, but it will still keep working on water quality. Cheryl Esslinger’s Earth and Environmental Systems class was trying to design an effective, affordable filter for water. Esslinger thought of the project after the contaminant was found in city water supplies this summer. “PFAS was found in our Rhinelander water, and the well was shut down

For part of the year, a gravel road reaches a remote piece of Vilas County land. But in the winter, a mile-long snowshoe is the only way in. Snow decorated an evergreen forest as Trisha Moore and Troy Walters reached their destination and greeted Bob Martini, who owns the 31 acres of wilderness northeast of Eagle River. Forty years ago, he built an eight-sided cabin here by hand. “I just kept stacking logs on each corner. It was one of those ‘learn as you go’ things. As you can see, every notch

People in Rhinelander and across the Northwoods want to know their water is clean, drinkable, and safe. But that expectation has been muddied in the past year, with the discovery of elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in Rhinelander’s municipal water supply. The finding of PFAS, which has been linked to risk cancer, thyroid disease, and higher cholesterol, led Rhinelander to shut down two of its five city wells. That’s left some people confused about where their water