big Ozark river smallmouths

[Danoinark]

Excellent commentary CC! That should be required reading in any Biology class. Thanks for the insights. Dano

[Crippled Caddis]

Dano wrote:

<Excellent commentary CC! That should be required reading in any Biology class. Thanks for the insights.>

Thanks Bud. Even tho I recycled some prior material I worked my behind off to try to assemble it in a logical and transparent sequence. It's an admittedly gloomy prospect predicated on the basic nature on man. Being a cynic is depressing.;o)

[Al Agnew]

Nice piece of writing and good analysis, CC.

To put it in more concrete terms, consider my home river, Big River, a little closer. You can start at the headwaters, maybe at the dam that forms Council Bluff Lake, a Forest Service reservoir only a couple of miles from the river's farthest source. Below the dam, the little creek that is Big River already has almost permanent flow, and was already choked with gravel from erosion off the maze of hollows the headwaters drains. National Forest protection of some of those hollows was starting to curb the continued erosion of gravel, but not all the headwaters watershed is National Forest, and several landowners in the area have recently clear-cut their woods. The river flows through Belgrade a small, clear creek with a lot of gravel, flows past Hwy. 21 and the Bootleg Access, and then comes to its first significant tributary, Cedar Creek. Cedar Creek used to have several miles of good fishing water, and flowed about as much as the river did at that point. But poor land use practices on the farmland in the wide, flat Cedar Creek valley puts a lot of silt down it and into the river these days, and there was a major gravel operation that paid absolutely NO attention to any sort of protection of the fisheries on Cedar Creek. It started up on Big River right below the mouth of Cedar Creek back in the early 1970s, and they dredged out a huge, lake-like pool on the river. Then they moved up Cedar Creek for a good two miles, totally digging out the channel. Now, Cedar Creek nearly dries up in the summer, the channel is flat and now choked with willows and young trees, the water, what there is of it, coming into the river from Cedar Creek is warm, and it's also full of nutrients from the farming going on in the large Cedar Creek watershed. That big dredged hole below Cedar Creek is now silted in and shallow, weed-choked, open to the sun, and the river below it is murky and warm. It's amazing it still holds smallmouths. It takes several miles of "natural" river channel for it to start to clear and get a little cooler.

The river flows past Irondale through three big, beautiful pools, separated by nice riffles and runs...and then encounters the effects of ANOTHER gravel operation. This one, which is older than the one above, close to 50 years old, is still evident in the river channel. The river here had a rather thin layer of gravel sitting on solid bedrock. The gravel operation removed the gravel, right down to the bedrock. In 50 years, there has been enough gravel re-deposited to start to give trees a place to grow, but much of the next few miles are still shallow water running over bedrock, now lined with willows.

There is a short section that didn't get dredged, and then you reach the oldest gravel dredging operation, located above the Hwy. 8 bridge. That short section...the landowner decided to open a topsoil digging operation along it. They left a thin line of tree-covered bank along the edge of the river, but dug out the bottom on the other side of the tree line close to the same depth as the river bottom. It's just a matter of time until that really messes up that section.

The next gravel operation originally dug out about 4 miles of river. In the upper part the river still flows shallowly over the bedrock that was uncovered. In the lower part, below Hwy. 8, the gravel was deeper, so you don't see as much bedrock. This was dug out more than 50 years ago, and in many places you have to look close to see the remaining effects, but the habitat is still not typical. The river here is also badly weed-choked, partly due to warm water from exposed shallows over the bedrock upstream, and partly due to excess nutrients from farming practices.

So then, you have a stretch of several miles where the river does get more or less back to a natural state. The habitat improves and there are some nice, deep pools. The weeds thin out. And then...the little tributary that drains the farthest upstream of the big mine tailings complexes enters the river.

There are 6 huge areas of lead mine tailings draining into the river. They have been federal superfund sites for 25 years. This first one, the Leadwood Mine, is still in the process of being stabilized. Basically, the mine tailings consist of crushed limestone and the silt washed away from the ore. The crushed rock was piled up into big, high "chat dumps" up to 300 feet high, huge mounds of fine gravel upon which nothing has ever grown. The washings were impounded behind dams that were made up mostly of the crushed rock, and consist of fine sand grading down to fine silt. The dams were in no way built to last, and periodically one gives way and dumps the silt into the river. And the erosion from the chat piles and the other places where chat was dumped and spread in the past continually enters the river with each flood. The Leadwood mine tailings aren't quite enough to seriously affect the river in themselves. The tailings are evident in the river bottom and gravel bars, but the river is still good habitat below...except for a huge quarry that now sits beside the river where there was once an old, small mine. The quarry lets silt into the river periodically. But the river is still nice for another mile or two, until...

It hits the bend at the Desloge mine. This is a huge, horseshoe bend, where the river flows for 4 miles around the bend to reach a point that is less than a half mile from where the bend started. And most of the inside of this bend was filled with the tailings from the Desloge Mine. Not only that, but the mine complex was also used for the St. Francois County landfill. Back in about 1975, the levee holding back the tailings gave way in several places in a big rain, dumping millions of tons of tailings, laced with trash from the landfill, into the river.

The result of this was a river that looks almost like it flows through a concrete channel. The tailings have totally smothered the natural gravel, with its crevices where the bottom organisms can grow, and it has filled in all the deep pools. For the next five miles or so, you are hard pressed to find any water over 4 feet deep anywhere in the river. Surprisingly, there are still smallmouths in this stretch, but here is also the point where the non-native spotted bass have reached, and the struggling smallie population is taking another big hit from spotted bass competition.

I'll continue later.

[Al Agnew]

Wayne, about the winter fishing...once you find some spots where the bigger fish are holding in the winter, catching them is not all that difficult. Finding them is the really hard part. Not all pools that look like good wintering pools produce fish.

Winter fishing is still somewhat of a mystery to me. I still don't know where a lot of the fish go in the winter. Why is it that you can make a 10 mile float trip in the summer and if the fish are active you'll catch fish everywhere and catch 75-100 fish, but make that same float in the winter, fish all the good winter spots, and you will probably only catch a dozen or so. If all those fish that spread out over the whole stretch in the summer move to a few wintering pools, they should be stacked up in those pools and you should be able to catch them by the dozens at each good spot. But instead, you catch one or two here and there...however, you catch a greater percentage of bigger fish. It's rare to catch smallies much under 12 inches in the winter. Where the heck are they?

I do find winter and summer to be more consistent than spring and fall. Autumn is the toughest time for me, especially the month of October.

[Crippled Caddis]

Al wrote:

<I'll continue later.>

Please do!

[Danimal]

Speaking of spotted bass invasion, do you guys in Mo. ever encounter smallmouth/spotted bass crossbreeds like we occasionally see in the southwestern ozarks? Dan-o

[Al Agnew]

Yep, the spotted/smallmouth hybrids are fairly common on the streams where the spotted bass are not native but are invading. I caught one the other day. Took a couple of photos of it, and will post one whenever I get the chance. My brother was floating Big River with me a couple years ago and caught a 19 inch hybrid.

[Al Agnew]

Big River, continued...

The spotted bass first invaded Big River in the mid-1980s from the downstream end, and the Bone Hole lowwater bridge, at the beginning of the big bend where the Desloge mine tailings are, is about 100 miles upstream. In the last two years, spotted bass have increased from basically zero in the stretch immediately below Bone Hole to about 1/4 the number of smallmouths. In the next stretch downstream, they first showed up in significant numbers three years ago, and now are almost as common as smallies. Just shows how quickly they can take over a stream section.

Once you get past the big bend, you're in civilized water, with housing developments encroaching upon the river. When I was a kid, this was still fairly wild, even though it was less than a mile from my boyhood home in Desloge. There was a big, deep pool, the first deep pool below the Desloge Mine, where we used to fish for catfish. It was a narrow pool, deep from bank to bank, with big trees lining the banks and arching over the water. The pool was there until about 20 years ago, when the landowner on one side, for no apparent reason that I could see other than recreational bulldozing, decided to clear all the trees down to the river and shape the bank into a gentle slope. The river immediately ate the bank away, widened itself by 40 feet, and now that pool is so shallow it has exposed gravel in the middle.

The river passes the Hwy. 67 bridge just north of Desloge, barely beginning to recover a bit from the big slug of mine waste it received at the Desloge Mine. A bit below the bridge was a big pool, deep enough from bank to bank that it was difficult wading, that was my favorite fishing hole when I was a kid. The upper end was the most perfect place to fish with live bait I ever saw. The river came out of a fast riffle and slanted into a vertical bank lined with the roots of the big trees growing atop it. There was a big slick log lying there, at a 45 degree angle, with a limb coming off it that formed an arch through which much of the river's current flowed. The hole there was about 6-7 feet deep, and all you had to do was let a live crawdad drift through that arch and you'd get bit. It was amazing how many bass I caught (and kept back in those days) at that single spot. But 30 years ago the landowner decided to sell off the topsoil in the bottom field behind that bank, and cleared off the trees. Next flood, the river went off into the dug-out bottom field, widened itself, washed the big log out, and now the water is a foot deep there.

The lower end of that big pool is still fairly deep, and it really looks like the river is beginning to heal itself a bit...but at the bottom of the pool, Flat River Creek enters (Don't even ask me whether this small creek was named Flat River first, and the town was named after it, or whether the town got the name some other way and the creek was named that because it flows through the town--which is now Park Hills anyway!) There are THREE major mines and superfund sites on Flat River Creek, and the amount of tailings it has dumped into the river has made the river the same horrible habitat for the next ten miles, down to St. Francois State Park.

The strategy on these superfund sites is to stabilize the tailings dams with big rock rip-rap, cover the impounded tailings with topsoil and plant them to grass, lower the chat dumps and make their slopes gentler, and then cover them with larger rocks to stabilize them. St. Joe State Park is on one of the sites, and the impounded mine tailings there form one of the most popular ATV riding sites in the state, so covering them with topsoil doesn't seem to be in the cards. The dam that holds them, while stabilized, is still not anywhere near earthquake proof if the next New Madrid earthquake strikes, so the town of Park Hills below stands to be half covered in tailings if the dam goes...not to mention Big River.

In the next ten miles below Flat River Creek, the river not only is extremely shallow, it also has housing developments, topsoil removals, wholesale clearing of the riparian corridor. Terre Bleue Creek enters partway through that stretch, adding its own load of sand...it flows through a heavily farmed area and suffers from a lot of erosion.

By the time the river gets to St. Francois State Park, however, it is beginning to recover from the mine tailings...except that the final mine, the Bonne Terre mine, has dumped its load into the river through a couple of tributaries in that area. The other problem with the mine tailings is that they are heavily contaminated, not only with lead but with other heavy metals like cadmium and zinc. It's questionable whether any of the fish in the river below are safe to eat, although at present the health advisories are only out on suckers, if I'm not mistaken. In the past, there have been warnings about eating catfish and sunfish, including bass, from Big River.

But the river is finally past the lead mine stuff, and beginning to recover. The next few miles still suffer from a lot of unwise clearing of the riparian corridors, and have at times suffered as well from the accumulated, questionably treated sewage of the old Lead Belt population center. But the river begins to look pretty good.

However, it isn't out of the mining woods yet. It has entered the barite (tiff) mining area. In 1975, a buddy and I were headed to the river at Blackwell, planning on floating from Blackwell to Washington State Park. It had rained pretty hard the night before, but the river was in good shape at Desloge. But when we reached the bridge at Blackwell and looked down, we were shocked. The river was a torrent of pure, blood-red mud. A dam holding back the washings from a major tiff dam had burst during the night, dumping so much barite tailings down Mill Creek and into the river just above Blackwell that practically every aquatic organism was killed between Blackwell and Washington Park. It took more than ten years for that stretch of river to recover. There have been minor spills since, and the threat, from a bunch of flimsy tiff dams, hangs over the river perpetually.

Once the river gets past Washington Park, it is big enough that you can run a jet boat on it. The stretch from Mammoth Bridge to Browns Ford was one of the first three smallmouth special management areas. It's a pretty piece of river, with some high and interesting bluffs and pretty good habitat. But at times it gets a LOT of jetboat traffic. Still, you have to enjoy it while you can, because about 7 or 8 miles below Browns Ford, the river enters its final ugly phase. From Morse Mill to the mouth of the river, it seems you can't go 100 yards without passing a ramshackle cabin with a garbage dump coming off the bank and an open sewer pipe sticking out. We're getting close to the St. Louis area, and apparently at one time everybody in St. Louis bought up land and built a cabin on Big River. The accumulated siltation from 100 miles of poor farming practices, concentrated development, parking lot run-off, you name it, makes this lower 40 miles or so of the river very unattractive in many places. The spotted bass have won in this section...you'll be hard pressed to find a smallmouth except in one or two secret little spots. It wasn't like this 25 years ago, when I caught a 21 incher just a half-mile upstream from the mouth of the river.

So there you have it...perhaps the most abused stream in the Ozarks, but unfortunately, many of its problems are threatening other Ozark streams as well. Sometimes it really surprises me that there are still smallies to be caught in Big River, but therein lies, maybe, just a little bit of hope. If we just give them a fighting chance, the smallmouths will endure and even thrive.

[hank franklin]

Al, I hope you intend to publish this work someday. It needs a wider audience than this website.

Excellent stuff.

[BrianK]

Thanks Al. Too bad we let things go like that. Hopefully our kids' kids will see the result of some of that slow healing and not the continued slow decline of our great rivers and streams.

Pretty sad to just read what you have watched happen over the last 25 yrs.