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Although marked on topographic maps simply as a spring, it is much more. It is doggone amazing! A whole creek just appears out of nowhere! You can drive a car right to it on the trail which is designated as a ORV trail. This creek seems to be a bayou or partial drain from and to the nearby river. The Little Ocqueoc River itself reportedly disappears underground nearby and reappears suddenly a few miles away.
Much of northeast lower Michigan is a landform called karst. Karst is a landscape shaped by the dissolving of a layer or layers of or rock, usually limestone, by water. Limestone is a rock made of layers upon layers (or strata) of lime muds and shells deposited in ancient seas. Water was squeezed out or evaporated from the muds and they became rock. This compaction caused vertical cracks, or joints, in the layers. Some of the limestones are ancient buried coral reefs and are porous. So water entering the cracks and pores has a large surface to work upon to dissolve. As water slowly works down a crack in the limestone, dissolving the rock and making the crack wider, it spreads in the horizontal cracks, or bedding planes, dissolving as it seeps along. In time, the openings are large enough to be caves with galleries connecting them. This area has several famous sinkholes, formed when the roofs of underground caves in the limestone collapsed. And it has a recently discovered cave.
I saw, over 30 years ago, a river (Little Ocqueoc or the Ocqueoc River ?} disappear into a bunch of spring-like holes in the ground. I was told that it re-emerged in a few miles. In a karst region like this, strange things like that happen, frequently all over. This Earthcache location may be a place where it re-emerges. Or not. At the very least it is a most impressive site, a spring with many "mouths" that pops up out of nowhere and becomes a small creek.
According to “Something About Caves in Michigan”, published by the MDNR in 1958 and available online for downloading, “The Little Ocqueoc River in Presque Isle County flows, part of its distance underground. Once it was an entirely "Disappearing River,” but now the roof of much of its underground tunnel has fallen in so that the river can be seen or heard beneath the blocks of limestone.”
However, this may not be exactly true, since it was about 1970 when I saw a river entirely disappear. Things change in karst country.
The creek from this spring appears to flow only about a hundred feet and then merges with the Little Ocqueoc River. It is convenient to find, being less than three miles from the well-known Ocqueoc Falls, lower Michigan’s only named waterfall, on the (main) Ocqueoc River.
So here is a mystery. Here is an appearance. Where is the disappearance? While it is easy to drive to this spring, finding solutions to the mystery may require traveling over dangerous territory of 4-5 difficulty. The river appears to roughly parallel the valley edge trail you drove in to the spring. It is aboveground where it crosses M-68. Is the creek, over the edge of the hillside in the valley to the east, above ground or underground from the highway to here? Can you penetrate the brush to find out, without falling into a cave or sinkhole? Does the Little Ocqueoc still disappear somewhere? Perhaps near 45 deg 22' N 83 deg 57' W? The Hawks topographic map shows the river as a dotted line there. It is at least a half mile from any road.
Or is it the Ocqueoc River that disappears? Topographic maps are not much help, except that the ones available are usually 10-50 years old. They may give you a historical picture.
And if you do find the disappearing river, or a re-appearing one, it may not be the same in a few years.
If you log this cache, you may like to email and tell me how many "mouths" the spring has. And what is the manmade feature about 100 feet downstream? And what body of water does this feature flow into? For extra credit, what have you found out about where a river presently disappears?
Folks are saying they have found where a river disappears, but they are unclear or uncertain what river and unclear on where. Where this creek disappears is right along the entrance road, but where does a river disappear?
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
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