More videos and images below and in the Google gallery linked here. 

Spirit Mountain’s piping project will draw water from the St. Louis River and pipe it to the lower chalet area where another pumping station will send it into the snow gun system. There are two pumping stations: one at the lower chalet area, the other right next to Tallas Island Bay on the Western Waterfront Trail in the Riverside neighborhood. That is the area these photos were taken.

The project is a very cool engineering challenge as you will see in the photos. I was really hoping to get some drone video when they were putting the pipe into the submerged trough. I wasn’t in town that day and my drone connection was busy so I didn’t get any photos or videos of that step.

The project caused many concerned Western Waterfront Trail users to question the river side construction in the exact place it is. They were told all will be good when the project is complete and the area will be brought back to what it was prior to construction.  As you can see form the photos it will take some time for this to happen.

A really cool little-known part of this project is the run off from Spirit Mountains snow will now (for the most part) be caught in holding ponds and discharged back into the river directly through this piping system. This should lessen the burden that Knowlton Creek has had to bear over the years and keep Tallas Island Bay from filling up with sediment once again. The bay was dredged about five years ago to bring back open water.