On June 18, 2017 we flew our kite with a camera for the first time.
For our third kite aerial photography session we went to the Upper Pivka valley, sometime in August 2017. We took a couple of cool photos of Šilentabor archaeological site (with a tailless sled, on 800 m of line), and then we visited a lake.
Here’s a photo of it.
The wind was strong, the Old Blue rokkaku flew perfectly – but as you can see, there’s no water in the lake.
That’s because it is an intermittent lake, a rare and strange Karst phenomenon, and a star of Pivka seasonal lakes nature park
Fascinating and all, and it’s nice to have a photo of an intermittent lake in dry season – but how about a kite aerial photo of a, you know, lake … with water and waves and stuff?
Oh, how many times we went there. Every year; every spring and every autumn – whenever the lake was full, we were there, searching for a good spot, checking the winds, pulling the kites.
There are seventeen intermittent lakes in the Upper Pivka valley. In eight years and more than fifteen KAP attempts, we have never managed to catch a single one of them full. You know, like a lake. With water and stuff. Never ever.
Until …
Until last Friday.
The moment The Original Blue rokkaku and Cindy delta rose above the pines, we knew we got it. The southwestern wind was mildly turbulent, the sun was shining through the wispy clouds, the lake was finally ready for a camera above it.
Behold: Palčje lake, Slovenia.
And it was green!
Palčje lake is a hydrological wonder protected within the The Seasonal Lakes of Pivka Nature Park. It is the largest of all the lakes of the valley: in times of exceptional floods, when the water level is really high, Palčje lake can rival Lake Bled; it can cover well over a square kilometre and holds more than seven million cubic meters of water.
But it rarely exists for more than a couple of months per year.
Palčje lake is a beautiful and intriguing quirk of Karst, a product of an exquisite, ever changing interplay of water and carbonate rock. Upper Pivka valley and the mountains around it are made of Cretaceous limestone, sporting every conceivable Karst phenomenon – caves, dolines, springs, sinkholes, estavelles, you name it.
The lake is in a large doline, an oval depression some kilometre and a half across and just over half a kilometre wide. The water has been busy for thousands of years, dissolving the limestone, widening the cracks, washing the rocks into the underground, constantly deepening the doline.
At one point the digging and dissolving water from above finally merged the waters hiding below – the water table – and Palčje depression became a lake.
Well, if only it would be so simple.
The mountains of this part of Slovenia receive quite a lot of precipitation, but the rain falls overwhelmingly in just two bursts, in autumn and in spring. So twice a year the area gets a lot of water – so much the cracks and sinkholes and estavelles can’t drink it all, and Pivka river is simply too small to carry the whole lot into the Postojna caves.
The level of the water table can rise enormously, up to 60 meters in some places. After heavy rains 17 of those dolines in Upper Pivka valley start to fill up, Palčje among them.
Water is coming from the bottom of the doline, from the caves, from small springs and cracks, bubbling and swishing everywhere – and occasionally flushing a strange beast, Proteus, from the deep and dark underground into the sun-kissed lake.
Palčje lake springs into being, becoming a deep eye of Pivka valley, reflecting the sky like a mirror …
When the water level rises above 553 m, Palčje lake spills into two bays, Njivce and Ždink – actually the waters of Ždink merge with Palčje lake, while the lake overflows a step and fills up Njivce. Both bays almost envelop a hill called Jezerščak, the Lake hill.
Then the rains stop and the water is left to drain; the estavelles reverse their flow, the cracks and pores in the bottom show the precious liquid a route into the underground. Deep beneath the soil the waters bifurcate; those of Palčje lake gush out at Trnje springs, forming the short-lived Stržen creek; some flow towards Reka, Timavo, and the Adriatic sea; the others travel under the Javorniki mountains to Planina polje, or go with Pivka river into the Postojna caves – eventually ending their journey in the Black sea.
Palčje and other lakes of Pivka valley go back to sleep, dreaming of the wind curling the waves – until the sky releases the rain again.
It’s a melancholic landscape, the meadows and forests around Palčje.
It’s remote, even desolate. The village of Palčje is the penultimate settlement on a gravel road that really doesn’t go anywhere anymore. The land is barren; the soil is too thin and the climate too harsh … between 600 and 700 meters above sea level is hard to grow anything.
The lake is an illusion. A beautiful, fascinating one, but still an illusion. It can’t help its people. There are no fish in it when the lake exists, and the marshy ground can’t be used for agriculture when the waters disappear. Even the hay is good only for the horses, there’s too much mouse garlic.
Making the lake permanent is impossible, making it disappear for good is pointless.
But this introverted, lonely land still has stories to tell. It whispers, reluctantly, to those who seek and are willing to listen. Small, overlooked, forgotten histories are still hiding here – still alive.
Thin hedgerows crisscross the pastures – a bocage of sorts – testaments of people wrestling with unforgiving Nature … Every piece of land had to be cleared by hand, the stones piled onto rows between fields, the shrubs – blackthorn, juniper, hazel – growing on them offering flimsy protection from the winds.
It’s impossible to tell how old the hedgerows are. The fields are abandoned, turned into pastures. The field division is the same as it was in the 18th century, meticulously drawn on the Franciscean cadastre, etched into the landscape, visible on LIDAR.
What do we see from above? A Medieval landscape? Neolithic? Perhaps … the hedgerows, the cairns, the battered, scarred lands are taciturn. Even the lake – used for target practice by armies of empires, kingdoms, and socialist republics; its bottom so bombed it needed to be reconstructed – is wary of strangers.
And beautiful.
Tall brown grass sways, the pines murmur, the ripples race across the lake. Everything is fleeting, ephemeral – the grass will wither, the trees will fall, the lake will disappear … yet it is timeless, unchanging, eternal.
It emanates from everywhere, melancholy.
Fragmented stories, pythian utterances. This is Appolonian land, stern and strange. Dionysius stays well clear of it, the Epicureans pass by as fast as they can on their way to the warm sea.
Only Heraclitus would have enjoyed the ephemeral timelessness of Lake Palčje.
For even a kite flying over it knows it will never fly again over the same lake.
Kite aerial photos shot with Nikon P330 on The Original Blue rokkaku, and with Insta360 on Cindy delta – both made by dr.Agon kites.