Epoxy

Trout Lake

Minocqua, Wisconsin, USA

Also known as Minocqua, Boulder Junction, Vilas County

American limnology, the study of lakes, was largely built at a field station on Trout Lake that started in a borrowed schoolhouse in 1925.

E.A. Birge and Chancey Juday set it up as a base for comparing lakes rather than studying one. More than 2,500 lie within 30 miles of the shore. They surveyed 500 of them, looking for principles that would hold across all of them.

The first three years ran out of an old schoolhouse and a garage at the state forestry headquarters. Most people slept in tents and ate with the forestry crew. Getting there was its own problem: there were 20 miles of paved road between Madison and Trout Lake. A permanent laboratory went up in 1928.

Birge was a former university president and still at work in the lakeside lab before dawn in his eighties. The station is still running, year round, a century later, with more than a thousand papers and theses behind it.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Maple
Colour: Ocean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: February 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

How this one was made

Maple with blue for the water and white for the type, which puts both of our staining problems on one board. Blue will wick into pale open grain if the seal misses anywhere, and white shows every trace of laser soot in the engraving as a dirty yellow brown, so the prep has to hold twice over. The lake itself is generous, two big basins with a fairly smooth shoreline, and the only tight work is the narrow neck between them and the handful of small islands in the lower basin.