Sand everywhere.

[jdmidwest]

True, they start at the Ozark Plateau and dig down from there into the ancient sediments.  

[Gavin]

Schoolcraft County is in the UP near the Fox River. Hemingway country.

[Deadstream]

11 hours ago, Gavin said:

Schoolcraft County is in the UP near the Fox River. Hemingway country.

Yes, it is great brook trout,black fly and monster winged drill bit country.

[Born to Fish]

Would be interesting to see a study of the land use within the watershed and see how that has changed over time.  Would also be interesting to know if flood frequency, and discharge, has changed any.  I wish MDC, MDNR, USGS, and/or NPS would do some monitoring/research of these rivers and their watersheds. 

[bkbying89]

 

Would be interesting to see a study of the land use within the watershed and see how that has changed over time.  Would also be interesting to know if flood frequency, and discharge, has changed any.  I wish MDC, MDNR, USGS, and/or NPS would do some monitoring/research of these rivers and their watersheds. 

 

I wouldn't be surprised that some studies have not already been done. USGS certainly has historic water levels. And I am sure that there are books written on the history and land uses in the area. Have you checked out the video in a previous post? A lot of information along that line in it.

[bfishn]

 

... I wish MDC, MDNR, USGS, and/or NPS would do some monitoring/research of these rivers and their watersheds. 

Have you actually looked for that stuff, or are you just wishing someone else would do it for you?

Here's a start;

https://mo.water.usgs.gov/fact_sheets/fs-092-01-wilson/report.pdf

https://mo.water.usgs.gov/fact_sheets/index.html

If you'll search out the references listed in those documents, they will provide even more information, and the references in them even more... If you're seriously interested, there's enough freely available documented research to keep you entertained for a lifetime. Some of it you may have to visit a library for, but there's an ever-increasing repository on the web if you're willing to do the diligence to find it.

[Born to Fish]

Would like to see recent studies and research, not 20 year old information.  Also, would be nice to see more educational stories in MDC's Conservationist magazine, and DNR's  Missouri Resources magazine, about the rivers in the Ozarks including their history/geology as well as present conditions/trends.  Started my career, some 37 years ago, doing research on the ONSR and have played on them for over 50 years.  You need to know where you came from, to know where you're headed.   

[jdmidwest]

In my 50 years of studying streams, I have noticed most have filled in and become wider. 

Big changing floods like this may help since most were carved by melting glaciers flooding the landscape. 

[Al Agnew]

 

In my 50 years of studying streams, I have noticed most have filled in and become wider. 

Big changing floods like this may help since most were carved by melting glaciers flooding the landscape. 

Actually, jd, that's not quite true for Ozark streams.  The glaciers never got this far south, stopping north of the Missouri River (the present Missouri river valley was carved by glacial meltwater to a large extent).  The Ozark stream valleys have been being eroded, as the video said, for 5 to 25 million years, the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago.  It may have been exceptionally wet in the Ozarks at the end of the last ice age, causing more and bigger local flooding similar to what this one was, and the floods during that wet period may have been instrumental in dumping a lot of gravel into the river valleys.  When you look at bottomlands along all the larger rivers, you see a lot of places where thick gravel beds are overlain by topsoil, and those gravel beds were there long before European settlement, so at some point there must have been a lot of rain washing that gravel off the hillsides, but the general shape of the valleys was constructed long before over a period of millions of years.

But you're right in that these huge floods are changing events.  Small floods, those that fill the channel to bankfull or a little bit higher, just move gravel around.  They take it off loose gravel bars and dump it into the next pool, or just move it around in the channel.  But a big flood like this scours the bottom and blows gravel completely out of the channel in places.  So it's actually more likely to find the pools deeper after this kind of flood, while it's more likely to find the pools filled in after a small flood.

I agree with you on many streams having filled in and become wider.  The "wider" part probably has something to do with the filling in part, too.  I'm still trying to figure out all the reasons that seems to be so.  But it isn't so on all streams or stream sections.  Some of the rivers I'm most familiar with are little changed in the last 50 years except in localized spots, and often you can tell exactly what happened in that spot to change it.  The riffles on the larger, jetboatable rivers are definitely wider and shallower on average, and I believe jetboat wakes are the major culprit there.  And some of the smaller streams are wider and shallower in places for no apparent reason.  But most of the places along Big River that are wider and shallower than they used to be got that way because some landowner cleared the trees off the bank or mucked around in the stream bed with a bulldozer and destabilized the gravel bars and bottom.

[Blazerman]

In our river valley by the K bridge on the Meramec there is now acres of sand covering everything where there used to be green growth like grass or brush. This happened in 08 and Dec 2015 as well so there is no doubt to me about the sand washing out of the river onto the bottoms during heavy flooding.

the amazing thing to me is everywhere i had zoysia grass in my yard it looks great. all the areas that had leaves with no green growth were washed out leaving eroded ground.