Uncapped boreholes or artesian wells????

[trouty mouth]

Thanks for sharing all of that, Al. It's hard to believe how much abuse the Big River has survived and it's sad to think of how little thought was given to the ecological impacts of all the "ideas" the folks came up with back then.

Although, we're still building trash dumps right on river banks... so I guess we haven't come far enough. 

[Conor]

Yes, all great info!  Thanks!

I assume the old borings probably continue down below Bone Hole a while as well.  I had heard there was some sort of structure constructed along that stretch so this is good to know about.

I guess eventually all the tailings will be stabilized or wash through the system but it will be many lifetimes.

As mentioned, it is amazing the river is as nice as it is with all the abuse it has had.  Unfortunately trash dumping has continued on this river so household trash, tires, appliances, etc. are still not uncommon.

I did pull two old expired propane tanks out of the river and exchange them for new full ones.  I paid $20 for the gas and got two $50 tanks free out of that deal!

Conor

[Brian Jones]

22 hours ago, Al Agnew said:

 

There is a creek that comes into the river about a quarter mile above the Leadwood Access--it's right where the river divides and bends sharply to the left against the last bluff (on river right) above the low water bridge.  That is where the runoff from the farthest upstream mine tailings (the Leadwood Mine) comes in.  So from Leadwood Access to Bone Hole there is a significant amount of tailings on the bottom, but not enough to fill in the pools much.  Bone Hole is the beginning of the five mile bend--only a half mile across the neck of it there--where the Desloge Mine's tailings once filled the entire inside of the bend, and continually eroded into the river.  The farther you went around that bend, the worse the tailings in the river were.  By the time you completed the bend, the bottom consisted of 90% tailings.  At the downstream end of the bend now, you'll come to a 75 ft. high slope covered in rip rap, with a couple bluff outcrops sticking out of the rip rap.  That was once a slope of mine tailings that covered even most of those bluff outcrops, and came right down to the river.  The tailings were partially excavated there as part of the Superfund cleanup and then stabilized with the rip rap.  The photo I've attached is an old photo of those tailings the way they used to be.  The tailings were bad enough, but the county was stupid enough to buy most of the inside of the bend from the lead company and make it their county landfill, without worrying about how stable the flimsy little dikes holding back most of the tailings.  Eventually the dikes gave way and not only dumped 50,000 cubic yards of tailings into the river all at once, but also the trash and garbage that the county had buried in the tailings.  This happened in 1977, and it was a mess.

Farther downstream, Flat River Creek comes in (about a half mile below the 67 bridges north of Desloge).  The tailings from the two biggest mines, the National and Federal mines surrounding Flat River (Now Park Hills), flowed down Flat River Creek to the river, and from there to St. Francois Park is the worst section of tailings.  There was a time when the bottom was little better than a concrete channel, the tailings packed on the bottom, the gravel bars mostly tailings.  And the tailings are almost sterile, so nothing grew on the bars and only that nasty algae grew on the bottom.

The river is actually in much better shape now.  The bottom still has a lot of tailings, but some of the pools are deeper and the habitat is somewhat better than it was for a long time.  The nasty algae is still a problem in mid to late summer, and there is plenty of development along the river that wasn't there before, but it's not bad floating...except for the Newberry Riffle about a half mile below Flat River Creek.  The EPA and Corps of Engineers decided to try something to remove some of the tailings...they built what amounts to a dam, but instead of a single dam wall, it's a stairstep rapid of big boulders piled up in four distinct steps.  The idea was to form a slack water pool above the "riffle" where tailings would settle (the tailings are the consistency of fine sand and small gravel) and be periodically dredged out.  The "riffle" was supposed to be shaped so that it could be floated over in normal water flows, thus not impeding floaters.  But a huge flood right after it was built kinda jumbled up the boulders and made it very difficult to float.  If the water is low you have to clamber down the rocks dragging your boat, and if it's up a little it's basically impossible to float and even more difficult to drag over or around.  If it's up more than that, it makes a serious whitewater rapid.

Al, the bank in the picture was our access to the river as a kid.  I would ride my bike to a buddy's house who lived in Briarwood.  And from there we would cross Hwy P, walk the old RR track bed to the landfill and then walk the landfill road over to that steep bank.  We'd drop off the bank,  enter the river and wade up to the Island Hole and back.  I find it absolutely amazing how that part of Big River has recovered since the remediation began around those tailings in the late 90s. 

Also, word on the street is that the Newberry riffle has been removed, but I haven't been through there since mid-August and I cannot find a reliable source to confirm the rumor.

[Al Agnew]

58 minutes ago, Brian Jones said:

Al, the bank in the picture was our access to the river as a kid.  I would ride my bike to a buddy's house who lived in Briarwood.  And from there we would cross Hwy P, walk the old RR track bed to the landfill and then walk the landfill road over to that steep bank.  We'd drop off the bank,  enter the river and wade up to the Island Hole and back.  I find it absolutely amazing how that part of Big River has recovered since the remediation began around those tailings in the late 90s. 

Also, word on the street is that the Newberry riffle has been removed, but I haven't been through there since mid-August and I cannot find a reliable source to confirm the rumor.

I hadn't heard about the Newberry Riffle being removed...I'm trying to remember the last time I floated that section.  It was sometime during late summer, and it was still there.  If it actually worked the way it was supposed to and was doing some good, it would have been a simple matter to make it easily passable by paddle craft; just pick a line through it and remove about four strategic boulders.

I've had mixed feelings about it.  The upper end of the pool it formed used to be a fast run that always held a really big smallmouth; I've probably caught a dozen 20 inchers there over the years.  But the "dam" deepened and slowed it, and I hadn't caught a big one there since it was constructed.  But the pool held a good bunch of nice fish once the thing was built.

[Al Agnew]

9 hours ago, Conor said:

Yes, all great info!  Thanks!

I assume the old borings probably continue down below Bone Hole a while as well.  I had heard there was some sort of structure constructed along that stretch so this is good to know about.

I guess eventually all the tailings will be stabilized or wash through the system but it will be many lifetimes.

As mentioned, it is amazing the river is as nice as it is with all the abuse it has had.  Unfortunately trash dumping has continued on this river so household trash, tires, appliances, etc. are still not uncommon.

I did pull two old expired propane tanks out of the river and exchange them for new full ones.  I paid $20 for the gas and got two $50 tanks free out of that deal!

Conor

Yeah, I didn't even mention the tiff mining, which screwed the river up about where it started to recover from the lead mining.  Back in 1975, a buddy and I headed to the river one morning to float from Blackwell to Washington Park.  It had rained a lot the night before, but when we crossed the river in Desloge it was in good shape.  Well, we crossed it at the old Blackwell bridge while heading on to Washington Park to drop off a vehicle, and it was pure red mud!  A tiff mine tailings dam had burst the night before up on Mill Creek, which comes into the river just above Blackwell, and had dumped a huge amount of tailings into the river, so much that it pretty much killed everything from there to where the Mineral Fork came in and diluted it enough.  I did a two day float from St. Francois Park to Washington Park the next year, and caught over 100 bass above Blackwell and exactly 2 bass below.  It took about 10 years for that stretch to fully recover.

[Conor]

I bet some of the fine sediments in this river are from the tiff as well.  I don't think barite is as bad as lead but still not something you want a lot of in the river.  Luckily it seems that this area has recovered pretty well since all that happened.  As mentioned, it is amazing this river is as nice as it is with all the abuse it has had.

 

I hear that one rapid is a pain so will be on the lookout to see if it is still there.  I also understand there is some type of low-water bridge that must be portaged down from St. Francois State Park.

 

Conor

[Al Agnew]

9 hours ago, Conor said:

I bet some of the fine sediments in this river are from the tiff as well.  I don't think barite is as bad as lead but still not something you want a lot of in the river.  Luckily it seems that this area has recovered pretty well since all that happened.  As mentioned, it is amazing this river is as nice as it is with all the abuse it has had.

 

I hear that one rapid is a pain so will be on the lookout to see if it is still there.  I also understand there is some type of low-water bridge that must be portaged down from St. Francois State Park.

 

Conor

There are two private low water bridges between the park and Blackwell.  One is the bridge at what used to be known as Cole's Landing.  It was once a fee access but is completely private now.  In normal flows you can float under it with no problem, except that sometimes a bunch of driftwood piles up against the bridge and blocks the culverts going through it.  The other is a couple miles downstream.  The river splits just above this bridge, and for the last 10 years or so there has always been enough water to float the left channel, which bypasses the bridge but has a pretty sharp drop that can generate some 1-2 foot standing waves in springtime water flows.  There usually isn't anything you have to portage, but up until last summer there was a bad log jam a couple miles above E Highway that required portaging.  I think Jason of Wolf Head Outfitters finally got a passage sawed through it, but the big tree that anchors the whole jam is still there, so it could easily get jammed up again.

[Conor]

Yeah, I heard about Coles Landing and guess it was similar to what Mounts is like now.  It is too bad this no longer exists because that would be a great intermediate point to use on a long 19+ mile section.

 

Conor

[Al Agnew]

11 hours ago, Conor said:

Yeah, I heard about Coles Landing and guess it was similar to what Mounts is like now.  It is too bad this no longer exists because that would be a great intermediate point to use on a long 19+ mile section.

 

Conor

Yeah, it's probably been 20 years since it was an usable access.  The last time I used it was with the MDC biologist in charge of Big River; we did electroshocking upstream from the access.  It was not open to the public then, but he got permission to use it.  Many years ago, I got to know the old guy who owned it.  What I didn't know was that his family was gradually moving him out of taking care of the place.  I got permission from him to use the access for $5 one day, and went back a few days later to give him some t-shirts with my artwork on them in hopes that he would let me use the access without charging me for it.  The next time I went to use it, another guy who I think was his son or son-in-law stopped me and told me the access was closed, and that the old guy shouldn't have given me permission to use it the last time.  Apparently he had been taking money from people (and my t-shirts!) when he no longer had the authority to let people in (his house was before you got the old farmhouse at the end of the road, so I guess everybody stopped there.)