Kansas Riverkeeper, Friends of the Kaw

Chasing the Channel – Blog No. 10

It’s been a whirlwind spring already along the Kansas River and our events are in full swing.  Before I get too much further, you can see all of our events on our calendar on our website:  https://kansasriver.org/eventcalendar/

There have been a few exciting things that we have been working on, but if you don’t follow us on social media then you may not know about it.  On Saturday, April 10^th we cleaned up Battery Cases in the Kansas River at Manhattan for the 4^th year.  We are slowly getting rid of all of the black dots all over the sandbars from Manhattan to St. George.  We had a great group of volunteers and partners that made it happen.  We also removed an old deep freeze and a refrigerator, both items we found over the winter. 

We also recently took a trip down the Kansas River through Topeka for a river check and were able to go through the new Topeka Weir chute!  We put up a video on our Facebook page if you’d like to see the view from my kayak.  We are so grateful for this safe passage for boats and for the ability of aquatic life to move up and down the river through this section.  There is a grand opening scheduled for Friday, May 7 in Topeka, sponsored by the City of Topeka and the Topeka Riverfront Advisory Committee.  If you have the chance, go and take a look at the new design.  We think you will love it too!  By the way, the second phase of the project will fix the south side of the river later this year, so the safe passage is only complete on the north side at this time.

As we start to celebration our 30th Year of Friends of the Kaw this year, we welcomed home some of our founders and early board members to participate in a documentary, to be published later this year. We are working with MattyDMedia out of Lawrence and are so excited to share this documentary with you later this fall!

We continued to monitor pollution and dump sites along the entire 173-mile-long river and turn those in to the agencies responsible for enforcement.  If you find any new dump sites or pollution, feel free to contact us at riverkeeper@kansasriver.org and let’s work together to keep our river clean!  The month of April is EARTH month, and to celebrate we have many cleanup events scheduled.  We hope to see you at one of those events, or out on the Kaw for one of our paddle trips.  Let us know how we can help you connect to the Kansas River.

Until next time….

For the river,
Dawn Buehler

Kansas Riverkeeper