Weather & quicksand

[beachbum]

I am wondering with all the rain in the northeast whether we will have an increase in mud and quicksand pits for the summer. I know a few places in New Jersey with quicksand, but anyone have any knowledge of whether all this rain will be helpful. Would love to explore new places once the sun comes back out again.

[Duncan Edwards]

My personal experience is that unless you have had an extreme drought recently you are more apt to find your quicksand under water.

[Mynock]

Agreed with Duncan, it's actually the exact opposite. The best sinking season I ever had was several years ago when we went roughly 3 months without any substantial rainfall. All the water in the settling pits at the quarry dried up--guess what was underneath.

[Nessie]

In my neck of the woods, we're having much less rainfall than normal, and my sinking spots from last year are not much good. There is mud there but it's being pushed to the center of the ponds...where, if you wallow, you're visible to trail-walkers!

I've found a couple new places, though...fortunately! But I've had to travel a bit farther out.

Where I'm at, the best mud happens after a wet spring. If you can get the peat bogs flooded early, the muck gets bared when the water recedes over the summer. And they're real nice when it happens.

It's almost like you need the ice under there to churn it up good and soft as it thaws.

If the mud dries hard over the summer, though, rain doesn't seem to help much. The ground doesn't seem to want to soak it up and soften. You get water with mostly firm ground underneath.

I've yet to find any 100% predictable sinking spots, though. In the end, all one can do is go there and try to sink. And you either do or you don't!

Nessie

[Boggy Man]

How the quagmire conditions vary with weather depends on the nature of the muck.

For example, if we get a lot of wet weather, then my Harris Creek slide silt becomes more saturated with water running through the ground, resulting in more and softer quicksilt to sink into! But for my other bogs, it means high water, which keeps the mud submerged even further underwater. If rivers run high, mud and quicksand tends to be submerged, although the rapid flow of water is also at work, moving mud and sand and clay around and depositing it loosely, creating fresh areas of mud and quicksand under the water, waiting for drier weather to drop water levels to expose it!

If we get a lot of dry weather, then my Harris Creek slide area dries out, reducing the number of places where the soft stuff is close enough to the surface for me to activate it to very few, and perhaps eventually none. But, that also drops the water levels of lakes, ponds, streams and rivers, exposing the quicksand and mud along river banks, as well as the parts of the muddy bottoms of lakes and ponds beyond the inside edge of the shoreline grass, stuff which range from shallow to bottomless! You won't know until you check it out!

But, too much dry weather can result in the loss of any nearby cleaning areas (places that you can get to and from without risking being seen by anyone), surrounding the water usually used for cleanup with a margin of more soft mud, preventing you from getting from the cleanup water to solid ground without getting muddy all over again. Or, the cleanup water can be gone altogether, with the cleanup pond being one huge mudpit. But, if you want to sink into those places badly enough, you may have to haul buckets of water from somewhere else to use to clean up with, which may be a bit of work.

Depending on the size and depth of the sinking areas, the mud may even dry out as well, although deeper ponds and lakes may have the mud turning firm a little ways out from loss of moisture, but still remaining soft closer to the water, where it is more freshly exposed. In fact, you may then find a wide range of softness to enjoy, with it being extremely thick and doughy closer to shore (most stimulating), becoming progressively looser the closer you get to the water, in some cases allowing you to swim through it in the really loose stuff!

But, as Nessie already mentioned, when water levels rise back up, the mud doesn't loosen up as readily, resulting in water on top of stiffer, compressed mud. It can take a long time, or perhaps until the following spring, for it to become soft again. Buildup of swamp gas does help with the loosening, as does freezing/thawing.

I have a sinking spot where I help it along by loosening it while it is still underwater, turning it into a nice soft patch of undulating ooze, with the depth of the softest part being the limit to where I had loosened it, with stiffer mud below that. It then gets thicker and thicker through the season, until I can sometimes walk on top of it at the end of the season, or take half an hour to work myself under it because it is so thick. Then, the following spring, I have to loosen it all over again, while it is submerged underwater.

[Salem]

wait, you say there's quicksand in NJ? ...do you mind sharing a location or two? :) i been looking for deep real quicksand in that state for a while.

[beachbum]

Pine Barrens and some of the bays off of LBI. Look at the southern tip of LBI on goggle maps. Don't know what it is like now after the superstorm sandy. Don't know where exactly in the Pine Barrens. Some quicksand by the Raritan Bay also but quite polluted up there. Also some quarries in western NJ and also the quarry off the Pine Barrens golf course in jackson. (Different than the pine barrens). Cheesequake State park may have a few spots also.

[schlamm]

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[PM2K]

Cheesequake State park

Really? someone must have been eating fermented berries when they named it that.....

Has a nice ring to it, though...

[Fred588]

It certainly sounds cool for our common interest, but, according to a Wikipedia article about the park, (and we all know that Wikipedia is the ultimate authority on everything) the name is actually a sort of Europeanization of a Native American word Cheseh-oh-ke. It is described in the same article as meaning "upland" in spite of the apparent fact that most of the park is really wetland.