Premiere Ozarks Smallmouth Bass Stream To Flow Freely After Part Of Kelly’s Slab Is Removed

[Zack Hoyt]

Premiere Ozarks smallmouth bass stream to flow freely after part of Kelly’s Slab is removed

YELLVILLE - Kelly’s Slab is coming down.

The concrete low-water bridge that crosses Crooked Creek in the Ozark Mountains is widely known among anglers as a premiere spot to fish for smallmouth bass. One website describes it as "the blue-ribbon smallmouth bass fishing stream of the state.” But the well known slab also is hurting the very fish population that attracts anglers.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission plans to remove a big chunk of the slab to allow Crooked Creek to flow the way nature intended, to the benefit of both fish and anglers. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has awarded a $250,000 contract to the Commission to remove the middle part of the slab, convert parts of the remaining structure to handicapped accessible fishing spots, rehabilitate the eroding steam banks and build a new bridge upstream from the current slab. The new upstream bridge also will make it much safer and more reliable for school buses to be able to take students to the Fred Berry education center.

“Our own electrofishing and angler fishing surveys show that Crooked Creek is one of the best smallmouth bass streams in the country,” said Steve Filipek, assistant chief of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Fisheries Division. “The problem with low-water bridges like this is that it is basically a dam with a few pipes through it,” he said. “Crooked Creek is a 150-foot-wide stream being diverted through two culverts that are just a few feet across, and the water flows through those pipes super-fast when the creek is high. Many fish can’t handle it. So for the fish to be able to move up and down Crooked Creek freely, part of Kelly’s Slab has to come out,” Filipek explained.

Although Crooked Creek is renowned mainly for its smallmouth bass, it’s also home to an amazing 66 species of fish, several of which serve as food for the bass and are listed by Arkansas as Species of Greatest Conservation Need. Being on this list means that the fish are in danger of becoming threatened or endangered if they are not protected or managed correctly.

The AGFC will remove the center section of the slab, about 60 feet across, which will allow Crooked Creek to flow freely. The remaining slab sections on each bank will be converted to fishing spots that will be open to the public and will also meet Americans With Disabilities Act requirements. The Commission will repair parts of the creek banks that have eroded and build a new elevated span upstream from the current slab that will allow the public to cross, but will not interfere with the creek.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Foundation and the Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership are partners on the project.

The Recovery Act provides $280 million for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - which includes $115 million for construction, repair and energy efficiency retrofit projects at Service facilities, and $165 million for habitat restoration, deferred maintenance and capital improvement projects. Projects will help create local jobs in the communities where they are located and around the United States, while stimulating long-term employment and economic opportunities for the American public. Recovery Act projects address long-standing priority needs identified by the Service through its capital planning process. The agency worked through a rigorous merit-based process to identify and prioritize investments meeting the criteria put forth in the Recovery Act: namely, that a project addresses the Department’s highest priority mission needs; generates the largest number of jobs in the shortest period of time; and creates lasting value for the American public.

For a full list of funded projects nationwide, go to the Department’s Recovery web site at http://recovery.doi.gov/. For a list of Service projects, click on the Service’s logo at the bottom of the page or visit http://recovery.doi.gov/press/bureaus/us-f...ildlife-service. The public will be able to follow the progress of each project on the recovery web site, which includes an interactive map that allows the public to track where and how the Department’s recovery dollars are being spent. In addition, the public can submit questions, comments or concerns at recoveryact@fws.gov.

[John Berry]

Zack, this is great news. When is this project to take place?

[Ham]

Is it great news John? I'm not really sure.

The slab helped maintain water levels upstream a little bit which kept it floatable longer which I see as a positive. So I would expect more difficult floats.

I'm not really sure how much fish migration was an issue anyway? The creek goes dry between Yellvillie and Hwy 101 more often than not so fish migration is limited to certain sub-sections of the creek anyway. I know smallies migrate to deeper water in winter and will migrate down to lakes or resivoirs if the creek runs into one, but there wasn't going to be a mass migration down to the White River. What species of fish were they expecting to do better with this change?

Better access to the education center is a plus. Bank repair and stabilization is a plus. Maybe we will get a better area for launching kayaks or canoes out of the deal.

Regardless, I guess the project is coming and we will see what happens.

[Zack Hoyt]

Construction is under way. They have the supports for the new bridge set and part of the Kelleys Slab bridge tore out.

[Zack Hoyt]

From Mr Bryan Hendricks article on the Norfork flow.....

Similarly, the commission approved a $250,000 budget increase, by way of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to improve a sectionof Crooked Creek at the Fred Berry Conservation Center near Yellville. The money will be used to remove Kelly’s Slab, build part of a new bridge over the creek and to stabilize the stream bank.

This was voted on last Friday I believe.

[taxidermist]

I dont think its a great or even good thing. the slab certain makes anice long hole that holds good fish, above the slab. Below the slab it also makes a great habiatat that is filled with Smallies and some Largemouth.

I know most people think stopping the hauling of gravel out of t he creek was a good thing, but I dont. There are a lot of holes than have filled in and nolonger hold fish, little water and its just not as clear as it use to be.

So maybe the slab should be left, makes a very good handicapped access.

[Wayne SW/MO]

I think I would disagree.

[Zack Hoyt]

From my understanding, part of the slab is going to be left on either side. They are just taking a hunk out of the middle......so to a point the water flow is still restricted. this will also cause gravel build up on both side of the remaning concrete "bridge" which should mean easier access for boaters to put in and take out. I haven't been up there recently to see how the construction goes.

[steve l]

I dont think its a great or even good thing. the slab certain makes anice long hole that holds good fish, above the slab. Below the slab it also makes a great habiatat that is filled with Smallies and some Largemouth.

I know most people think stopping the hauling of gravel out of t he creek was a good thing, but I dont. There are a lot of holes than have filled in and nolonger hold fish, little water and its just not as clear as it use to be.

So maybe the slab should be left, makes a very good handicapped access.

A couple of years ago or so there was a great post of the effects of gravel mining - that what may look good locally is bad for the steam overall. I searched for it, but could not find. It was maybe by Al or Ted? Seems to be a good post/link to revisit here if anyone remembers where it is.

And, the picture posted by Wayne worth somewhere right around 1,000 words

[Al Agnew]

Yep, we hashed it out about gravel mining a while back. I don't think you can ever convince some people that it's such a bad thing because it just seems to make sense that removing gravel means less gravel in the stream. But no matter how much gravel you remove, you CANNOT remove enough to make any difference in the total bed load of gravel in the stream. And the ills of gravel mining are so much greater than any temporary and illusory benefits that with just a little bit of study and thought, one ought to be able to see that it's NEVER a good thing, and seldom even harmless.

As short and sweet as I can make it, here are the bad stuff.

1. Removal of gravel often means removing streamside vegetation and widening the stream bed. This puts more sun on the water, warming it and making a lot more algae growth--scum on the water and murkier water. And the warmer water is not good for cool water species like smallmouth bass.

2. Removal of gravel from gravel bars destabilizes the gravel that's left. A healthy gravel bar has a lot of small plants growing on it, and a relatively hard crust on top, both of which make the bar fairly stable--it takes a pretty strong flood to blow it out and move it downstream. But if you dig up that gravel, now you've removed everything that holds it together, and the gravel that's left moves whenever there's water high enough to cover it.

3. A river always wants to "level off" its channel from upstream to downstream. If you draw a line down the center of an Ozark stream and then look at it from the side, it's a series of very gentle steps--fairly level in the pools, and gentle drops at the riffles--but overall is a slight slant. Now, if you dig a hole in it that's a lot deeper than the general slant, the river wants to get back to that gentle slant, which means that it begins cutting into the channel upstream with every high water event, trying to dig out upstream enough to get back to that gentle slant instead of that big hole. In other words, it's trying to take gravel and rock from upstream to fill in the hole that's been dug. This means it digs deeper between the banks, which means the banks destabilize, which means the river widens and actually shallows upstream. Meanwhile, it also cuts downward downstream to try to get back to that gentle incline, and the same kind of stuff happens, though a lot less than upstream.

4. And of course, where you dig, you are immediately ruining that area for habitat and screwing up the water downstream if you do so within the channel. You're digging out all the logs and rocks and deep pools and riffles and usually replacing them with flat, featureless bottoms and wider channels.

And the thing is, the first three things don't heal quickly, and indeed get worse for quite a few years before they get better. So Taxi, what you're seeing now with gravel filling in pools just might be the result of former gravel mining, not the result of the ending of gravel mining. A lot of times, long sections of the stream get worse before they get better.

I can show you a lot of former gravel mining areas. In NONE of them did the river get better habitat either above or below while the gravel mining went on. On nearly all of them, it got worse, and it has taken many years to even start to get better.

Lower Black River. Two huge gravel excavations, widening the channel by twice as much or more, deep holes up to 50 feet deep when the excavations ended. Good places to fish for winter walleye for a few years. Now, however, the river upstream of both places has big, high, unstable mud banks. It took about 20 years to fill in those huge holes, but now one of them is almost entirely filled in, and it's nothing but shallow runs and willow trees. It'll probably be another 30 years of so before it gets back to some semblance of a natural river.

Upper Big River. Here it was different, a fairly shallow gravel deposit over a bedrock bottom. They couldn't dig it very deep, but they got all the gravel they could by widening the channel and digging into the banks. That was 50 years ago. Now, at first glance the river looks natural, trees along the banks starting to get big. But the river is still very shallow in most places, and as new gravel from upstream moves in, it just puts a layer of gravel over that bedrock without making the river any deeper. A little farther downstream, removing gravel in the same way a few years later, there are still lots of places where the river is open and shallow with lots of aquatic scummy weed growth.

Huzzah Creek. A short stretch, no more than a few hundred yards, of digging gravel mainly on a big gravel bar, not in the creek channel itself. It destabilized the bar, and what was a nice deep pool below immediately filled in. I especially hated it because that pool had produced several big smallmouth for me before it filled in.

Poor land use practices in the watershed are always the source of more gravel. Big floods are both boon and bane of habitat. Boon sometimes because they really blow out a lot of gravel from the channel and around obstructions, piling it up higher on gravel bars and out into the bottom fields. But they also take a lot of new gravel off the hillsides and out of the small tributaries and dump it into the river channel. Lower floods are often worse, however, especially in a river that already has a lot of gravel, because they simply take gravel off the gravel bars and dump it in the pools.

But if you're seeing a lot of pools filled in, don't blame it on somebody stopping gravel mining. Look to the watershed and land clearing along the banks and tributaries. And look to where the gravel mining was before.

As for removal of the section of bridge...Ham, think about it. The only water level that will be affected by it is the water that was impounded behind the bridge. It won't make a millimeter of difference in the level once you get above the first riffle upstream.

Slab bridges DO form partial barriers to upstream migration. On upper Big River, a slab bridge stopped spotted bass encroachment upstream for several years--I caught increasing numbers of spotted bass below it for about three years before I caught the first few spots above it. And the next (and last) slab upstream is the last unbreached barrier to the spotted bass--it's been about five years since they got past the one below in significant numbers, but I've yet to catch one above that slab. So in that case the slabs were a good thing. But on the other hand, they never seemed to stop or slow sucker migration upstream. Maybe the suckers are able to fight the current going over the slab in high water better. So while I'm not sure that the slab was all that bad, removing it might be a good thing for the fisheries.