BELLE RIVER – Not long ago, Rhett Pipsair of Pierre Part, son of Joe and Laura Nell Pipsair of Belle River, stopped by his parents house on Levee Highway to show off a real treasure.

The younger Pipsair, who works for Laser Construction, was pulling a work barge across Grassy Lake, between lakes Verret and Palourde, when the barge hit an underwater obstruction.

Pipsair stopped to investigate and saw bubbles rising to the surface where something large had been disturbed in the mud below.

The obstruction turned out to be a “sinker” cypress log, lost generations ago during the heyday of cypress lumbering in this part of the country.

Unable to lift the log himself, Pipsair hooked onto the log and pulled it to the Settoon shipyard dock in Belle River.

There a 100-ton crane was used to lift the “treasure” from the river and onto a lowboy trailer belonging to Laser Construction.

The 22-foot-long log or piece of what was certainly a giant cypress tree was 54 inches in diameter at one end and over 4 feet at the other.

At the wide end could clearly be seen the original ax marks where the tree was chopped down and the jagged shreds of wood left when the massive tree broke and finally fell.

The narrower end was tapered a bit for what Pipsair guessed was to have made it easier to pull the huge tree along a "pull boat" road.

The log, by the way, was solid through and through.

Pipsair hasn’t decided what to do with his “treasure” yet.

It could certainly be sold for lumber, maybe displayed in an appropriate venue.

No rush to decide. The log has been silently, patiently lying on the bottom of Grassy Lake for over a 100 years.

Now it gets to bask in the sunshine awhile.