Personalities Of The Merced River

The Merced River has so many personalities. On a day like the one when this photo was taken, it rests calmly as glass, hardly seeming to move at all; harboring the occasional floating leaf or passing merganser. The day after a rain, within a matter of hours, it becomes wild; ferocious, and teeming with branches, stones, mud, debris, and the cantankerous splashing of water over stone and around trunks of trees. The ecosystems in the Merced are mighty indeed; to have evolved to thrive under such varied and unpredictable conditions