Hwy 101 To The White

[gotmuddy]

I dont know if I buy into the theory. Look at the lower buffalo river. There are sand/gravel bars 50 feet high, that go hundreds of yards. They have large trees growing on them and do not appear to be "new"

[gotmuddy]

I dont know if I buy into the theory. Look at the lower buffalo river. There are sand/gravel bars 50 feet high, that go hundreds of yards. They have large trees growing on them and do not appear to be "new". How much development is going on along the buffalo?

[Al Agnew]

On the lower Buffalo, most of the gravel probably got into the river, and the tributary streams, back during the first big logging boom a hundred years ago. And although there are a lot of huge high gravel bars on the Buffalo, in reality it doesn't have as much gravel as some of the other Ozark streams. How many of the pools and riffles on the lower Buffalo have a solid rock bottom? A lot of them. And the lower river has little or no bottomland for gravel to spread out into. What you see on the gravel bars is what the Buffalo has as far as gravel is concerned. Compare that to some of the stretches of Current River and Black River, where you have wide bottomlands with deep layers of gravel. The amount of gravel along Black River below Clearwater Dam is simply amazing, even though the dam has made the actual gravel bars small and stable for the most part. There are old gravel mining operations on the lower Black where the gravel was dug out of the main channel, leaving pools that were once more than 50 feet deep, and pits dug out of the bottom fields just as deep, and as you float the river, the high banks where the river has eroded the banks away always have a few feet of soil lying over gravel. And those bottom lands are a half mile wide in places. So all along the lower Black you could figure that there are gravel deposits a quarter to a half mile wide and at least 50 feet thick.

I don't think all that gravel got there during historic times. Some streams flow through geologic formations that have always produced a lot of gravel, and apparently there have been times in the past when a lot of gravel eroded into the stream bottoms. But most of that gravel is stable and often buried beneath other sediments.

On the other hand, Schoolcraft and others reported that the White River had a lot of areas with solid rock bottom, which would mean very little gravel in it before the logging boom. But look at a lot of old photos of the White River area and other areas of the Ozarks taken during and after the logging, and you'll usually see nothing but small, sparse, scraggly timber in the background. This land was basically denuded in the first couple decades of the 1900s, and then burnt off every year to "keep down the ticks". The amount of change to the rivers during that time from all the resulting erosion had to be incredible.

By the 1930s much of the Ozarks was losing population, hardscrabble farms were reverting back to forest, and the National Forests were protecting timber from fires and clearing. The gravel began to stabilize and less new gravel was coming into the rivers. But ever since the 1950s the Ozarks has seen gains in population and increasing development, and now more gravel is washing into the rivers and tributaries again.

[Crooked Creek Angler]

• I don't claim to know much about how gravel mining impacts the smallmouth fishery on Crooked creek, but I have a feeling the creek was doing just fine in the 10,000 or more years it was around before gravel mining started. Just a guess though....