Report from the Yellowstone

[Al Agnew]

Mary and I were in Missouri when the big flood hit the Yellowstone River.  I had never worried about our house on the river flooding; according to the flood plain maps it was high enough to never flood.  The river had seen a record high a couple years after we bought the house, and the water didn't come more than halfway up the bank next to the house.  

But hearing and seeing from our Livingston friends about the flood, I must admit I got a little uneasy.  The water was SO much higher than the record.  I was still pretty sure it wouldn't get up to the level of the house, but I was a bit worried about saturated ground backing up our septic system and maybe flooding into the basement.  The top of the bank is about 12 feet higher than normal river level, and the house ground floor sits about 2 feet higher than that, but it has a finished basement, so the floor of the basement could easily have been lower than the height of the river.

Our friends called and told us they were going to watch the flood peak from our yard, so I asked them to go in and check the basement.  It was fine, and I breathed a sigh of relief.  They arrived at the house late in the afternoon, and the flood peaked at the house about 11 PM.  This photo was taken from our yard looking upstream (pay no attention to the video play arrow; I can't get the video to load right now):The video was taken standing at the top of our bank.  You'll notice a post with an electrical outlet near the water; at the peak of the flood, the full force of the river was crashing into this bank and causing a bulge of at least two feet, and water surrounded the base of that post.  Another foot and it would have spilled out into the yard at that point, even though a bit farther down the bank where the water leveled off, it stayed about three feet below the top of the bank.  I found a screenshot on Facebook that shows an overview of the river the morning after the peak of the flood; at this point the water had gone down a foot or so.  I put a little red dot where our house sits.  You'll note that the water spilled far out into the valley on the other side from the house, because that side is lower, and that's what kept it from getting higher on our side:The other thing I was worried about was our bank itself.  It is underlain by bedrock that outcrops about three or four feet higher than normal river level, so I wasn't too worried about it getting eaten away significantly, but we'd just spent a lot of money and effort last summer clearing out a lot of trash and debris that the former owners had thrown onto that bank to keep it from eroding, reducing the steepness of the slope, and covering it in topsoil and vegetation.  When the flood went down, about half the length of the bank had lost all the vegetation and was just rock.

We got back out to Montana about three weeks ago, and the river was still high and muddy. But it was obvious that it had changed significantly in front of the house, and not for the better for my fishing purposes.  When we bought the place, there was a half-mile long wooded island in front of the house, with nearly all the river on the other side of the island; only a small channel was on our side, just big enough to have some nice pools that held a lot of trout.  But the river has gradually shifted toward our bank, and after this flood, more than half the river is on our side and it's pretty much unwadeable.

The river finally dropped and cleared enough to be fishable this past week.  So yesterday I loaded up the little Water Master one person raft and had Mary drop me off for one of my favorite floats, Pine Creek to Carter's Bridge.  I got on the river about 10 AM, clear skies, gentle wind, promising to get hot in the afternoon.  The river clarity was about 18 inches visibility, which is often good for streamer fishing, so I tied on a streamer on one rod and nymphs on the other, planning to fish the streamer while drifting and to stop at every good "riffle corner" (places where there is an eddy with a good eddy line at the bottom of a riffle) to drift the nymphs.  And I immediately hooked a nice brown on the streamer along a shallow, rocky bank on the inside of a riffle, the kind of place the guides usually don't fish.  The river had plenty of boats, many of the guides and clients, so I decided to fish those kinds of places that they don't fish.  Soon I got another good fish, a rainbow this time, and then picked up three nice rainbows and a small brown in the next couple riffle corners.  Then the fishing slowed as the sun got high overhead.  I was still picking up a few, though more whitefish than trout.  But it was a great day to be on the water.  I WAS intimately familiar with this stretch, but the flood had completely altered it; it was like fishing a new river.

By about 4 PM, I was within a couple miles of the take-out and the fishing was totally dead.  So I decided to just row on in.  And that's when I entered the twilight zone.

I was rowing down a steep, wide, shallow riffle when I somehow jammed an oar into the bottom and wedged it in the rocks.  Nearly flipped the little raft, and broke the shaft of the aluminum oar.  I paddled over to the bank with my swim fins, nearly losing one of the swim fins when it came off my foot doing such heavy flipping.  I had it tethered to my shoelace because I've lost swim fins before, but just as I grabbed it (fortunately I was in shallow water at that point or it would have sunk out of sight), the tether came loose as well!  Okay...dodged a bullet with that one.  I thought I could find a piece of driftwood that I could wedge in the two halves of the oar shaft and limp on down to the take-out, but after finding what I thought might be the right diameter driftwood branch, I discovered that there was a plug in the shaft and I could not jam it far enough into the shaft to make it work.  Okay...I'd just have to paddle on in with the swim fins alone.  But in order to do that, I had to make sure I wasn't going to throw a swim fin again.  So I dismantled the buckles on the swim fins to redo them more securely...and somehow, while sitting in three inches of water in the raft with my feet on the bottom in the opening in the middle of the raft, I dropped one of the pieces of the buckle...a vital piece...and COULDN'T FIND IT.  I looked for that thing for fifteen minutes with no luck.

Now my only option was to try to attach the strap without that piece, and the only way I could think of to do it was to cut a slit in the rubber strap and stretch the hole over the peg on the fin...and hope it stayed.  I reached into my pocket for my ever present pocket multi-tool...and it wasn't there.  I ended up using the line cutting scissor on my hemostat to cut the slit.  It worked, though I made especially sure to really tie my tether down well to the fin and to my shoe.  And started down the river.

Had to cross the river at the next riffle, then could see I had to cross it again.  The river is about 150 yards wide at that point, and I was really working myself silly getting across with the swim fins.  At that point, the river swings next to the highway and there is parking along a high, rip rapped bank.  So I called Mary and asked her if she could come and pick me up there.  She said she would head that way (about a 15-20 minute drive from the house).  I pulled into an eddy on that rip rap bank, and dragged the little raft up it (fortunately it only weighs about 40 pounds)...and somehow broke the butt section of my Sage 6 weight rod!

So now I'm out a swim fin, an oar, and a favorite rod.  I'm kinda glad we have to come back to Missouri soon! 

[darbwa]

Glad to hear that the house is okay. Sorry about your rough outing. At least you caught some fish! 

[Quillback]

When the flooding was in the news I was wondering how the Agnew's were doing, good to hear your property made it through OK.