(gentle music) - [Bret] We're standing on the shore of Redwood Reservoir, which has gone through this amazing transformation.

- Back in the 50s and 60s, this was a very popular lake, and there would be a lot of boats out here, a lot of fishing and a lot of skiing and kayaking, canoeing.

- Back in 1963, the city of Redwood Falls had a centennial and they had a huge celebration and there's a lot of pictures of a water ski team.

They had done a pyramid and there was like boat jumping off of ramps, and just a fun celebration.

That is when a lot of the attention was brought to the accumulating sediment in the reservoir.

- I had a boat with a Ford V8 engine and we wanted to see how many skiers it would pull, and the record was six.

That would've been, I believe, in 1986.

We managed to get six people up behind it.

It was myself, one of my other brothers, and then four friends that were the skiers.

And that was about the last hurrah.

The boat by early 90s, it was no longer, you couldn't use it in here.

- That sediment just kept accumulating and it got to the point where it basically choked out the lake.

- [Gary] It's a manmade lake and I think it was a made in 1902, and they put the dam in for a grist mill.

- In 1919 I believe was the first, we put a hydroelectric portion on the dam to produce power.

So it's been an important lake to the community, to the history, and the growth of Redwood Falls.

- When we think about how streams function, we're talking about transporting water and sediment.

When we put a dam in place, sediment is not able to continue moving, but water is.

- [Kerry] It was basically just functioning as a river.

It was just a mud bog.

Basically there was two islands out there, and then two peninsulas on the upper end.

So really there was hardly any recreation.

It wasn't enjoyed, it was ugly to look at.

It would turn green and get mossy in the late summers.

So it was really important to bring that back to life.

When the Redwood-Cottonwood Rivers control area, which is an eight county organization, it's eight counties and eight soil and water conservation districts.

They began in 1983, and the dredging of Lake Redwood was one of the founding premises for that organization, to get that done - When it was filling in about a foot, foot and a half a year, it really didn't make any sense to dredge it down 20 feet.

Because you do the math, you got about 20, 30 years, and you're right back where you started.

Working with the landowners upstream, they're basically the people that made this possible by their putting in waterways, terraces, sediment control basins, fixing ravines that were started on their property, to conservation tillage, all those things worked together to reduce the amount of sediment that was coming to the reservoir and filling it up.

- Anytime you can slow down infiltration from 1 1/2 feet to 1.5 inches in a year is a massive change.

- At that point in time, you take something from 20 years out to 75, maybe 100, 150 before we'd be back to what we had before.

- Back in 2008, there was a small bonding appropriation made.

I think it was only about a million and a half.

But when the bids came in, it needed to be about a $4 million project.

So they couldn't get it done.

The money had to go back to the state, you try again.

Finally, we just, we got lucky.

Senator Dahms and Representative Torkelson have always been very supportive.

They had let us know now is our time and we were successful.

We did get 7.3 million from the state, and the city of Redwood Falls provided a local match.

They provided $900,000 for the project.

There was two phases to the project.

Phase one was the construction of a dewatering pond, that is roughly about 2 1/2 miles north of town, north of the lake where we're at.

We bought 140 acre parcel, and within that, 110 acres is where all the sediment was piped and dewatered.

So all the sediment would settle to the bottom and it was just the clean water that would continue on and basically get returned back to the Minnesota River.

The second phase was actually hiring of the dredging.

We had five bids.

JF Brennan based out of La Crosss, Wisconsin was the low bid.

We had a kickoff on Earth Day, which was April 21st, 2022.

They started dredging the next day, and they completed their work on October 15th of that same year.

They came in with a hydraulic dredge, essentially it stirred up the sediments and went through a pipeline which went down to the end of the lake up a township road, down highway 19, up another county road and then across.

We didn't know what exactly they would find as far as trash, but luckily nothing.

They didn't run into anything large that stopped them.

Jim Deering, the Public Works Director for the city, he had a couple gentlemen come in his office, and if I remember right, they shut the door, and they sat down and they said they had to confess their sins.

At the courthouse, there used to be a pyramid of old cannonballs.

And apparently when they were young, and this is the very early days of Lake Redwood, there was a big slide that came off the bluff behind us.

And these boys thought it'd be really fun to put those cannonballs down this slide and launch them into the river.

Well, they didn't launch real well because they weighed so much, but when we mentioned that to the dredging company that this happened and they're like, "how big are these cannon balls?"

And I'm like, "I don't know, eight, 10 inches."

And that was a concern because they said that is something that could plug the dredge.

Luckily we didn't run into that.

Part of the restrictions we had is that the dredge had to stay 25 feet back from the shoreline and 100 feet back from the dam.

So we're assuming that because of the weight of them, they just sunk straight down.

So they're probably along the shore over to the east side.

A lot of the material that they found actually went through that pipeline and they found in the dewatering pond, it was just a hodgepodge of just fun items that they found.

There was a gearshift knob off of the old manual transmissions, and all those items would be at the Redwood County Museum on display.

We got the project done under budget.

We will be spending the 7.3 million from the state, and I'll be returning roughly $200,000 back to the City of Redwood Falls.

And that's gonna go into a fund for long-term maintenance for the project.

All in all, our goal was to remove 650,000 cubic yards.

The total amount was 682,880 cubic yards is what we actually took out of here.

If you take US Bank Stadium, the field there, that amount of sediment will go through the roof.

There was no contaminants, there was no excessive chemicals in it.

It is being seated, so it'll have a permanent cover on it to prevent erosion.

Now that we've got that lake restored, we're seeing a lot of families and a lot of children in the area spending a lot of time at the park.

So I think it's just been a real integral part to bringing Redwood Falls back together again.

(gentle music) - Getting it back to recreational use, getting it back to seeing the boats, the paddle boards, the jet skis that we've seen on it has just been really amazing.

- It's been a great first year after dredging.

Folks that are reporting great catches on channel catfish, on walleye, on black croppy.

We had a record number of fish houses out here this winter, and we expect that great angling to continue.

- Well, you get into these small communities, it's a struggle to compete.

And this is just another little notch that might help when you're competing to bring somebody into town to have this asset, have this natural resource here.

- We're just delighted again to see the reclamation of Lake Redwood completed and knowing that it's gonna really enhance the quality of life across the city, but also the region.

- We're blessed in one sense in Redwood County to have a lot of stream resources between the Minnesota River and the Redwood River, but there's not a lot of lake resources.

So get out and take advantage of this.

Go for a ride in your boat, take the kayak out, enjoy the fall colors, enjoy the spring thaw, go see the wildlife, it's a beautiful place to be.