itsabigfish

I got a call back from the conservation dept and long story short, the above post is correct: it is a gray area. I'm currently waiting for a call from the Phelps county sheriff's department to see how they handle trespassing on the Little Piney. I called the prosecuting attorney's office and was told I could set up an appointment on Saturdays to discuss this. Unfortunately, I'm not in Phelps county and when I am on a Saturday, I'm fishing or hunting. Additional edit: I didn't get a specific answer from the deputy--he didn't seem very familiar with the area and only stated he thought only one side of the creek is private property in that area.

I called the legal division in Jeff City and told them of the issue. An agent will be able to answer my question next monday. I'll post what happens as soon as I know. I've been following this guideline: "The landowner controls the right to access the creek from the bank, but any person has a right to move upstream or downstream in the water, according to the Missouri Supreme Court in the 1954 case Elder v. Delcour, as long as the stream can be considered “navigable,” in a fairly loose sense of the word. In some cases, the federal government has obtained an easement to allow recreational users the right to be on the streambanks, such as in the Ozark National Scenic Riverways (parts of the Jacks Fork and Current) and the National Wild and Scenic Rivers system (part of the Eleven Point)."

That's exactly what I thought, but that's not what the fisheries biologist told me. I'm going to do some research on this and post my results--I'll try to check with the law school here at Mizzou and talk to someone at the conservation department here in town.

I had a run in with her this weekend. Found out we are related--my grandmother is her cousin. Long story short, three guys pulled up on a four wheelers and it got real heated after I told them that I wasn't doing anything wrong--the stream is listed as a float stream by the conservation dept. When I told them to call the sheriff, it got uglier. I decided to leave. I called a conservation agent and told him what happened. This afternoon I got a call from the fisheries biologist in Rolla. He told me that she owns that portion of the creek and can fence it off and run people off. If the sheriff had come, I would have been arrested. However, He said, if I was floating in a canoe, she could not have said a word. As for the details, in phelps county property lines run to the middle of a stream if the property is divided by the creek. If the owner owns both sides, then they own the stream and its bottom, gravel bars, etc. This is my first post to this forum--I just wanted to keep people from getting into trouble by following the misinformation in the previous posts. I followed it and could have got arrested. She owns the land all the way down to Vida slab, so wade upstream at your own risk.