Gravel in Ozark Streams--the Problems

 All of us who float, boat, and fish Ozark streams have noticed that our favorite waters seem to be getting shallower, with pools filling in and habitat degraded in some of the spots we fish.  There are constant calls to do something about this, most commonly from people convinced that we need to allow more gravel mining.  But is that true?  Nope.

Gravel is a part of the geology of the Ozarks.  The limestone and dolomite that make up much of the surface rock strata is weakly soluble in rainwater, and the water dissolves voids within and between the layers.  Chert forms in these spaces, and some formations also produce drusy quartz, the same mineral as chert—silicon dioxide—but in masses of crystals that form on the inside surfaces of the voids.  Silicon dioxide in either form is much harder than the matrix rock and remains on the surface as the limestone is dissolved and eroded away.  So all the streams have sources of gravel, though some flow through formations that produce more gravel than others.

Gravel erodes off the hillsides with heavy rain, into the hollows, creeks, and tributaries that feed the streams.  This has been going on since at least the last ice age, when glaciation occurred almost to the latitude of the Ozarks.  At the time of the greatest ice cover, the Ozarks was probably treeless except perhaps in small, sheltered areas, and when the ice began to melt, the climate was wet and erosion was rampant off the nearly bare hillsides.  The evidence of this is found in the thick layers of gravel beneath the topsoil in the bottomlands of the larger streams, gravel that has also been mined for many years, and which one can often see in the places where the stream is eroding a bank; there will be a layer of alluvial mud, and beneath it, near the normal water level, a layer of gravel.  If we think gravel is bad in the streams now, we should have seen it 10,000 years ago!  The valley bottoms were probably almost all gravel, with the streams running in braided channels through those extensive gravel beds.

Thousands of years of weathering and forest growth changed the streams and valley floors.  As trees and other plants covered the gravel bottoms, they trapped topsoil that built up in thick layers over the gravel.  The forests became old growth; big, widely spaced trees with native grasses growing beneath, maintained by natural and Native American set fires.  The growth held the gravel on the hillsides.  Gravel already in the stream channels was washed downstream and ground away until at the time of the first European settlers, there were many sections of streams flowing over bedrock bottoms, as reported by Schoolcraft and others.

But then came the great logging boom of the early 1900s.  The forests were cleared.  Brush grew and shaded out the grass.  Burning to remove the brush and “kill ticks” was common and widespread.  The gravel began a new cycle of erosion into the streams and tributaries.  In old photos from the period of the 1920s to 1940s, Ozark hillsides are covered in sparse, scraggly trees, with brush and a lot of bare ground, perfect for widespread erosion.

By the 1930s, the streams were probably in the worst shape they had ever been during historic times; not only from wholesale erosion, but from log drives and railroad tie rafts that destroyed banks, uprooted trees, and scoured the bottom of the stream in shallow water.  It took until the 1950s before the forests had grown back enough to provide some protection from erosion, but the native grasses that were best at stabilizing hillsides never returned, and gravel continued to enter the streams.  Logging, housing developments, clearing of hillsides for pasture, roads, and ATV and horse trails have proliferated over the watersheds, all contributing to more gravel in the hollows and tributaries. 

Most people would be surprised at the amount of gravel continually coming into the rivers.  I saw this firsthand many years ago.  There had been a massive rainstorm that was centered over one small area of Jefferson County through which Big River flowed.  The river got no rain upstream of this area, so the upper river didn’t rise.  Instead, it stayed normal until reaching this small area, where the massive rainstorm caused a rise beginning in this one section.  I floated from Mammoth Bridge to Brown’s Ford a couple weeks after the flood that ensued.  I could tell from the mudline on the vegetation at Mammoth that the river had only risen a few inches.  But the farther I went downstream, the higher the mudline was, until at the end of the float, 10 miles downstream, it had been 8 feet higher than normal.

Amazingly, at the mouth of every tiny creek and hollow there was a delta of gravel and even rocks up to the size of a basketball, and some of those deltas extended halfway across the river.  There had obviously been a massive amount of gravel coming down those wooded hollows into the river.  But in a usual flood, where high water coming from upstream would have scattered that gravel as it entered the already high river to the point where it was unnoticeable once the river dropped, it hadn’t gotten high enough upstream to move the gravel.

Crucially, huge rains like this are becoming more common with the changing climate.  It doesn’t matter whether the change is human-induced.  The fact is that huge floods are occurring at a greater frequency than they did throughout much of the 20^th Century.  They are often occurring almost back to back, with two or more floods within a very short period of time.  Examining the US Geological Survey records for the Sullivan gauge on the middle Meramec, you’ll find that from 1915 to 1970 there were six floods that exceeded 40,000 cubic feet per second, only two of which reached 60,000 cfs.  From 1970 to 2025, the same number of years, there have been 12 such floods, including a new record flood and six more floods over 60,000 cfs.  So there is more erosion occurring, which means more gravel in the streams.

But new gravel is not the sole reason, nor perhaps even the main reason, that the rivers appear to be getting shallower.  River channels are widening. 

The same volume of water will be deeper in a narrow channel than in a wider one, and narrow channels also increase the force and power of the water, making it better at scouring out pools and maintaining them at high water flows.

So why are the streams widening their channels?  It all starts with destabilized banks.  It is difficult for many people to understand, but while floods do the damage, stable stream banks lined with trees and vegetation are usually not susceptible to erosion in a typical flood.  The intertwined roots hold the bank together, and the flood’s power cannot find a weak spot to attack.  It takes a truly huge flood, or some kind of damage or change in the bank, to make it vulnerable to erosion. 

The most obvious cause of destabilized banks is landowners clearing the trees to water’s edge, removing the protection those tree roots furnish to the banks.  In the 60 plus years I’ve been fishing Big River and the Meramec, my two “home” streams, I’ve seen the river erode more than a hundred feet of some of those cleared banks.  In several places, I can show you where the erosion has removed an entire bottom field and the river is now up against a rocky hillside.  And invariably, where a bank like that is eroding, gravel is building up on the other side, which has become the inside of a bend.  You will see a gravel bar, then a zone of young trees, with progressively bigger trees the farther away you get from the river channel.  The river’s original bank with mature trees might be hundreds of feet behind those zones of growth.  Landowners see the damage, but by then it’s very difficult to fix.  The erosion must first be stopped, and that usually means hardening the bank with riprap rock (or, in the past, anything a landowner could get hold of, including old car bodies).  Some landowners have attempted to use just piles of big rocks at intervals along the bank, but this seldom works because the rock piles just cause much more turbulence in high water, and the river is likely to eat away the bottom surrounding them, leaving them as isolated rock mounds in the river. Covering an entire bank with riprap works better, but isn’t foolproof; there is one spot near my house on the Meramec where the river ended up eating out the bottom behind the lower end of a rip rap bank, leaving the line of rock as a submerged ridge in the middle of the river.

Once you succeed in stopping the erosion by hardening the bank, then you have to plant trees atop the bank to further stabilize the bottom field, and hope they survive long enough to be of a size to do the job.  Often, they do not.  It is an expensive, labor intensive, long term project.

Even if an entire bank isn’t gnawed away, changes in the flow regime caused by removing trees or just digging around in the bottom field behind the tree line can cause the river to widen and shallow.  One of my favorite places to catch smallmouth when I was a kid was a quarter mile long pool that was narrow, 4-7 feet deep throughout its length, flowing between alluvial banks lined with big trees, with old wood cover along the banks.  With the channel so narrow and confined within high banks, the upstream portion had enough current and depth to make it a perfect spot for smallmouth, with big, slick logs in 5-7 feet of water providing the cover for ambush points. 

I fished that pool for 15 years, and it remained completely unchanged the entire time.  And it was probably just as unchanged for many years before, because my dad told me he fished it when he was younger and it was always good.  Then, the landowner on one side cleared the trees off his side and began digging and selling topsoil out of the field behind where the trees had been.  It was not on the outside of a bend, so the current didn’t start cutting his bank away.  Instead, the next couple floods lowered the bank and allowed water to spread out over the bottomland where his digging had been.  The whole bottom field was eroded, the bank lowered into a gravel bar, and the upper half of the pool went from a narrow channel 5-7 feet deep to a wider channel from inches to 3 feet deep…all without the spot receiving more gravel.

So it becomes obvious that humans removing trees is a huge cause of bank erosion and widening of the channel.  But in recent years, we are seeing whole, apparently healthy, tree-covered banks being torn up and lost to erosion in floods.  Having been on these rivers (and being an observant and curious river rat) for going on 65 years, this is by far the worst I’ve ever seen the banks on my most familiar rivers.  I never used to see whole rows of trees being ripped out of the banks, nor so many fresh downed trees in the river that long stretches of good water are unfishable because of all the tangles of trees.  What is different now from 40 years ago?

First, we have to discuss the mechanisms of floods and flood damage a bit more.  We all know that floods cause the damage to banks, eroding them and thus widening the river.  But these rivers have experienced floods since the last ice age.  Floods do not ordinarily damage healthy banks; if they did, the rivers would have long ago become as they were back then, wide, braided gravel channels covering the whole valley bottom.  The reason this hasn’t yet happened is because the power of a flood, as impressive as it is, is diffuse; spread out over a whole bank from top to bottom.  If the bank is healthy, covered in vegetation, tied together with tangled tree roots, it can withstand the flood.  But give the flood a weak point to attack, and it will begin to eat away that point.  A piece of bare, vertical mud bank, devoid of roots, is enough if the mud is already wet and loose.  Once it begins to gnaw into that weak spot, it enlarges it, undermines the edges, and rips some of it away. 

But Ozark floods drop almost as quickly as they come up.  Ordinarily, the flood might not have time to excavate much of that bank.  The scar recovers, perhaps gets some vegetation growing on it.  It becomes healthy enough to withstand the next flood.  But only as long as that next flood doesn’t come too quickly.  And only if the wound gets the chance to heal itself.

Which brings us to the two reasons I believe floods in recent years have done so much damage. 

First, I’ve already noted that there have been more big floods in the last 55 years by far than in the previous 55 years.  But there is another component; there are simply more frequent floods some years, with only short periods of time between them.  The banks never get a chance to heal before the next flood strikes, nor does the alluvium have time to dry out.  One flood starts the damage, the next one rips out some trees, leaving big scars, and then another one comes along and rips even more of the bank away.

So it is the frequency of flooding that is different.  But there is another difference.  I cannot prove this myself, and as far as I know there have been no scientific studies confirming it.  But jet boat wakes are the other wild card in the mix.

Jet boats first began to show up on the larger Ozark streams in the 1970s, but did not really become popular until the 1980s.  By the late 1980s, some of us old timers (who weren’t nearly as old back then) began to notice more changes on rivers like the Current and middle Meramec.  The riffles seemed to be getting wider and shallower, with less well-defined channels.  Places with fast water and alluvial banks were beginning to see more bank erosion after floods even at that point.

Why?  Think about this.  All you have to do is visit the middle Meramec on a summer weekend to see a likely cause.  There will be jet boats going by you, one after another, a hundred or more wakes pounding the shorelines each day.  And these wakes will be causing any shoreline that is not covered in rocks to spew mud into the river, gradually extending a mudline until by mid-afternoon the whole river is much murkier than it was that morning.  All that mud is being chewed off the banks by the incessant wakes.  That is a lot of mud, and it is all coming from that one narrow zone of shoreline, just a few inches above and below the waterline.  It is an indication that the zone along the waterline is being damaged by the wakes; the mud is not appearing out of thin air.  It is being removed from the banks, and that is wearing small weak points in those banks.  In itself, it is not doing any obvious damage, but it is giving the floods those small zones to attack that wouldn’t have been there without the wakes.  And once the weak points are attacked by the flood, the same dominoes fall; the weak spots expand, a whole section of bank is weakened, and the damage spreads.

And as the banks erode, the river widens.  A wider channel flowing the same volume of water is a shallower channel; no excess gravel necessary.

And there is one more major factor in the pools of the Ozark streams filling in; the gravel in the channels is moving more than it should.  A natural gravel bar is somewhat stable; huge floods will move it, but smaller floods may not.  Small trees like willows, maples, and sycamores, water willow weedbeds, and other vegetation grow on gravel bars and help stabilize them, but even a bare gravel bar is usually somewhat stable.  The gravel is weakly cemented by silt on the surface in what the experts call “armoring”.  Drive a vehicle out onto a gravel bar, and as long as you go slowly and don’t spin the wheels, the tires will usually stay on top of the gravel.  But if you break through that surface armor, the gravel beneath is far looser and less stable, and you immediately sink to the axles.

So anything that disturbs that armoring is going to make the gravel move more extensively in floods.  A major culprit, especially on smaller streams, is ATV use. It has been illegal to drive ATVs into, across, and up and down stream beds for a couple decades now, but the law is widely ignored.  Take a look on Google Earth if you don’t believe this.  You’ll see ATV tracks covering gravel bar after gravel bar on just about any stream with big gravel bars.  On some nearly dry tributaries, you’ll see tracks going for miles down the stream.  Those tracks are an indication the gravel bars and stream bed are not in any semblance of stability.  Floods will move that gravel.  Even a small flood will pick it up and deposit it at the next spot the current slows—which will usually be the next deep pool.  A huge flood might pick it up and deposit it all the way out in the bottom fields, but numerous smaller floods just move it downstream in the channel.

That’s where we are now.  We are seeing the channels filled in with new gravel, ice age gravel being excavated by bank erosion, “legacy” gravel already in the system moving downstream and filling in pools, and it’s all exacerbated by bank erosion widening the channels.  The gravel is mostly natural, but it has become more harmful because of various human activities.

How to Be a Real Riverman

I wrote this piece for the River Hills Traveler back in the 1983.  It was a different time then in many ways.  Jet boats were not popular everywhere, kayaks and rafts were almost unheard of as rental craft, and aluminum canoes were the usual way to get down the rivers.  Not that they weren't crowded; weekends saw the aluminum hatch on the more popular rivers.  But it was not long removed from the days of the old wooden johnboats and guided float trips.  I have edited it and changed a few things from the original article, but it was a fun one to write.  I hope you enjoy it!

How to Be a Real Riverman

Lately I've been hearing a lot about this new book called, "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche".  I haven't read it yet, but I already know that it has some questionable propositions.  Even though I don't know how to pronounce "quiche", I have eaten it and liked it. I assume the book is about how to be a real man.  But it did give me an idea; I think what this corner of the world needs is a book--or maybe just an article because it isn't THAT important--on how to be a real riverman.

There was a time when about the only people that ventured onto our Ozark streams were veteran rivermen; the native hunters and fishermen and giggers and log rafters; the guides with their younger apprentices running the commissary boat and their rich clients from the city.  Nowadays, the streams are full of novices.  Inexperienced paddlers and families out for  a weekend of casual fun mix with drunken 20-somethings and party animals.  Those of us who have spent every hour we could on the river all our lives--and who would live on it if we could--tend to look with contempt upon the weekend splash and giggle and chug boat bangers.  They may not care much for us, either, but surely it's just jealousy.  They must think that people who look as grubby and smell as bad as we usually do after a week on the river shouldn't be enjoying ourselves that much.  Surely, deep down, they aspire to be true rivermen.

It isn't easy to be a real riverman.  It helps to be born within a mile or so of a good float stream so that you can get an early start on spending every hour you can, including many hours you shouldn't, on the river.  It takes that kind of time and dedication.  Perhaps you may not have that kind of time or opportunity; and incredible as it may seem, perhaps you might not even want to after seeing us after the aforementioned 5 days on the river.  But if you don't want us true rivermen to snicker smugly when we see you wearing swimming trunks and so much sunscreen that you look like you fell into the lard rendering kettle, you might want to learn a bit about how to speak and act well enough to pass for one of us from across the river.  And before you jump all over me, yes, women can qualify, but "riverwoman" or "rivergirl" just doesn't have the right ring to it, and don't expect me to call you a "riverperson".

If, like most of us these days, you use a canoe, you're at a disadvantage when it comes to being convincing as a riverman.  The old timers never used anything but wooden johnboats.  But since real johnboats are scarcer these days than mud flats on Current River, genuine rivermen have been forced into using other craft.  Many opt for aluminum jonboats.  (Note the different spelling--johnboats with an "h" describe only the old clunky, heavy as your mother-in-law's milk gravy but surprisingly graceful when drifting down the river wooden classics.  The more sophisticated but more effete "jon" without the "h" serves when talking about the newer aluminum imitations.)  And never mind what to call the lumbering behemoths with 100 horsepower jet engines that have started showing up.  A motorhead who runs up and down the river 20 times a day like a brain-dead crawdad is so far from a riverman there is no hope.

Some rivermen have switched to canoes.  Not rental canoes with their shiny aluminum skins and bows painted in distinctive colors so they can be sorted out by the dozen outfitters all picking up clients at the same take out on Saturday afternoon; a real riverman's canoe will usually be spray painted the ugliest set of camouflage colors he could find, with about half the paint chipped off.

Now if you have trouble keeping your canoe upright, you're just not going to pass as a real riverman...unless you have the presence of mind to clamber out of the water after a spectacular flip with a disgusted expression on your face, muttering that you "ain't got the hang o' handlin' them dang kay-noos yet.  Wisht I still had my ol' johnboat."

As to your other gear, in recent years rivermen have begun to find out about stuff like lightweight paddles and quality camping gear, especially the stuff developed by those idiot backpackers whose warped minds think it makes sense to carry your camp on your back instead of in your boat.  Real rivermen don't have to suffer; good gear makes anything more fun.  But if you want to look the part, you should have at least one rough-looking handmade ash paddle weighing about 30 pounds with you at all times.  You can keep it in the bottom of the canoe and only drag it out when you've set up camp with your buddies and want to show it off around the campfire.  For real authenticity, you should probably keep a piece of moth-eaten threadbare canvas tarp and a blackened coffee pot that looks like World War II surplus.

True rivermen are never found in a watercraft on any river without their fishing tackle.  That is one of the main things that distinguishes them from the the "tourist kay-nooers".  They might be fishing for goggle-eye (which you should never call "rock bass" no matter what the book says, let alone one of those other goggle-eye names like shadow bass and Ozark bass).  They might even be fishing for catfish if they are hungry enough.  But mostly they'll be fishing for bass, which in reality means smallmouth; largemouth and spotted bass barely deserve the name so they should be called "linesides".  A few real rivermen use a fly rod, but they are kinda like your rich cousin that everybody likes until they have to spend more than two days with him.  Some fish with spinning tackle, they are contaminated with the city angler syndrome.  Most use baitcasting tackle and "plugs", a catch-all name for any artificial lure other than flies.  Short, nondescript rods and beat up reels are the norm.  Push-button spincast reels are strictly forbidden; if you use one, it's a "Zebco no-brainer" no matter which brand it is, and you are only using it because you don't have the brains to master a baitcaster.

Real rivermen can always catch fish, except for the times when they forget themselves and brag that they can always catch enough fish to feed themselves.  An example of this was the recent float my girlfriend Mary and I made with my brother Don and his girlfriend Connie, and I assured them that I'd never made this float without catching some good bass.  Naturally, on this trip none of us caught anything over 10 inches.  Of course, the water was too clear.  That's another mark of a good riverman; the ability to make plausible excuses for bad days.  Another of the best excuses, especially if it's a weekend as it was on the Meramec trip, concerns "them dang boat-bangin' pleasure kay-nooers scarin' all the fish".

It's always possible to catch green sunfish and longear sunfish on Ozark streams, but whenever a real riverman catches them he will invariably cuss those "black perch" and "sun perch"--though he may keep them if he's been bragging about his ability to catch bass (see the above). They must always be looked upon with disdain even if they save an otherwise fishless day.

Real rivermen don't spend the winter watching TV.  They are out on the river, turning their feet to fudgecicles trying to catch a jack salmon.  Some people say that a jack salmon (jack for short) is a walleye.  That may be what you call those little fellers up in Minnesota or some other frozen northern place, but around here they are jack salmon, and you aren't a real riverman until you catch one over ten pounds.  You can fish for them with plugs, but if you use minnows you're a walleye fisherman, probably from Wisconsin or even Kansas.  Jack fishermen use "minners", and jack minners are big enough to furnish you a "minner dinner" if you've bragged that you can always catch jack (see above again).

Genuine rivermen never hesitate to run the worst rapids they encounter, though you don't call them rapids, you call them shoals or chutes or "god-awful waterfalls".  However, having the skills to match your confidence isn't mandatory, so when you get into trouble in a hairy place, you bail out before you hit it and try to swim and wade dragging the canoe to get it away from the hazard.  And you're always ready with a plausible excuse again, like "danged river's changed some since the last time I ran this spot".  Another excuse, which I used to good advantage the only time I flipped a canoe, is "this boat handles different with a full load".  A riverman's skill with a paddle is one of his prides in life.  Any riverman can paddle from the same side all day long without switching, even though at times it would have been a good idea to switch.  And a real riverman can paddle all day with one hand, because the other usually holds his fishing rod.

As you may have surmised if you've read this far, a real riverman uses the proper vocabulary.  We've already touched upon the proper names of some fish, though we haven't mentioned "yaller suckers" (redhorse) or "hog-mollies" (hogsuckers).  However, there are plenty more words and phrases you need to learn.  No matter what kind of watercraft you use, you go on "float trips", not canoe trips or paddling trips.  The start of a float is the "put-in".  The finish spot is the "take-out".  And try to learn the real names of accesses.  One of the most used take-outs on upper Black River used to have a giant round yellow sign, with two black dot eyes and a curving smile line beneath them,q on the bank to show the novices where to take out, but under no circumstances should you call it the "smiley face place" like the non-rivermen do; it's the Coil Bluff take-out (even though it's a bit upstream from Coil Bluff).

Hollers come down to the river, not ravines or swales or even hollows.  That sheer rock face is a bluff, not a cliff, and real rivermen know the names of bluffs even if they have to fake it.  We've touched upon what to call riffles and rapids, but if you ever call it a "ripple", you instantly forfeit your riverman card.  And if you call it a "scary place", there's no hope for you.  Slow, deep sections should never be called pools; they are holes or eddies.  A slough or backwater might be called a "slew", but just as acceptable is calling it a bay.  A narrs or narrers is sometimes a narrow place on the river but more likely a thin spine of rock with a stream on both sides.

Real rivermen know the names of every river feature.  If it's a hill, a mountain, a ridge, a creek, or a spring, it has a name.  A typical riverman's trip description might go like this:  

"Yup, I put in at Two Rivers.  Got into a mess of goggle-eye and little bass there around Coot Chute.  Caught a couple nice jack at the mouth of Goose Bay, an' a good bass in that hole where Blair Creek dumps in.  Seen a 10-point buck at Boomin' Shoals Holler, and a flock o' turkey came offa Butt-in Rock and flew over me.  Whole passel of pleasure kay-nooers around Blue Spring.  Hung a big jack in the Ant Hole and lost her.  Took out at Paint Rock Bluff, and that road in is a real bear after the last gulley washer."

More important than the rest, a real riverman truly cares about the rivers.  He is vitally interested in maintaining fish and wildlife populations.  He's not a game violator and he reports those who are when he sees them.  Any potential danger to a stream is a personal threat.  Dams are crimes against nature.  Real estate developments should be wiped out by massive floods.  Polluters should be hanged and litterers flogged.  And people who don't care about wild rivers and use them only as amusement parks and bars and aquatic racetracks are considerably lower than tapeworms.  When you feel that way, you are well on your way to becoming a real riverman.

Learning the new USGS real time river gage pages

 For those of us who depend upon the US Geological Survey river gages, the day has finally come when they are switching over to the new format.  I had explored the new pages a few times, but was holding off on really diving deeply into the information in them, but today when I clicked on a gage, for the first time the new format appeared instead of the old familiar page.  

It is always difficult to switch over from the intimately familiar to something new.  And in playing around with the new format, I had not been impressed.  There was a lot that seemed to be either missing, or more difficult to reach.  But a deeper dive into the information shows that most of what I've used in the past is still available, though some takes a few extra steps to reach.

Most people do not use a tenth of the information these gages contain, anyway.  But in fact, most people don't realize how many ways they can be useful, nor do they understand the main pieces of information--gage height in feet, and flow in cubic feet per second.  I've been on a bit of a crusade for many years to get people to use the flow in cfs, rather than the height in feet, in determining water conditions.  Flow is, quite simply, the volume of water flowing past the gage at any given time.  A reading of 20 cubic feet per second is 20 cubic feet of water flowing past the gage each second.  It is the same volume, no matter which gage you're reading; a reading of 100 cfs on one gage is the same volume of water as 100 cfs on any other gage.  On the other hand, the height in feet is unique to each gage.  A reading of 2.5 feet on a given gage is NOT the same as a reading of 2.5 feet on another gage; on one gage it might signify that the river is very low, on another gage, even on the same river, it might show the river at that point is a couple feet higher than normal.  So unless you already know what 2.5 feet signifies on a given gage, that number will mean nothing.  In other words, the flow in cfs is a universal measurement, but the level in feet is different for each gage.  There actually ARE ways in which the level in feet reading can be useful even when viewing a gage on an unfamiliar river, however.

With that in mind, perhaps we're reading to take a dive into the information contained in the new gage format.  Note that I'm showing the screen shots from visiting the gage on a laptop; the same images open on my phone as well, but in a slightly different proportion--you will have to do a bit more scrolling to reach each part of the page.

When you open a page, this is the information that immediately comes up:

The first thing to note is that you can still reach the old style gage from this page; you'll see a spot to click on "legacy real-time page".  Who knows how long this will still be available, but it's still a possibility right now.

Next, what jumps out is that the graph is for gage height only, unlike the old style gage page that showed graphs for both gage height and flow in cfs.  Keeping in mind my pleading to get used to using the flow and not gage height, this is the first disappointment.  Never fear, you can still get to a graph for flow, it just takes an extra step.

On the other hand, the first thing that is actually easier to do is to change the time span shown on the graph, at least from the default 7 days shown to either 30 days or a year.  You can see the button just above the graph.  While this isn't particularly useful for determining present water conditions, it's a convenient feature for those of us who want to go into more depth on river information.

There is also a convenient feature on the graph itself.  At the top of the graph in orange letters, it shows the exact gage height at the latest time the information was updated.  If using a laptop, running your mouse across the graph moves a dashed vertical line across the graph, with a black dot where the line intersects the orange height reading line.  The readout at the top of the graph changes to show what the exact height reading was at that point.  So you can run back to any given point on the graph (any point in the last seven days in the default setting) and see what the exact river level was.  Here, I have moved the vertical line back to around the beginning of Oct 23, and you can see that at 11:45 PM on Oct 22, the river was at 1.34 ft.

You can use your finger to do the same thing on your phone if it's like my Iphone.

There is also another way to zoom in on the graph to show shorter time periods.  There is a bar with handles just below the graph.  Using those handles, you can move in to show any time period within the default 7 day graph.  Here, I've dragged the left handle to the beginning of Oct 23, and the main graph has zoomed into just the time period in gray on the handles bar.

However, on my phone, this bar with handles does not show up.

A few other things to note on this top portion of the page shown...the level considered minor, moderate, and major flood stage is interesting.  And the button to click to "compare to last year" is also a fun piece of info to see.  Neither is very useful for determining how floatable or fishable the river is now, though.  There is also a button to "display median", but it is inoperable when the graph for height in feet is displayed.

So, scrolling down the page to the lower portion, we see this:

Aha!  Now we have a button to click on to change the graph from height in feet to "Discharge, cubic feet per second".  So one click will change the graph to what I really want to see.  It will also make the "display median" button operable.  So, clicking on the discharge button and the median button, we get this graph:

The graph is now for flow in cubic feet per second, and the median is shown as a dotted line going across the graph.  Median is a VERY important piece of information.  It is a good approximation of the normal flow for the time period, so we can see in this case that the flow was a bit above normal, even before the rain a few hours ago raised the river slightly.

On the old page, there was a table that showed the exact median flow for the present day, but alas, that table is missing on the new pages.  You can still get that information as well, it just takes more time and clicks.

Another feature is that you can click on the button "Select data to graph on second y-axis", and then a couple other buttons will appear.  You can click on the "gage height, feet" button, and get the gage height onto the same main graph.  The other button on this particular gage is "precipitation, total, inches".  Not all gages will show precipitation.

The next option down the page is "Today's statistical data".  Clicking on it gets you that table I mentioned above showing the median and other info on the old gage pages. That info includes the latest value of streamflow, the lowest ever recorded on this date, the 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile, mean, and highest value ever recorded on this date.  Here is the table:

Of this information, median is the most immediately important.  Median, as I said before, is a good approximation of what the river normally flows on this date or time of year.  It is the flow of which 50% of all recorded flows for the date are lower, and 50% higher.  The 25th percentile value is the flow number for which only 25% of the recorded flows were lower, and the 75th percentile is the flow number for which 75% of recorded flows were lower.  The mean is the average of all flows recorded for the date.  You might think it would be a better approximation of normal than the median, but it is not, because any really high water recorded on the date skews the average upward; the mean is always a significantly higher figure than the median.  The lowest value and highest value show the lowest and highest flows ever recorded for the date, and the year in which they were recorded.

The next menu is the "Hydrograph data table(s)".  Clicking on it gives you all flow figures downloaded from the gage and the times they were sent.  It is not particularly useful for recreational purposes, so you can just ignore it.

Below that is a map showing the exact location of the gage, and the extent of the watershed feeding the stream down to the gage.  It also shows other active gages (monitoring locations) on the stream and surroundings.  This can be very important info on an unfamiliar gage.  In this case, knowing that the gage is downstream for such sources of flow as Maramec Spring, Dry Fork, and the entire headwaters area of the river, but upstream of the mouth of Huzzah Creek, tells you that the gage is most useful for the stretch of river between Maramec Spring and the Huzzah.  

The next menu is "Summary of all available data".  Clicking on it doesn't give the recreationalist much good info in itself, but it brings up another link to click on, "Water Data for the Nation Inventory".  This gets you into some real meat as far as river gage info goes.  It brings up a different page that looks like this:

Clicking on "Current/Historical Observations" just takes you back to the new gage page.  "Daily Data" actually takes you to something resembling the OLD gage page, but with the default of showing the gage height and flow rate graphs for the last year.  You can change the dates and time periods shown if you wish.  The graphs:  

There is one more piece of info that I find useful to get from this page. Near the top of the page is a link to "Current stage-discharge rating".  Clicking on it, you get this:

It may look like gobbledegook, but scroll down past the first part to the three columns of numbers, which will continue farther down the page than shown here.  These numbers will take just a bit of explanation...

River gages actually measure the water height.  Basically, a gage is a vertical tube, with the bottom down in the river water, and the top way up above normal river level.  There is a float inside the tube that goes up and down as the river level comes up or down within the tube.  Gage height readings come from that float.  Periodically, USGS personnel visit the gage and measure actual flow in cfs, and also measure the profile of a cross section of the river valley at the gage.  Then they estimate the flow rate in cfs at every given water height, and make up a table of these values.  So when you see the flow in cfs graph and numbers, these are actually the estimated flows in cfs for the given, recorded gage height.  Since the profile of the river bottom and banks can change with each high water, these values will also change; a gage height of 2 feet might not mean the same flow in cfs after a flood as it did before the flood if the flood changed the banks or bottom of the river at the gage.  That's why the personnel periodically check the accuracy of the tables they have.  

So the columns of numbers on the page we are now discussing are the height and corresponding estimated flow in cfs.  The gage height numbers are in the left hand column, the corresponding flow rate numbers are in the right column (the middle column is not important to our purposes).  The numbers start with the lowest possible height reading (basically the bottom of the gage tube), and go to the highest possible reading at the top of the gage tube.  Note that most gages have their bottoms well under the lowest level the river has ever dropped to, so the numbers at the top of the columns are so low that they will probably never actually be seen in a gage reading.  If we scroll down the page a bit, we will get into more realistic numbers:

So you can see here that, for instance, a gage height of 2.30 feet (from the column on the left) means the river is flowing an estimated 644.24 cubic feet per second (from the column on the right).

This may be diving farther into the weeds than most users will ever need, but if you really want to go in-depth on river information it can be useful.

The next menu is "Daily Statistics".  It is another one that can be useful if you want to go deeply into the information available for the rivers.  Clicking on it brings up this page:

It shows the available data being the discharge in cfs for the time period from, in this case, 1922-10-01 to 2022-08-17.  Click on the box on that, and then down below, you can make choices on the date range of the data you want to see, and a drop down menu of which table you want to see.  The default is "mean", but if you click on the menu it will give you the choices of minimum, maximum, and a bunch of percentiles including "median".  We already know that median is far more useful than mean or any of the percentiles.  Minimum and maximum will give you the highest and lowest values ever recorded for each day of the time period you select.  But, let's select a time period beginning with the earliest data and ending in the latest available, from Oct 01 1922 to Aug 17 2022, and then select median from the drop down menu.  Hit "submit", and it gets us this:

  This is a table of the average median value for every day of the year throughout all the years of record available.  In other words, this is a table of what normal flow for the river at the gage site should be on every given day.  So if you want to know what the river should normally be flowing on, for instance, March 15th, 555 cubic feet per second is your answer.  More interestingly, you can look at this table and see that the river normally flows more water at certain times of the year than others.  In April and into May, it normally flows the highest, 500 to well over 600 cfs.  While in September and October it will normally flow less than 200 cfs.

The next menu is "Monthly statistics".  Clicking on it gives you similar choices but by month instead of day, and only for mean values.  For our purposes it isn't very useful, for it can be fun to play around with.  "Annual Statistics" is similar.  You can pull up the annual mean for each year of record, which can show you which years were drought years and which were more normal or high water years, but it isn't useful for recreational purposes.

"Peak Streamflow" simply gives you the highest flow recorded for every year.  It is also interesting but not useful for recreation.  The rest of the choices are useless for our purposes.

So there you have it, a summary of the data contained in the new USGS river gage pages, and how to access it.  If you are a floater, an angler, or anyone wanting to find out about water conditions on a given stream, the new pages are very useful but take a bit of getting used to.  Here is how I typically use them:

First, go to the USGS river flows data for the state you're interested in.  Here is the page for Missouri:

 

https://waterdata.usgs.gov/mo/nwis/rt

On that page, you will see a link to "Statewide Streamflow Table".  Click on it, and you get this page:

https://waterdata.usgs.gov/mo/nwis/current/?type=flow

It will look like this:

Note that over on the left are links to click on for every gage in the state.  On the right are figures for "Discharge, ft3/s" (that's what the stream at each gage is flowing presently) and "Long-term median flow (present date)" (that's the median or normal flow for the date).  So immediately, you can see what the river is flowing now and compare it to normal.  Much of the time, that's all you need to know.  For instance, scrolling down the page, which is grouped by major river systems, to the Meramec River system, we get this:

Say I'm wanting to know what conditions are on Big River near Richwoods, because I'm wanting to fish the lower middle river.  I can instantly see that the normal flow there is 164 cfs, and it's flowing 190 cfs right now.  That's plenty close enough to normal; the river should be in good shape.  If weather conditions were stable and there hadn't been any rain in the last day or so, that would be good enough, no need to actually even visit the gage page.  I have this page, the streamflow table, bookmarked on all my computers and my phone.  All I have to do is click on it, and scroll down to the river I'm interested in, and see if it's near normal or not.

But...it HAS rained in the last day, pretty heavily.  So is there maybe a slug of higher, muddy water moving down the river that just hasn't reached the Richwoods gage yet?  So I look at the upstream gages on Big River (fortunately there are several; some streams have only one or two gages on them).  I note that at Irondale, the highest gage, normal is 23.0 cfs and present flow is 55.8 cfs.  That's a bit of a rise, but not much.  If the river had risen several feet it would be flowing a lot more water than that.  No problem there.  At the next downstream gage, below Desloge, it's only flowing 98 cfs.  No big rise there.  Below Bonne Terre shows a more significant rise; normal is 60.0 cfs, it's now flowing at 265 cfs.  Okay, better go to that gage page and look a little more closely.  Here is the graph that comes up on the new gage page:

Now, here is where the height in feet graph does come in handy.  It's showing the river has risen from about 2.75 feet to 4 feet, and may still be rising.  That's a rise of over a foot.  A good rule of thumb is that a rise of more than a foot is fairly likely to mean a slug of muddy water.  So now my fishing trip downstream from there is looking a little more iffy.  Maybe I better either go now and hope I can get in some good fishing before the muddy water hits, or else look for a different place to go that isn't quite so chancy.

What if this was a few days ago, when the Missouri Ozarks had been in drought conditions quite a while, and all the rivers were low?  What if I wanted to float the Jacks Fork, and wondered if there was enough water to float from Bay Creek to Alley Spring? I would have gone to the statewide streamflow table that I had bookmarked, and looked at what the gage info said.  But...what if I was totally unfamiliar with the Jacks Fork, and didn't know which of the three gages on it to use, nor what flow would constitute enough water to float?  Well, then I would have to go to each individual gage page, and fist look at the map we discussed above to see exactly where the gage was.  It would show the "near Mountain View" gage to be farthest upstream, at the Highway 17 bridge.  Zooming in on the "at Alley Spring" gage would show it was at the Highway 106 bridge.  And most importantly, just UPSTREAM from Alley Spring itself, which we might know is a large spring that adds a considerable amount of water to the river.  So if we are floating down to the bridge at Alley, that gage is PERFECT for determining water conditions on that float.  So was there enough water?  A few days ago the gage was showing around 60 cfs.  And here is where a big rule of thumb for Ozark streams comes in.  To float any Ozark stream that can get too low to float, you need a minimum of 100 cfs to get down it without a lot of scraping bottom and maybe some walking shallow areas.  Knowing that easy to remember number, I would now know that the float down to Alley was going to be some work dragging a canoe or kayak here and there.  (Right now, as I type this, the Alley gage is showing 74 cfs--it's had a slight rise, but is STILL too low to float easily above there.)

What if I wanted to know whether the river BELOW Alley Spring ever gets too low to float?  I would go to the "at Eminence" gage page, which I know is downstream from Alley Spring. Then I'd go through the steps on the new page to reach that table that showed the median daily value for each day of the year, which I discussed at length above.  It would show this: 

You can see that there is no day of the year in which the median was under 100 cfs.  So normally, that stretch would not get too low to float easily.  If I still wondered if it could get too low during a really bad drought, I might change the drop down menu from "median" to "minimum".  This would give me this table:

See all those values below 100 cfs?  So it IS possible for the lower Jacks Fork to get too low for easy floating, but only if there has been a VERY extended drought.

You can use your imagination to see how many things you can learn about the rivers from the gages.  Knowing how to use them can save you a lot of drive time and phone calls and disappointments.  The new gage pages are good in some ways, not so good in others.  But they will serve the purpose well.  

The following are some of my own rules of thumb for determining water conditions from the gage numbers:

1.  The minimum flow for a stream being floatable without a lot of dragging and scraping--100 cfs.  I have floated plenty of streams at lower flows than this.  Even at about 30 cfs, narrow riffles may still be floatable.  But at anything lower than 100 cfs, wide riffles and split channels will often necessitate walking, and riffles with rocks and a lack of well-defined lines to run will be problematical.

2.  The optimum flow for most streams that are sometimes not floatable is 200-300 cfs.  At that flow nearly all riffles will be easily floatable, but the water won't be so high that the dangers are magnified.

3.  For those running jetboats, the approximate minimum flow for running an unfamiliar river is 500 cfs.  I've run stream sections at less than 200 cfs, but they are streams I know well.

4.  As for whether a stream is too high for safe floating, that is where I do use the graph for gage height.  First go back to the last time the river was stable, as in several days with little change in the level in feet or the flow in cfs.  Note the level during that time.  Then check how much higher than that the river is now.  If it's less than a foot higher, it should be good, not muddy and not really high.  If it's between one and two feet higher, it may be muddy and more caution should be used, because it will be moving fast and obstructions could be seriously dangerous.  Between two and three feet higher, it's going to be pushing the envelope for floating, and you should stay off it unless you have plenty of experience in big, fast moving water.  Over three feet higher, and it's getting truly dangerous.

 

 

  

  

   

   

 

Crazy Big Fish

 This is an old piece of writing from 2011.  That was a year of the periodic cicada emergence in Missouri, and we had a lot of them around the house.  The fish in the story, by the way, was STILL alive in my pond as of the fall of 2021.  

After supper this evening, I decided to take my lightest intact fly rod out to the pond beside the house to catch some small bass and bluegill to replenish my fish supply in the freezer. There are a lot of bass in the pond, probably too many, so I like to keep a couple dozen 10-12 inchers throughout the year, along with a bunch of bluegill. The bluegill are fairly big, 9-10 inches. The pond is somewhere between a half-acre and three-fourths of an acre in size, and 7-8 feet deep at the deepest.

The cicadas were on the water regularly and getting eaten just as regularly, but I decided to see if they'd take an ordinary white popping bug with black feathers. They did. Mary came out and caught five from one corner where the bluegill bed, but then decided it was too hot and headed for the house. I took a couple more from there, then worked my way around the pond, picking up a few bass. There is a shallow point where the bluegill also bed, and when I got to it I caught a couple more. I could see something moving just below the surface a little farther out on the point, and figuring it was a bass cruising for cicadas, I made a bit longer cast to reach it. The bug landed and the water bulged and moved a bit a couple feet away. Aha, I thought, the fish is moving toward the bug...

There was just a tiny "something" that happened at the bug, and it disappeared.

I set the hook, and instantly the water bulged in a boil the size of a bathtub. A bass? I knew there were a few bass in the pond that would go 6 pounds or better. The fish moved off the point toward deeper water, shaking its head. I could feel each shake...and they were really BIG shakes. Not quivers or jiggles or jerks, but hard, sharp, huge surges. This wasn't a bass, or if it was it was a record.

And then it dawned on me. At least ten years ago, I had put three small grass carp in the pond to control algae. I never saw more than two of them after that, but the two got bigger and bigger. They were shy and wary and really the only way I ever got any kind of look at them was if I climbed up on an observation deck we have on the roof of the house and watched carefully. I've plotted for years how to catch them, because I knew they were getting pretty big. The last couple years I've only seen one at a time, and I suspect that one is all that is left.

I had hooked that grass carp!

It took a good 45 minutes to land it on a 6 weight fly rod, which begs the question of whether I could have handled it at all on the 4 weight I usually use to catch bluegill. It ran all over the pond. I mainly held on, giving it line whenever it moved, slowly pulling it back toward me when it rested. A couple runs were truly epic, halfway across the pond in a second or two, but mostly it just swam around shaking its head and when I'd get it fairly close it would lunge out to the middle again. I really wanted to land it just to really see how big it was. It was hot, and I was truly getting tired. I wanted Mary to see this beast. I wanted a photo of it.

Finally I got it coming toward me for about the umpteenth time, and slid its head up onto the bank by backing up a few feet and pulling as hard as I dared. Then I ran down to it and grabbed it by the gill covers with both hands and dragged it up the bank. I left it a few feet from the water while I ran to the house to get Mary and a camera. She was flabbergasted to see this scaly monster. Here it is in all its glory:

I decided to release it, and it took several minutes of moving it back and forth in the water to revive it enough for it to slowly swim away. I hope the old cow makes it.

It was getting dark and I suddenly realized I had a bunch of fish to clean. I looked down at the bank where I'd left my rope stringer full of fish, holding it down with my foot while I fished...I'd totally forgotten about it, and the fish had swum off with my stringer long ago, I guess.

The Great Australia-New Zealand Adventure

This was a trip Mary and I made in 2015.  The write-up was done for OzarkAnglers forums.  It's one of a number of old stories I'll be putting on here in the next few weeks.

 It almost makes my head hurt trying to figure out times and dates when you fly to Australia. We just got home a couple hours ago, about 6 PM on April 9th...but the plane took off from New Zealand at 7 AM on April 9th. But we were in the air 4 hours from Christchurch NZ to Brisbane AU, then two hours in the Brisbane airport, then nearly 13 hours over the Pacific from Brisbane to Los Angeles, then 1.5 hours (barely made it through customs and immigration in time) at LA, then 5 hours from LA to Minneapolis, an hour in Minneapolis, then 1.5 hours to St. Louis. By my math, including the nearly 2 hours in the Christchurch airport, we were either in airports on in the air for a total of 30 hours.

Fortunately, both going over there and returning, we had accumulated enough frequent flier miles previously to be able to afford business class tickets. And I gotta tell you, if you're planning a long flight like that, you need to do business class if you can swing it. I saw how the peon class was on the flight. The seats on the Virgin Australia plane had SOME legroom, unlike the seats on the Air New Zealand flight we had getting from Brisbane to Christchurch earlier in the trip. But meanwhile, up in business class we had seats that were fully adjustable from fully upright to fully reclining like a bed and everything in between, we got food that was really about as close to gourmet as you can get on a plane, all the booze and soft drinks we could consume either at our seats or at a real bar with four barstools, a set of soft comfy pajamas, an overnight kit with toothbrush and toothpaste among other stuff. We had free movies and TV right at our seats on a good sized screen that swung out in front of each seat, along with chargers for cell phones and Ipads. And enough space in the two aisles to walk around all you wanted to without waiting for some fat boy to get past you. Both flying there and back, the stewards or whatever they are called these days dug out foam mattress pads and sheets after feeding us a big meal and seat up the seats as pretty darned comfortable beds, and then turned off the lights. It was a bit weird, given that we left Australia about 11 AM and were in bed within three hours or so of taking off, but we were running into the sunset and it was dark outside within an hour of lights out, and we got out of bed two hours before landing, at 4 AM LA time.

So the flights, instead of being a true ordeal, were actually about as much fun as I've had on a plane in a LONG time. As for the trip itself, here's what we did in a nutshell:

March 7th--left home early-early in the morning to catch a flight to, of all places, Atlanta, in order to get a connecting flight to LA. Arrived about 7 AM March 9th (yep, that makes my head hurt, too) at Brisbane (it's pronounced BRIS-bn by Australians), and immediately caught another flight to Melbourne (MEL-bn), where we met our Australian friends Krystii and Michael. Krystii is also an artist--we met them at an art show 15 years ago), and up until they immigrated to America 5 years ago Michael was the head of technology and heraldry at the Australian National War Museum. They were to be our guides and drivers while in Australia, and then just fellow travelers with us in New Zealand for the trip. Since they drive on the wrong side of the road in Australia and NZ, neither Mary or I wanted to have to drive if they were willing to do so. We rented an SUV and drove through Melbourne, then out an hour or two to Healesville, where we stayed the night at a couple of beautiful cottages in the Toolangirainforest.

March 10th--we liked the cottages so much we stayed there another three nights instead of going on to the next place, which was a couple hours away, for two nights. We hiked in the Toolangi much of the day this day.

March 11th--did another hike and some sightseeing, including visiting the area nearby where Krystii and Michael had lived for several years.

March 12th--more sightseeing and a visit to a wildlife park in Healesville, where we saw all kinds of indigenous Australian wildlife. Our friends had assured us that we'd see a lot of kangaroos on this trip, but other than at the zoo we only saw a half dozen roos at long distances. We did see quite a few wallabies, the smaller kangaroo critters, while hiking. The rainforest was magnificent, with mountain ash trees that were getting up to the size of the largest Douglas firs in North America. These were the biggest non-conifer trees in the world, and like most of the native Australian trees, were a eucaliptus species. Just as impressive, and making the forest look like something in which you'd expect to encounter velociraptors, were the giant tree ferns, some of them 20 feet tall. Mary, however, probably didn't enjoy the hiking as much as I did, because she'd read far too much and been told far too many stories about the myriad of snakes and spiders in Australia that can kill you very quickly. We never saw a snake outside of a zoo, nor any dangerous spiders, but Mary couldn't quite relax as much as I did while hiking.

March 13th--we drove to the small town of Corowa, taking the scenic routes and sightseeing. Michael was giving a talk at a gathering of military vehicle enthusiasts there that night, and the town was packed with authentic WWII vehicles and guys driving them around. We stayed at a modest but nice motel.

March 14th--We watched a big parade of the vehicles, then dropped Michael off at an extensive swap meet for vehicle parts and other wartime memorabilia while the rest of us walked all over the town and did a hike along the Murray River. K and M knew I loved to fish, and I think they expected me to fish the Murray for a while, but it was a big, slow river that didn't lend itself to fishing from the bank, and I had no clue how to fish for Murray cod, the predominant species in the river, anyway. We stayed the night hosted by friends of K and M in the not too far away town of Wangaratta.

March 15th--we did a long drive over the highest mountains in Australia (6000 feet elevation maximum, which gives you an idea that Australia isn't real mountainous) through Mt. Kosciusko National Park to Jindabyne. While the mountains may not have been all that high, they were spectacular, and the road was non-stop hairpin curves. It was extremely rugged country, with incredibly thick forests on the slopes and high alpine scenery near the tops of the mountains. After picking up groceries in Jindabyne, we drove a few miles out of town to the Moonbah River Huts to spend the night. The huts looked really good on the website, but were quite...rustic in reality. We'd always looked for places with separate bedrooms for the two couples and separate bathrooms as well. The hut we stayed in had a bed in the living room, one bedroom, and one bath (well, it was two rooms, with a sink and tub in one and a toilet in the other). It also had a barely working microwave and the stove was an antique wood-burning job. Mary had planned to make her famous dinner rolls, and it was a real adventure figuring out how to bake them in a wood oven.

March 16th--the reason we'd picked the Moonbah Huts to stay was mainly because they were on the Moonbah River, which was reputed to have good trout fishing. The river turned out to be a creek about 10-15 feet wide and completely closed in with very thick brush. It was fast and clear and the bottom consisted of very rough rock. After doing a hike in the morning back in the National Park, I bought a month's fishing license at Jindabyne ($14 Australian) and tried to fish it in the afternoon. It had quite a few little brown trout, which I caught on elk hair caddis (yep, they have caddis flies in Australia, though I never saw more than one or two in the air at once).

March 17th--after another night in the hut, we did another hike in the park during the morning. This forest was a little drier than the rainforest earlier, with smaller trees and brush not so thick. We hiked to a high waterfall and back. Then, while the other three did another short hike for a couple hours, I fished another stream, a little bigger than the Moonbah, that was coming out of the mountains, and finished achieving my Australian trout slam with a rainbow and a couple of little brook trout.

March 18th--after the third night at the hut, we drove to a high point in the park, with alpine scenery and beautiful alpine gums, another eucalipt. Then started the long drive to the Australian capital of Canberra (CAN-bru), where we stayed the night in separate one bedroom furnished apartments that were pure heaven after the Moonbah Hut.

March 19th--the plan for this day was for Michael to take us on a behind the scenes tour of his former place of employment, the War Museum, for a couple of hours, and then tour some of the other sights of the city. Well, the War Museum is, if not THE best, at least one of the very top museums of its kind we've ever seen, and we spent the whole day there. Not only that, but we also spent a good part of the next two days there as well. It covered, in depth, Australia's involvement in every war from WWI on, and if you didn't know it, until Grenada Australia had participated in every war of the 20th Century that America was involved in (and Iraq and Afghanistan too). There were vast amounts of artifacts and vast amounts of memorabilia and explanations of every aspect of every war. Dioramas galore, beautiful artwork, multimedia productions that were extremely well done. I still don't think we saw it all.

March 20th--we spent much of the day at the War Museum, and ate dinner with friends of K and M that night.

March 21st--well, at least we visited some of the other places of this beautiful city. Canberra was a planned city; it was mainly built in the 1950s specifically to serve as the capital city, and the government buildings and settings around them are quite impressive. We visited the National Museum of Art and the National Portrait Gallery, both of which had some very good art and some very bad art. We had dinner with two more friends of M and K, and spent our last night in the very nice furnished apartments.

March 22nd--we flew from Canberra to Brisbane. The Canberra airport, for a capital city airport, was small and uncrowded, and going through security there was a breeze, vastly unlike what it is at any airport around Washington DC. The two hour flight put us in Brisbane in mid-morning, and we lunched with another friend of Michael's, a former brigadier general in the Australian army who has retired to an ocean-front home where he is a gourmet cook. Krystii's mother lives in Peregian Springs, on the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane, and after lunch, we drove the new rental SUV the 1.5 hours to her house, where M and K would be staying for the next few days while Mary and I stayed at a furnished apartment on Sunrise Beach a half hour away.

March 23nd--Mary and I enjoyed the Sunrise Beach. It is a spectacularly beautiful beach, and was nearly deserted while we were there, due to the fact that summer was over (barely). The water was a pleasant 75 degrees. I finally figured out how to convert Centigrade to Farenheit, since they only use C in Australia and NZ. 0 degrees C is 32 degrees F, and from there, for every five degrees it goes up in C, it goes up 9 degrees in F. So 5=41, 10=50, 15=59, 20=68, 25=77, 30=86, 35=95. Air temps never got above 30 C in Australia while we were there, but the beach area was very humid. The water was nice, and the waves were just big enough to be fun to play in and try boogie-boarding.

March 24th--Mary and I established a routine of walking two miles up the beach each morning to the nearest town area, where we found a nice place to eat breakfast with free WiFi so we could check emails and play on the internet for a while. Then we'd come back down the beach, and by that time it would be warm enough for a swim to be nice. In the afternoons we'd explore the area with K and M and M's mom.

March 25th--on this day we found a huge colony of fruit bats (flying foxes) right in a nearby town. There were thousands of these bats the size of rabbits. They were just hanging from the tree branches in huge clusters, fanning themselves with their leathery wings, climbing from one spot a better one occasionally. In the evening we watched them fly out of the trees in numbers darkening the sunset skies, branching off to go in three different directions (just not out over the ocean).

March 26th--highlight of this afternoon was a pontoon boat trip up the Noosa River, where I tried my luck at fishing, catching a bunch of little catfish that looked very much like small blue cats.

March 27th--after a final night at the beach apartment, we drove to Brisbane to catch the flight to New Zealand. We arrived in Christchurch very late, near midnight, and spent the night in a motel close to the airport.

March 28th--We drove through the city center of Christchurch, which had been all but destroyed by a huge earthquake just a few years ago. Construction was everywhere, as were crumbled and damaged buildings. Then we headed off to the west across the Canterbury Plain from Christchurch on the South Island, over Arthur's Pass in the Western Alps. On the east side of the mountains it was dry and warm and sunny, with scrubby vegetation, but by the time we reached the pass we were in fog and rain. We stopped at the town of Arthur's Pass to pick up info on the national park there, and Mary and I hiked an hour or so in the rain to a magnificent little waterfall. Then we drove down the west slope in rainforest to the narrow coastal plain on the west coast, and down it to the tiny town of Okarito, where we had a house rented for the next two nights. The house wasn't much, but the little settlement was quaint.

March 29th--we spent the day driving to the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers. These are the only glaciers on earth that drop straight off mountains into rainforest, and they are spectacular. We hiked up as close to the glaciers as we could get--it gets dangerous to get too close since they are continually dropping huge chunks of ice. Then we hiked through the rainforest below and across a suspension bridge over the wide, brawling, silty glacial river below the ice.

March 30th--we kayaked the Okarito Lagoon in the morning, a tidal lagoon full of various wading birds and waterfowl, not all that impressive though. Then we headed back across the mountains through awe-inspiring scenery, headed for the town of Wanaka and another slice of heaven after the disappointment of Okarito, a fine furnished apartment in the middle of Wanaka.

March 31st--I'm not sure what everybody else did the next two days, because they were my New Zealand fishing days. I'd hired a guide (expensive--over $500 a day in U.S. dollars), and on this day we drift fished the Makaroa River above Lake Wanaka. This was a smallish river, barely floatable in the low water of early autumn, flowing through a vast bed of glacial gravel and surrounded by mountain scenery. It was extremely clear, and to be honest, it probably had fewer fish per mile than any river I'd every fished for trout. After all, you could see just about every fish there was, and in five miles of river I doubt that we saw more than a couple dozen fish. But they were all big...and wary. This was technical fishing, where you absolutely couldn't make a mistake and catch a fish. If you lined them they were gone. A bad drift and they were gone. A fly that slapped the water a bit too hard and...well, you get the picture. Montana fishing is combat angling in comparison. I got several to take dry flies, and finally landed one big rainbow, a good 22 inch fish.

April 1st--on this day we fished the Clutha River, and it was very different. Big water, as big as the White River when they have a lot of generators working. Fast, clear...and a lot more fish but most were a lot smaller. I caught a bunch of fish on dry flies and a few on streamers, but only a couple were worthy of pictures. And some of the biggest ones were lying along the banks in shallow water, 1-2 feet, often under overhanging willows. It took accurate casts and good drifts to get them to take, and although I got several big ones on, it was one of those days when I couldn't keep them on. Still, it was a great change of pace after the previous day.

April 2nd--with one more full day in Wanaka, I had the option of fishing on my own for the day, but instead we hiked up a mountain overlooking Lake Wanaka, and spent the rest of the day roaming around the very nice town and walking along the huge lake.

April 3rd--we left Wanaka, headed first for Queenstown, where we had plans to do ziplining down a mountain overlooking the town. Mary and I also thought about mountain biking down the same mountain, and were about to rent the bikes when we were convinced by the livery people that it was probably not something we would want to do. The mountain was about 3000 feet high and scary steep, and the biking consisted of taking hairpin curves at speed on a trail no wider than you are, jumping boulders, etc. And we weren't especially interested in the ziplining, so while M and K ziplined, Mary and I had a nice, long, strenuous hike on the other side of the mountain, one of the best hikes of our whole trip and away from the hordes of people roaming around the touristy area at the top of the gondola ride from where the ziplines and luge rides and mountain biking started, and where our hike started as well. Then we drove on to Manapouri, a tiny town on the huge lake of the same name, nestled in the mountains. The house we had rented there was plain but clean, and was just an overnight stop.

April 4th--at noon, we toddled down to the lake and got on a big cruise boat for the 45 minute ride to the other end of the lake, where we got on a bus for an hour's ride on a piece of road that only connects the lake to Doubtful Sound, with no other connections. The NZ government had constructed the road to service a set of tunnels they built from the higher elevation lake to the Tasman Sea, with turbines to generate electricity. It was quite a scheme, and it made possible our cruise. When we reached Doubtful Sound, a huge fiord with several arms running into the sea, we got on a bigger cruise boat for an overnight cruise on the sound. This was perhaps the most spectacular place I've ever seen. The mountains rose straight out of the sound, often near vertically, for thousands of feet. Waterfalls pouring out of the high hanging glacial valleys were everywhere in towering thin ribbons dropping hundreds, even over a thousand feet. There were seals and sea lions out near the mouth, and dolphins back in the sound, and sea birds everywhere, but mainly it was just staring at the scenery with your jaw dropped.

April 5th--the room on the boat was small but very nice, with private bathroom. The evening meal and breakfast in the morning were excellent. The day before had been cloudy and rainy with clouds hanging on the sides of the mountains, but this day was sunny and the experience was totally different and no less spectacular. We spent the morning cruising parts of the sound we hadn't seen the previous day, and ended the cruise late in the morning, taking the bus back up the twisting gravel road and over the pass and down to Lake Manipouri, where we got back on the boat to take us across the lake to the car. From there, we drove out of the mountains and across rolling, hilly countryside covered in sheep, to Dunedin on the west coast and the cottage on the Otago Peninsula, which turned out to rival the Moonbah Hut in it's shabbiness. The beds were horrible, the carpet looked like it had experienced about 500 cats in the last 20 years, and the kitchen was none too clean.

April 6th--the reason we had picked the cottage was because it was close to the end of the peninsula, where there was the only mainland colony of royal albatrosses and blue penguins. We did the albatross tour, seeing a bunch of fuzzy young not yet fledged and a couple of adults flying around, and just before dark we did the penguin tour, which consisted of going down to a small patch of beach and watching these tiny penguins the size of frying chickens coming out of the sea and waddling accross the sand and rocks and up into their nighttime burrows in the grass. It was pretty cool.

April 7th--we explored the peninsula, including a nice hike in native forest and down to two other beautiful beaches. We stayed at the second beach late enough to see a few yellow-eyed penguins coming onto shore, and then headed back to the tiny town on the peninsula where the cottage was, and where we had a great meal in a nice restaurant.

April 8th--we said a not so fond farewell to the grubby cottage and started the five hour drive back up the coast to Christchurch, stopping only to take in the Moeraki Boulders, a tourist trap along the highway but still the boulders themselves were interesting, almost perfectly round, smooth rocks up to five or six feet across that dotted the sandy beach, with a few emerging out of the higher bank behind.

April 9th--after spending the night at the same Christchurch motel we'd stayed at the beginning, we got up at 4 AM to catch the flight from Christchurch, the first leg of our journey back home.

Some random notes...

Australia is really big on round-abouts (traffic circles) and they really really work well when all the drivers know how they work. Traffic circles seem to be hard for American drivers to figure out.

Australia is also really big on speed limits, and there are traffic cameras everywhere. And you get a ticket if you go one kilometer over the limit, no exceptions, and points off your license big time.

Also, they are hard of drinking and driving. Legal limit is .05, and if you're over the limit you lose your license for a period ranging from 3 months to forever, depending upon how far over the limit you are and how many times you've been caught.

Every tiny town in both countries has a bakery or three, and these aren't donut shops, they mainly bake stuff like meat pies and sausage rolls, and for the most part the meat pies are absolutely delicious. Lots of variety and all of it good. And across from every bakery is a fish and chips place. They do fish of various species, not just generic fish, and the fish are terrific. The chips are simply fries and no better than anywhere in the U.S. but I could eat the fish every day.

They are also big on a chicken thing that's like pressed, battered, fried chicken parts in a big slab, but it's delicious as well. On the other hand, they don't do much of anything else all that well anywhere we ate. They love beets. Their burgers are huge and have thick slices of beets on them, along with lettuce and tomato and "tomato sauce", which is catsup, but they don't much use mustard.

New Zealand is really big on hedgerows. Hedgerows that are out in the middle of nowhere, and are so well-trimmed and maintained that they look like huge green concrete walls with perfectly straight sides, 10-15 feet high and 4-8 feet thick. Anyplace that is farming country is divided by thousands of miles of hedgerows like this.

New Zealand, both islands combined, has 4 million people and 50 million sheep. I never imagined there was that much of a market for wool in the whole world. They also grow a lot of red deer, the European version of elk, along with a couple other exotic deer species, to sell the antlers to the Chinese and for venison in the stores and restaurants.

The highest mountains in NZ only go up to about 10,000 feet, but they rise up out of very low ground or right out of the sea on the west coast, so they are incredible. We saw a number of the sights where the Lord of the Rings movies were filmed, and the country has really made a big deal out of being the site of "Middle-Earth". But it truly is spectacular and unique country.

There are no native land mammals in New Zealand, but a lot of introduced ones have decimated the native birds. And so have a lot of non-native birds. On the other hand, there aren't any snakes. Australian possums vastly outnumber even the sheep, and in some places the rabbits are so thick the ground seems to be moving. Over 100 native bird species are now extinct, due to the invasives and human hunting from the Maoris on, including the largest known flightless bird, the moa, and the largest by body weight eagle, the haast's eagle.

North American conifers grow as well or better in New Zealand as they do in North America. We came across 150 year old redwoods in Wanaka that were nearly as big as those in the forests of California, and Douglas firs that were at least as big as any I've ever seen. And the firs are highly invasive and crowd out native species in a matter of decades. The whole settled part of the country is a clinic on what NOT to do with introducing non-native species. Only the trout seem to have been a pretty good idea.