Sometimes, Not Often, Something Does Get Better.

[Al Agnew]

The creek was a big part of my life growing up. One piece of it was within a half mile of my house, and my grandparents lived on another piece of it. So I spent untold hours roaming the creek, catching crawdads, fishing for sunfish, snagging suckers, swimming, and just hanging out with buddies or by myself on the creek.

It wasn't much of a creek back then, in the 1960s. It drained a vast area of old lead mines, and with every high water event mine tailings washed into the creek. It flowed through the Old Lead Belt, and back then there was raw sewage running into the creek, along with very poorly treated sewage from the municipalities. Perhaps that was why there really wasn't much fishing. Bass were non-existent in the creek; the best you could hope for were green and longear sunfish, a few bullheads, and some suckers in the springtime. My dad once caught a nice rainbow trout out of it, and he told me stories of catching a bass now and then when he was a kid, but the only places I ever saw bass on it when I was a kid were a few largemouth in some pools far upstream that probably were escapees from farm ponds, and the occasional bass that came up a few hundred yards out of the river it flowed into.

I eventually simply outgrew the creek. Except for wading down the last few hundred yards to get to the river, and trapping walleye minnows in the winter, the last time I was on the creek was probably around 1967, when I was 15 years old.

My brother, who is more than 7 years younger than me, fished it a few times when he was in his teens, and actually caught a few largemouth, though most of them came from an even smaller tributary and were probably pond escapees as well.

Last year, my brother called me. "You'll never guess where I just caught some nice bass." He had an afternoon to kill and was curious as to what the creek looked like after all these years, and he fished a short section of it and caught several bass, mostly largemouth but with a few smallmouth mixed in. I kept that in the back of my mind, intending one day to check it out myself.

This afternoon was the day.

I parked at the spot I used to get onto the creek to wade down to the river to fish, but instead of wading downstream the few hundred yards to the river, I started upstream. It's a small creek. It was flowing maybe 5 cfs, with small pools three feet deep at most. As a little kid, they seemed deeper. In the first nice little spot, three feet deep near the head of one of the pools, I got a strike from what appeared to be a good smallmouth, had it on for a few seconds, and lost it. In the next pool, I caught what was actually the first smallmouth I'd ever taken on the creek. I continued upstream. It was often a long distance between fish-holding spots, and the fish-holding spots weren't very impressive, but in nearly every pocket of slightly deeper water in all but the smallest pools, there were fish. And they were mostly smallmouth. And some of them were nice fish. I caught a couple of 16 inchers and several 14-15 inchers. I kept moving upstream, underneath a new bridge, underneath another bridge, alongside houses and warehouses, under pipelines, under a third bridge, up into the waters I'd spent so much time on in my youth. After nearly 50 years, there were a few big rocks and bluffs that were still familiar, but had you dropped me into any given spot on the creek without telling me where I was, I wouldn't have recognized it.

One section has a series of rock ledges and a long expanse of shallow bedrock bottom. It didn't look fishable, but I discovered that there were smallies in every little crack in the bedrock. I had one that looked like a 17 incher that charged my topwater lure from ten feet away in water that was less than a foot deep. I lost it.

I went under the fifth bridge, fascinated by the creek as it was, and the memories of what it had been so many years ago. A little farther upstream, I came to a beaver dam, above which was a pool too deep to wade. I realized that I'd seen three deer and evidence of several beavers, neither of which I'd ever seen during all those times on the creek back then. And for all the sounds of civilization, highway sounds, chain saws, lawn mowers, the creek itself was prettier than I remembered it.

I also realized that so many other things had changed. When I was a kid, we always ran into other kids playing on the creek. But I had seen almost no evidence of kids on it, no footprints on the gravel bars, no paths down to the creek. I knew there were more houses close by, and more kids in those houses, but the creek was no longer a playground, the kids probably in the houses texting and playing video games.

Realizing that I had gone several miles up the creek and it was getting late, I decided to turn back at the beaver dam, and then I had an idea to call my brother, who still lives nearby, and have him come and drive me back to the car from that last bridge I'd gone under.

Sometimes, not often, things do get better. The mine waste became a federal Superfund site, and was eventually stabilized. The sewage treatment is more effective than it once was. The creek banks are in better shape, even with all the development around. The water is clearer and cleaner, and the pools aren't as filled in as I remembered. And the smallmouth have come back.

It will never be a place that you'd drive miles and miles to fish. Most people would opt for something a little wilder, a little bigger, a little better habitat. And yet, I caught more than 40 bass, mostly smallmouth. The creek of my youth has become something it never was back then, smallmouth water.

Sometimes, not often, when it comes to our environment, things do get better.

[jdmidwest]

Unfortunately, that is not always the case. The little creek I grew up on is now filled with gravel and almost fishless in its upper parts. The deep holes are not just ankle deep. There was never a superfund site nearby. In stream cattle watering and cattle farms have disappeared. So has the row cropping to the edge of the stream and there is a nice ripearian corridor along it.

I really draw a blank as to what is causing it. When I was growing up, all of the things we blame today were happening to the creek and it was in good shape. Now it is just a trickle except in flash flood stage.

[Mitch f]

Ya know, maybe there is a plus side to kids texting and playing Call of Duty......

[drew03cmc]

Al, it is things like this that have me jealous of you folks living in the Ozarks.

[Brian Jones]

I've been itching to try it out as well.

[LittleRedFisherman]

Great read Al, and good to hear something positive about something getting better!

[Tim Smith]

Unfortunately, that is not always the case. The little creek I grew up on is now filled with gravel and almost fishless in its upper parts. The deep holes are not just ankle deep. There was never a superfund site nearby. In stream cattle watering and cattle farms have disappeared. So has the row cropping to the edge of the stream and there is a nice ripearian corridor along it.

I really draw a blank as to what is causing it. When I was growing up, all of the things we blame today were happening to the creek and it was in good shape. Now it is just a trickle except in flash flood stage.

Maybe all that stuff that happened back then is just now marching it's way down the river to your doorstep. It takes a long time to move gravel.

[Al Agnew]

Unfortunately, that is not always the case. The little creek I grew up on is now filled with gravel and almost fishless in its upper parts. The deep holes are not just ankle deep. There was never a superfund site nearby. In stream cattle watering and cattle farms have disappeared. So has the row cropping to the edge of the stream and there is a nice ripearian corridor along it.

I really draw a blank as to what is causing it. When I was growing up, all of the things we blame today were happening to the creek and it was in good shape. Now it is just a trickle except in flash flood stage.

I think Tim might be right. This seems to be happening to a lot of Ozark waters that theoretically have healthier watersheds than they once did. But the gravel is already in the system, and there IS more gravel coming in. Maybe the healthier riparian corridor and watershed actually works against us in an odd sort of way. A healthier watershed reduces the severity of floods by trapping more water on the land and letting it run into the streams more slowly. But the gravel is already there. Small floods move gravel, but they don't blow it out of the channel, they just move it from bars and shallows to deeper pools, where it settles. They don't "lift" it, they move it and let it drop. Big floods actually blow it out of the pools by excavating it, lifting it, piling it up on existing gravel bars or making new ones, and even blow it completely out into the bottoms. So while big floods can be destructive of banks, they may actually deepen a lot of pools and pockets, while little floods fill them in. And so if you have fewer big floods, the creeks get shallower.

We've also been in a long term drought in the Ozarks. A lot of the springs seem to be flowing less water than what they were decades ago, so the base flow of many of these creeks seems to have gotten less.

We've hashed the whole gravel dredging thing before here, and I think there's no doubt that most commercial gravel dredging, while it removes a small percentage of the stream's bed load of gravel, does far more harm than good. IF you could dredge gravel carefully over the whole course of the stream and all tributaries, instead of as it's done by dredging only in spots, the streams would suffer a whole lot of short term damage but might actually be better off in the long run if the watershed was healthy. But that isn't feasible even if it would work. So I'm afraid we're going to have to live with the streams the way they are.

Jd, I wonder if anybody upstream of you on your creek is doing any gravel removal by bar skimming, taking it off the gravel bars. That's one of the worst things that cause gravel to move in those small floods. It destabilizes the bar and loosens the gravel as well as bringing the level of the bar down to where moderately high water can take it off and move it downstream. I used to consider bar skimming to be one of the least harmful ways of mining gravel, because it didn't affect the actual underwater part of the stream channel. But I've seen several places where it's been done and the pools below filled in with the next flood, after being deep and stable for many years.

[Gavin]

Glad you had a nice day. Creeks always peak & valley. Good some years, not the next. Depends on rain, and lots of other things. Mostly land use and pressure.

[jdmidwest]

Not much gravel skimming around the place, the DNR has stopped it in most of the county. The county road district was the only ones doing any major gravel operations that I can remember and it has been several years since they did it. They have been using crushed stone for the most part.

There was a large clearcut 20 years ago up one branch and timber is being cut all up and down the system, but not any more than they were doing 50 years ago. As a whole, the timber stands are better. Row cropping has disappeared and it is mostly pasture or grown up fields along the way.

I think the water table is dropping all along the watershed. The Castor is becoming the same way. What used to be a nice river is diminishing down to a creek. I don't really think the gravel is rising up higher, I just think there is less water.