Riverbanks 7

This series goes back to 2006, when I had no idea where it would end up a decade on.  Click here to see past installments.  All the photos in this post I took between Prescott ON and the start of the Beauharnois Canal.

Below . . . it’s the light at the location of the Battle of the Windmill.   Some of the charm of seeing this borderlands is learning of the obscure events of US-Canada history and the little remembered or mentioned groups like Hunter Lodges and the so-called “patriots” of the Patriots’ War.

Here’s the active monument to commerce at the port of Johnstown, ON.

What prompts me to do this post is a recognition of the beauty little seen.

More Mississagi soon, but for now, the self-unloader is offloading upstream of the Iroquois Lock.

This wall leads into the Iroquois lock, which doesn’t always close.  It’s a check lock.

This is the same dairy farm off the port beam and

the stern.

We meet Thalassa Desgagnes upstream of the Eisenhower Lock.

These transmission lines come off the Moses-Saunders Power Dam, crossing over the River at Massena.

Dog swimming on a leash?

Singer Castle, it’s not.

Singer Castle, 50 or so miles upstream, this is. 

And these are the Adirondacks, as seen from the River downstream of Massena.

 

This looks like the Eglise de Saint Anicet, QC.

Labrador here is just upstream of the first lock in the Beauharnois Canal.

 

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

Not so E-ZPass

Give me automated toll collection anyday. Around NYC and the mid-Atlantic states it’s called E-ZPass and using it bypasses the long lines of cars paying tolls for roads, bridges, tunnels, etc. In small towns fire fighters collect “optional” tolls by standing on the main drag with a boot. So below . . .

is an approach used on the Seaway. No, that’s not a long-handled boat brush.

It’s more like . . . pay up or the exit gate doesn’t open. It works.

I looked really carefully and when a laker came through, no manual toll collection was even attempted. In fact,

when Canadian Provider sailed through, they had both the entrance and exit gates open simultaneously.

Maybe it was the daunting flag staff on the bow . . . looked like a jousting lance. Definitely it had something to do with the fact that water level above and below the Iroquois Lock differs only about six inches. Inches, that was.

Photos, WVD.