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The technology known as 鈥� Light Detection and Ranging, a laser-driven means of making precise measurements over large areas 鈥� has been helping scientists understand geology and natural history for many years. It turns out that LiDAR is also pretty useful for plumbing the depths of recent human history too, including a phantom lake on the Eastside.

, a Kirkland-based historian and author, has been combing through publicly accessible lately to supplement the searches through local history that he鈥檚 been pursuing on foot and in newspaper and photo archives for most of his life.

“The really nice thing about LiDAR is it gives us a chance to view from above what a landform looks like,” McCauley told 成人X站 Newsradio early Friday. “Yet it digitally peels back the foliage so we can get a really good look at the various contours. And in a lot of cases, there are remains of historic structures or other infrastructure that can still be there underneath the bushes and trees.”

Case in point: the old Juanita Bridge in Kirkland, which was closed to vehicle traffic in the 1970s and is now a popular pedestrian and bike path connected to . Old maps and old photos can only reveal so much of the history of the bridge, or, really, of any human-created change to the landscape.

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But with LiDAR, McCauley was able to confirm the exact location of a wooden causeway, built in the 1890s, that once ran perpendicular to an earlier iteration of the bridge across Juanita Bay. On the LiDAR image, the old route of the causeway, and an earthen berm that was built up beneath it beginning more than 100 years ago, is clearly visible.

“I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the ghostly remnants of that causeway/NE 112th extension are still visible,” McCauley wrote in an email earlier this week.

“Various incarnations of the Juanita Bridge had a wood-planked causeway built on pilings running perpendicular to the bridge,” McCauley continued, “east to west from the western end of what is now NE 112th Street, previously named ‘Aaron Newell Road,’ among other informal names.”

“It originally spanned open water,” McCauley said, “but after the lake was lowered in 1916, it crossed what became marsh.”

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Another dormant and hidden artifact

Other than in old photos and on old maps, evidence of the long-ago causeway hadn鈥檛 been visible for generations, and the structure had been mostly forgotten.

Not far from the old bridge and the ghostly causeway, McCauley discovered another artifact lying dormant and hidden in the landscape: a phantom lake.

“I see as a depression the 1880s-1910s ‘Lake Juanita,'” McCauley said, otherwise known as “the log pond Dorr Forbes made by damming up Juanita Creek.” Forbes was an early settler in the area around what鈥檚 now , and the old Lake Juanita was situated just to the northeast.

The depression in the landscape, which McCauley says is clearly visible using LiDAR, “seems to conform reasonably well to the 1897 USGS map. We knew that was about where it had been, but to me it was fun to digitally strip away the foliage and see that the remnants of Dorr’s handiwork survive.”

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McCauley is investigating other landscapes on the east side of Lake Washington, revisiting old projects and teasing out previously unseen evidence.

“We have another project down in the Newcastle area involving the old Seattle Coal and Transportation Company tramline,” McCauley said. Sure enough, the LiDAR data revealed something about that piece of long-lost infrastructure too.

“It was still neat to see it on LiDAR because it makes it that much more clear to us that that is, in fact, what we’re looking at there,” McCauley said.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks .