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

[taxidermist]

Bear Creek In boone county Ar. has filled with gravel. holes that were 15 feet deep years ago are not full of gravel. same for crooked creek..

I have seen the streams go down hill since I was a kid in the early 1970's even Liitle sac had good smallie fishing in the 1970s now its not even a creek int he same places. Water goes underground and that sure does nothing for the fish.

[Al Agnew]

Taxi, I've seen the same thing on a lot of smaller streams similar to Bear Creek. In most cases you can find the reasons for it...too much tree-clearing on the hillsides, too many people doing what I call recreational bulldozing--getting into the creek with a bulldozer and moving gravel around and clearing out obstructions in a mostly vain attempt to make the creek flood less. It does nothing good and a lot of bad.

One thing I didn't realize for a long time is how much NEW gravel a really big flood puts into the streams. It really hit home a few years ago when there was an 11 inch rain over a small area in the middle of the Big River watershed. A couple weeks after that rain, which took place right around the river between Mammoth Bridge and Morse Mill, I floated from Mammoth to Browns Ford. You could see from the mud line on the streamside foliage that the river at the beginning of that float only got a couple of feet higher than normal, but as I went downstream, that mud line kept getting higher and higher, until by the time I reached the end of the float it was 8 feet above water level. So it rained enough in that one area to raise the river 8 feet, even though there was very little water coming from upstream. And...EVERY little ravine coming into the river had a big new rock and gravel bar at its mouth. If it was a pretty good sized hollow, that bar would be bigger than my living room. Now ordinarily, when such a rain happens it happens over a wide area, the river gets high and stays high long enough to spread all that new gravel out over the whole stream bed, but since this rain happened in a very small area, and the river above it didn't get enough rain to rise much, the river in that area went back down to near normal almost as fast as it rose. All the water came in at once, and then it was over. So those bars never got spread out because the river dropped too fast, and for once you could see how much gravel had been dumped in. When you add that up with somebody up on the hillside clearing timber, you can get an idea why some of these smaller streams are filling up more and more with gravel.

And yet, if they are left alone, some of them at least recover pretty quickly, or never get filled in. Huzzah Creek has about as much gravel in its bed as any stream in the Ozarks, and in some places the land use has been pretty poor. But fortunately it doesn't have a lot of gravel dredging nor a lot of recreational bulldozing. There are a few places along it that have gotten worse in the 30 or so years I've been fishing it, but quite a few areas have also gotten better. That spot I mentioned above is one of the few places where somebody came in and dug around in the gravel bar, and the downstream effect happened after the first good flood. A pool that had been pretty stable and unchanging for a long time immediately filled in. To describe it a bit more...

The creek comes out of a series of short, medium depth pools and riffles, swinging to the right to go around this big gravel bar that used to be partially covered in willows. There are willows lining the creek channel itself as it goes along the bar, and in fact once you get into the creek channal adjacent to the bar, you can't even see the main part of the bar because it's screened by those willows. At the bottom of that run along the bar, the creek swings into a bluff hillside on the right, and enters a rather long pool that used to be deep and lined with rock on the right and logs and root wads on the left.

Somebody cleared some of the willows on the bar and started digging up the bar. They didn't dig it down below river level, just "bar-skimmed" the gravel. After the next flood, that pool below was filled in to where there was no water in it over about 2or 3 feet deep...rocks were buried, and it was only inches deep on the log side. There wasn't anywhere else on that stretch that changed much after that flood, just that one pool. I'd say it wasn't a coincidence.

[gotmuddy]

I like the idea of being able to take a boat down from Bruno all the way to yellville without carrying it over a dam. IMO it will hurt the smallie fishing some near the dam but not too much above it. I read somewhere that most river smallies stay in the same 100yd stretch of river they were born in their whole life.

the REAL reason they are taking part of the slab out is because people have died there from being sucked into the culverts.