My parents, brother and I used to call Big Snowbird Creek home for weekends at a time. We camped along its banks with my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Our days were spent swimming, fishing, picking blackberries, cooking together, telling stories, riding four-wheelers and bicycles, playing cards when it rained, and shooting off fireworks on the Fourth of July.

As adults, my husband and I make trips back to that place as often as we can. When we hit the gravel road, we both reach to roll down our windows and take in the cool air and smell of the river. That smell floods me with precious memories every time. Instantly, I’m home. Memories like these are why I chose to work for rivers.

Here at American Rivers, we love starting conversations by simply asking, “What is your favorite river?”

This was the topic of the night when supporters of American Rivers, American Whitewater and MountainTrue gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act at New Belgium Brewing in Asheville, North Carolina.
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Around 500 people came together that evening to celebrate rivers and to share their stories with us. Folks showed up eager to talk about their favorite rivers and ready to act to protect them. Activists wrote passionate messages to elected officials, urging them to protect more waterways under the landmark Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Together, we enjoyed fellowship with river lovers by telling stories about our favorite rivers.

Ask a group of people “what is your favorite river?” And you’ll sometimes hear the same river name. But the story is always different. From serene paddles to whitewater action; from lazy floats to fly-fishing; from riverside hikes to family picnics — rivers are eager to give. We all have connections to rivers and rivers connect us.

During the 50^th anniversary year of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, American Rivers has been celebrating how far we have come in safeguarding rivers, and we look ahead as we work to protect 5,000 additional miles. Many of these special places are at risk. Visit 5000Miles.org to tell us your river story and to take action for our wildest, most outstanding rivers.

Thank you to all those who came out in Asheville to celebrate rivers and join us in protecting them.

 

It’s been a rough year for the environment. We’re fighting off constant attacks that threaten the health of our rivers and clean drinking water.

Every year, American Rivers highlights threats to rivers across the country in our annual report on America’s Most Endangered Rivers®.

Right now is your opportunity to let us know what rivers you think are threatened. Do you think that your favorite river is facing a critical decision in the coming year? Have you been wondering… why isn’t my river on the list when it faces so many threats? Let us know!

Hopefully, you have seen our blog posts in recent months talking about threats facing the 2018 listed rivers. We are spreading the word about threats to these special places, thanks to you! Since April, our America’s Most Endangered Rivers blog series (scroll to the bottom of each river page for links) has covered the Big Sunflower River, Bristol Bay Rivers, Middle Fork Vermilion River, and Mississippi Gorge. Still to come will be Boundary Waters (this month!), Colville River, Kinnickinnic River, South Fork Salmon River, and Smith River.

We are excited to announce that we are now accepting nominations for our 2019 report. Nominations are welcomed from any interested groups throughout the United States.

Rivers are selected based upon the following criteria:

• A major decision (that the public can help influence) in the coming year on the proposed action
• The significance of the river to human and natural communities
• The magnitude of the threat to the river and associated communities, especially in light of a changing climate

The report highlights ten rivers whose fate will be decided in the coming year, and encourages decision-makers to do the right thing for the rivers and the communities they support.  The report is not a list of the nation’s “worst” or most polluted rivers, but rather it highlights rivers confronted by critical decisions that will determine their future.  The report presents alternatives to proposals that would damage rivers, identifies those who make the crucial decisions, and points out opportunities for the public to take action on behalf of each listed river.

Please help us make the most of this great opportunity in 2019 by nominating a river you think deserves to be included on our list. We are especially interested in highlighting threats this year which impact marginalized communities (although this is not a requirement for nomination).

Deadline for nominations is Friday, November 16, 2018. Please fill out this form and send to Emily Harris, who can also provide more information.

The communities of eastern North Carolina are still reeling in the aftermath of yet another historic amount of rain and flooding than has ever been seen before. Thousands of families are still trying to get back to their homes and communities are pulling together to support each other. The water is finally receding and the support networks of the government and non-profit organizations are on the ground providing help.

This story is unfortunately not uncommon to us. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew dumped 20 inches of rain on the region. The spring of 2017 saw huge rain events in the piedmont area that turned small creeks into raging torrents of water filling the rivers of eastern North Carolina to the brim and inundating floodplains. The 35+ inches of rain that fell in the area around Elizabethtown, NC during Hurricane Florence is the latest mark and almost rivals the rain falls we saw in Houston during the drenching of Hurricane Maria. These new normals are part of the story of climate change that includes more frequent and violent storms which is clearly our reality now.

In 2017, American Rivers listed the Neuse and Cape Fear Rivers as the #7 Most Endangered River due to the threat of industrial farm waste lagoons and piles in the floodplain. North Carolina has over 3,300 hog waste pools and innumerable amount of dry litter piles from poultry operations. Within the 100-year floodplain of the coastal counties there are 62 hog operations and at least 30 poultry operations. The hog operations have 166 open-air waste lagoons directly within the 100-year floodplain, and another 366 within 100 feet of the floodplain. The floodwaters of Hurricane Florence inundated many farm operations, killing the animals and releasing waste into the floodwaters.

There is a buyout program for the agricultural facilities that was started after Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and it has been successful when it has been funded. According the N.C. Pork Council more than 330 hog waste lagoons that had been in the floodplain have been closed down and cleaned out through that program. But it is time to move all of this waste out of the floodplain.

There is more than just animal operations in the floodplain, there are threats from coal ash ponds, community waste water treatment plants, and industrial operations all sited and sitting in the floodplain. Many were inundated during the overwhelming floods North Carolina saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence. Our new normal requires us to develop a plan to get these threats out of the floodplain so that when the rivers rise and the floodplains fill we don’t add to the threat to communities by creating a toxic surge of water that coats the flooded areas.

October 2 marks the 50th anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, one of our nation’s landmark conservation laws.

The golden anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act provides a unique opportunity to celebrate the importance of rivers in our country, and commit ourselves to their protection for the next 50 years.

The National Wild and Scenic Rivers System safeguards beloved places that define us as a nation. The ‘shot heard ‘round the world’ was fired over the Wild and Scenic Concord River in Massachusetts. Nebraska’s native prairie still thrives along the Wild and Scenic Niobrara River. Wild salmon return every year to the Wild and Scenic Rogue River in Oregon. Lewis and Clark would still recognize the Upper Missouri River in Montana.

Millions of people in New York, Pennsylvania, California and other states turn on their faucets every day and enjoy clean drinking water, thanks to the protection of Wild and Scenic Rivers such as the Upper Delaware and Tuolumne.

Together, we will write the next chapter for river conservation in our country. We must prioritize the protection of wild, free-flowing rivers in collaborative, bipartisan ways that benefit all of us – particularly historically marginalized communities and communities of color. Now is the time to act, because healthy rivers make us more resilient to the impacts of climate change by providing reliable, clean water supplies and natural flood protection. Wild and Scenic Rivers also offer unsurpassed opportunities for recreation and connection with each other and the natural world.

When he signed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act in 1968, President Johnson said, ‘Every individual and every family should get to know at least one river.’ Rivers connect us to our past and our future. American Rivers is committed to supporting and growing the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System to ensure a rich legacy of wild rivers for generations to come.

Some key facts

The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was championed by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on October 2, 1968. It is unique in the world and remains the most powerful tool for protecting rivers, by prohibiting dams and other harmful development along the designated reaches.

Today, the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System safeguards nearly 13,000 miles along parts of 209 rivers and 3,000,000 acres of riverside land in 40 states and the commonwealth of Puerto Rico. See https://www.rivers.gov/map.php

We’re making progress

American Rivers and the 5,000 Miles of Wild® campaign are working to protect 5,000 new miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers and one million acres of land nationwide.

The nation’s newest Wild and Scenic River is East Rosebud Creek, part of the Yellowstone River watershed in Montana. President Trump signed the bipartisan legislation into law in August. Current grassroots Wild and Scenic designation efforts include the Nooksack River in Washington, the Gila River in New Mexico, Montana’s Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Oregon Wildlands with protections for the Molalla and Rogue rivers, and the Wild Olympics, with protections for rivers including the Elwha and Sol Duc.

The 5,000 Miles of Wild® campaign is supported by American Rivers, American Whitewater, Pacific Rivers, NRS, OARS, YETI, REI Co-op, Chums, Chaco, Nite Ize, Kokatat, Yakima, and KEEN.

In Episode 13 of We Are Rivers, we explore how fire suppression has triggered  today’s newsworthy mega-fires and how intricately connected wildfires are with the health of the rivers we love.

 On the weekend of 4th of July, while most people were enjoying a sunny holiday with friends and family, barbequing, and relaxing, my best friend was packing up her mom’s wedding dress, her late grandmother’s hand-me-downs, and baby pictures into a cardboard box in her Basalt, Colorado home. White ash rained from the sky around her and helicopters darted in the sky above while she carried the keepsakes to her car. She was hastily choosing what belongings to save as a wildfire encroached on her house. I was in New York at the time, and we talked over the phone amidst the chaos. Her voice cracked as she asked, “What if I’m leaving my childhood home for the last time?”

The human-wilderness interface offers some of the most devastating impacts of wildfires, leaving families without homes and communities in shambles. Sophie was lucky, the Lake Christine wildfire ended up changing course a mere 500 feet from her home thanks to the tireless efforts of firefighters and a shift in the breeze. Now that the fire has been directed away from the town of Basalt, it has been allowed to burn in the wilderness until snow falls to extinguish the blaze.

Over 110 wildfires have burned more than 1.8 million acres this year alone, mostly in the west, and despite the natural reaction to condemn wildfires, many forest types actually need wildfire to regenerate growth and support a healthy density of trees. The problem with today’s massive, newsworthy wildfires is that they are usually unhealthy fires, burning too hot and too fast, destroying everything in their path. From the last 100 years of human enforced fire suppression, the delicate balance of forest regeneration has been disrupted, resulting in catastrophic wildfires that have adverse effects on forests, rural/urban communities, and river health.

River health starts with forest heath. Uncharacteristically intense wildfires can change the course a river takes, erode its banks, disrupt biological processes, and fill reservoirs with excess nutrients and sediment. In 2009, The Colorado Statewide Forest Resource Assessment identified 642 watersheds susceptible to high-intensity wildfire. Over half of these watersheds registered a high to very high risk of postfire erosion, impacting vegetation, soils, and water supplies.

By 2050, Colorado’s fire season is expected to increase by several weeks as the climate further warms, with a potentially dramatic increase in total area burned. With post fire damages ranging from destroyed communities and business closures to loss of natural resources and poor water quality, studies have found that the costs associated with preemptively making forests healthy, and thus less susceptible to fire, are far less costly than post-fire damages.

For all these reasons and more, it’s important that all western states develop a strategic plan, like Colorado’s Water Plan, to directly address forest health. Western states must cooperate and align their forest health objectives, as wildfires do not pay attention to geopolitical boundaries.

Join us for Episode 13: Flames and Flows – How wildfires Impact Healthy Rivers of “We Are Rivers” to explore how fire suppression has triggered today’s newsworthy mega-fires and how intricately connected wildfires are with the health of the rivers we love.

This is a guest blog by Ron Smith, Editor in Chief at The Digital Outdoorsman.

People use to call it the need to “decompress,” “get away,” “clear your head,” “unwind,” and “time-off.” When these terms were used in conversations they were being applied to adults. As we know times have changed and continue to change at an even more accelerating pace, these various terms are now often combined into the modern need to “unplug” and it’s a term that is not only used relative to adults but to our children.

The use of the term today refers to “disconnecting from something.” For our children, it means disconnecting from their phones, wristwatches, gaming devices and any other device that connects them to the Internet or communicating using a device rather than in person. Not only is the connection to these gadgets a challenge for their growth, our children are spending less time in the outdoors. It’s a serious challenge with significant ramifications.

According to a 2015 study by Common Sense Media, American youth between the ages of 8 – 18 on average are logging 7.5 hours of screen time per day, and that’s not counting time spent using media for school or homework. Richard Louv has explored the growing gap between children and outdoors. In his 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv he discusses the disconnect and how it impacts their physical and emotional health. His research indicates that the large growth in childhood depression, obesity and inability to focus can be attributed to children spending so much time indoors.

We are especially failing our girls. Parents are four times as likely to tell girls than boys to be careful (according to a 2015 study in The Journal of Pediatric Psychology). Girls are warned away from activities that hint of risk. Parents are more likely to assist their sons to face their fears with instructions on how to complete the task on their own. We need to teach both boys and girls the skills they need to be confident, responsible problem solvers and risk takers.

That being said, my challenge as a parent is how do I execute to achieve this goal? How do I help them grow up loving the outdoors? What steps can I take to foster this love? How do I bridge from the reality that like me, many parents today will be the last generation to have grown up without being “plugged into the internet” as a child?

Recently as part of my personal effort to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wild & Scenic River Act, I arranged for my 13-year-old daughter and me to go on her first multi-day river trip. I chose as our destination the Rogue River and its 46-mile wild & scenic section. We would raft for three days, camp out for two nights, and take all our own equipment for camping.

Our guides were terrific. Our group of 18 was great and one other youngster was along, a boy in high school. We also were fortunate to have Bob Rafalovich as one of the guides. Bob has guided for 44 years on the Rogue. He founded the original outfitting company on the Rogue and he worked with government agencies to implement the Wild & Scenic Act on the Rogue. He was filled with stories and insights few others have.

We floated, we ran rapids, we hiked, we saw Zane Grey’s original 1939 cabin, we spent time at a true swimming hole up a side creek, we jumped off boats, swam in the river, saw black bears, shared stories with others, watched the Perseid meteor shower, learned about new flora and fauna, and Kira got to try rowing leading up to her taking the boat through a class 2 rapid.

What did she learn? Here’s what she highlighted.

• Anything is possible but you have to be brave enough to try
• How to deal with initial failure and turn it into success with perseverance
• How to take risks and be more confident in taking them
• The value of patience
• The ability to be honest with each other and to laugh at ourselves
• To allow yourself to feel fear and let it pass through you
• It important to have a positive attitude in order to succeed
• Moving forward is the only option you have
• The most important things in life are personal relationships and a wanting to grow
• Liked not being tethered to her phone and free to really focus on where she was and what she was doing
• And there is only one person responsible for living the life you want; You.

The river provided me with a means to connect with my daughter, before, during and after the trip we took on it. The river gave us the means to create memories, stories, and experiences to help us grow as father-daughter and as individuals. We need to provide opportunities to our children and support the organizations that help with accessing those opportunities.

Georgia’s Flint River: I grew up just one watershed away, and with friends I paddled nearly the whole navigable length of the river in the summer of 2003. But as for the river’s source, until I started working on the Flint six years ago, I’d always just taken as a given what I’d always heard as I was coming up in the river community in Georgia. And what I’d always heard was a sardonic line invariably delivered with a sad shake of the head or maybe a sarcastic chuckle:

“You know, the Flint starts at the airport.”

Minus the exceptional presence of a major international airport in the description, it was the kind of line we hear often about urban streams. Its utterance is a way for river-lovers to grapple with the concept that some streams may seem so degraded as to be past the point of no return. But that attitude threatens to write these streams off. And in the case of the Flint, it threatened to write off the very source of the river.

So one blazing hot day in July six years ago, after doing just a little homework with aerial photos and topographic maps, my colleague Jenny Hoffner and I set out for a day of urban exploring to find the source of the river for ourselves.

We saw what a few other brave souls – or at least hydrologically savvy folks – already knew: The Flint doesn’t quite start at the airport. It starts with a few urban streams emerging from storm sewers and culverts in the communities just north of the airport. These streams come down off of ridges in the cities of East Point, College Park and Hapeville – originally railroad towns that have become a part of the sprawl of Metropolitan Atlanta and have been re-shaped by its booming international airport in recent decades.

The creeks come down off of the ridges that still carry the railroads today. These urban streams run in and out of culverts, under roads and parking lots, behind buildings and through undeveloped lots, and they join together to flow under the airport in pipes about a mile and a half long. Coming out the downstream side is a stream large enough to start earning the name “river” as it flows southward through the rest of Georgia.

A History Hidden in Road Signs

Along the way in this exploration, I found a U.S. Geological Survey topography map dated 1895 that shows many more little tributary streams throughout the headwaters than you can find in the landscape today: most of them over time have been converted into typical urban storm sewer infrastructure. But even in today’s landscape, there are plain-as-day clues to the river’s role in the history of the area, if you’re looking for them.

For instance, a little dead-end street at the edge of airport property is called Terrell Mill Road. A few minutes south of there, you come across Lee’s Mill Road, where trucks now haul trash to a landfill and rocks out of a quarry. Both of these road names refer to the water-powered grist mills that were central to the communities in the area long before airfields were ever contemplated.

All of these ironies stand out because the Flint River is Georgia’s second-longest waterway, and it’s a critical water source for human and non-human Georgians across the state. It is one of the longest free-flowing rivers in the country and home to unique biodiversity, but it toils under the strains of land development and water use for much of its length.

Teaming Up to Restore a River

Since 2013, I’ve had the honor to convene water utilities and environmentalists in the Upper Flint River Working Group – a collaborative forum for finding ways to restore drought resilience to the entire upper Flint River basin and the communities that depend on it. For four years now, we at American Rivers have collaborated with Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to identify opportunities for green stormwater infrastructure – not on the runways, but along roads, parking lots, and landscaped areas across the airport’s 4,700 acres – where we can do a better job of infiltrating rainwater into the ground rather than letting it rush quickly downstream.

In 2017, American Rivers, The Conservation Fund and the Atlanta Regional Commission launched Finding the Flint, an effort to support the health of the Flint while reconnecting people to the hidden river. These groups worked with Sixpitch, a design firm founded by Atlanta BeltLine visionary Ryan Gravel, in partnership with Hannah Palmer, author of Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World’s Busiest Airport, a book about urban planning and history in area, with a big focus on how the airport changed the region.

Finding the Flint is an ambitious vision. It incorporates strategies for bringing the river to the forefront in a landscape where the airport, interstate highways and urban development loom large. These approaches range from facilitating more urban exploring to using the Flint as a focal point in future airport and airport-area plans and improvements. Sixpitch analyzed several areas around the airport where the piped Flint River could be unearthed and restored, and where inviting green spaces could make the area around the airport destinations in themselves, rather than places to pass through in order to get somewhere else. The primary goal of Finding the Flint is putting the Flint River back on the map.

Where We Go From Here

How do we turn this vision into reality? By introducing the vision to partners of all kinds who have a role to play in airport-area redevelopment, who want to join in for ambitious urban watershed restoration in metro Atlanta, and who want to see authentic urban development that connects communities to one another and to their own intrinsic natural assets. Hannah Palmer now serves as Coordinator for Finding the Flint, a role that includes creating and shepherding the Finding the Flint Working Group, a big-and-getting-bigger task force of stakeholders and “doers” from local governments, the airport, corporations, community groups and elsewhere.

The level of enthusiasm for this vision from all quarters and from local residents throughout the area has been staggering. Working Group participants include representatives from Atlanta’s airport, Delta Airlines, the cities of East Point, Hapeville and College Park, Clayton County Water Authority, Flint Riverkeeper, the Metro Atlanta Urban Farm, Woodward Academy and many more.

The environmental justice organization ECO-Action and the Atlanta-based Partnership for Southern Equity have become key partners in Finding the Flint, and their perspectives provide a necessary ingredient to the project: an educated eye for equity, justice and an improved quality of life for all as the area sees re-development and greener urban infrastructure. This year, Flint headwaters residents have taken part in the Atlanta Watershed Learning Network, an advocate training course that helps residents develop the tools to influence urban development plans with an awareness of green gentrification and affordability concerns, for the benefit of those who live there now and for decades into the future.

Restoration Starts at the Source

What these partners are building is the opposite of the sad joke I used to always hear about the source of the Flint. They understand that restoring a river’s health starts at the source.

As Finding the Flint takes off (pun intended), we’re excited to be at the forefront of a new vision for the world’s busiest airport and its neighboring communities. Central to this vision are local people, local businesses, and the local environment. Being a steward of the highly contested Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin is a big responsibility for Atlanta, and as this effort continues to be realized, as more partners buy into the idea and start implementing projects big and small, the Flint River will come to serve as a focal point for a world-class airport that prioritizes urban planning, resilient natural resources and community cohesion.

Then, perhaps, the Flint River will find its way back on the map.

This guest blog is by Dr. Matt Baker, a researcher with University of Maryland Baltimore County, who is conducting monitoring research for the Bloede Dam removal project on Maryland’s Patapsco River. It was written before the initial demolition of Bloede Dam on September 11, 2018

This month, the Bloede Dam will be removed from the Lower Patapsco River near Ilchester, Maryland.

The restoration is a one-of-a-kind natural experiment that will help test how relatively inexpensive drones can help scientists like me understand the integrity of streams and rivers.

My collaborators include students and researchers from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Maryland Geological Survey, Maryland Department of Natural Resources, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Geological Survey.

If our approach works, it will allow us to track sediment movement more completely and accurately than ever before, at a fraction of the expense.

What will change

Completed in 1907 and operational for 30 years, the Bloede Dam contained the first submerged hydroelectric plant in the U.S. At 26.5 feet high, it represents one of the largest dam removals on the Eastern Seaboard.

Why remove the dam? The state, federal agencies and nonprofit American Rivers hope to eliminate a derelict public safety hazard.

Taking out the dam will also complement restoration from previous dam removals upstream and expand connected habitat for fish and other aquatic creatures. The Patapsco once hosted major freshwater runs of shad, alewife and American eel, which were blocked by the dam. A fish ladder has proven ineffective at connecting upstream sections of the river with the downstream estuary and the Chesapeake Bay.

Despite a prominent role in early U.S. manufacturing, the Patapsco Valley has suffered its share of environmental challenges. Colonial shipping was forced to relocate to Baltimore after the original port at Elkridge Landing was choked by sediment from shipping ballast, river bank mining and upstream forest clearing. Once a 10-foot channel surrounded by a saltwater marsh, today the site is fresh and the channel less than two feet deep.

Periodic floods have also wreaked havoc in the narrow gorge, occasionally with catastrophic results. In the past few years, flash floods just upstream in Ellicott City have ruptured the sewer main that runs along the valley bottom and reorganized large quantities of sand, wood and rock in the downstream channel.

Today, the dam stores approximately 2.6 million cubic feet of stratified silt and sand less than eight miles from Chesapeake Bay tidewater. When the dam is removed, we want to know how this much sediment is going to move and how fast.

Why sediment movement?

Understanding sediment movement is critical for river management in every jurisdiction of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Sediment helps balance water flow to maintain channel shape and stable habitats for aquatic plants, invertebrates and fish. River sediment is necessary to help estuarine coastlines combat sea level rise. However, fine sediment can also be a pollutant in, or carry nutrients and heavy metals to, downstream estuaries.

Although it’s easy to observe evidence of sediment erosion from riverbanks or hillsides, it’s often unclear where and how much of that sediment is redeposited and stored. Management of sediment storage, particularly behind dams, can be somewhat controversial.

After studying several other dam removals, we expect sediment trapped behind the dam to rapidly evacuate and redistribute downstream over a period of several years.

However, there’s still much we don’t know. Floods following intense storms can move huge quantities of sediment, altering the valley bottom in just hours. Will such storms redeposit sediment elsewhere in the gorge or the coastal floodplain, or deliver it to the bay?

New ways to track changes

It’s logistically difficult to accurately measure large and potentially rapid channel changes.

In a typical field survey, technicians measure water depth, flow, bottom substrate and other information at specific locations. Though stream channels can vary tremendously over space as well as through time, we scientists are rarely able to represent such variability in our measurements. Instead, we collect isolated snapshots in time. That leaves us with less understanding of dynamic sediment movement, devastation wrought by flood waves or the diversity of conditions necessary to support aquatic life.

Gauging stations located upstream and downstream of the dam measure water flow and estimate suspended material like fine silts and clays, but not coarser sands and gravels moving along the channel bottom. Surveys of 30 cross-sections distributed over eight miles provide information about how channel shape and composition vary as one crosses the channel, but relatively little about the thousands of feet in between each transect.

What’s more, after a major flood, scientists must conduct new cross-sectional surveys, taking up to a month in occasionally in risky conditions.
Our team is attempting to add to our measurements by deploying small, off-the-shelf drones that photograph the entire valley bottom. Repeat photographs before, during and after removal can help us track the location of a sediment plume as it moves downstream. They also allow new perspectives of the river.

Relying solely on overlapping photos collected both before and after dam removal, we will create 3D computer models of the channel bottom and water depth – not just at the surveyed cross-sections, but every few inches along the channel. Although this technology works best in shallow water, our models should allow us to vastly improve estimates of both the amount and location of channel change as sediment moves downstream.

Scan of Patapsco River point cloud from Matthew Baker on Vimeo.

With the new approach, our team collects a photo set of all eight miles in just a few days, and further work occurs within a desktop computer. That means measurements can be repeated or made anew at any time using archived images.

Although we are certainly curious to see how this much sediment moves, we are especially interested in how well we can capture it. If it works, this technology will likely change the way scientists collect measurements and monitor rivers.

This blog was originally published in The Conversation on September 5, 2018. Link to original article: https://theconversation.com/drones-to-track-one-of-the-largest-dam-removals-on-the-eastern-seaboard-100071. This work is funded in part by American Rivers, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Dr. Baker is a professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

 

Our aim was to breach the dam before Labor Day.

Rain. Rain. Rain. All year.

Nevermind. Too much rain. We’re working in a river. Water water everywhere. Project delayed.

No breach before September 6. More rain. There’s no way we can breach the dam before September 13. Let’s tell everyone.

Monday, September 10. We get a call from the contractor — hurricane coming. We’re breaching the dam tomorrow. What?? Everyone scrambles.

Tuesday, September 11. I arrived at the site of Bloede Dam in the morning. The plan was to blast out a slice of the dam on the Howard County, MD, side of the Patapsco River. Holes have been drilled in the dam already. The contractor is filling the holes with explosive charges. They are moving quickly. They want to make this happen today.

The breach is expected to happen around 2pm. Okay, let’s gather the safety gear and head over to the other side of the river. (This is a crazy site in Patapsco Valley State Park where you have to leave the main part of the construction site and drive around for like 15 minutes to the other side, and then hike another 15 minutes up to the dam where the breach will happen.)

2pm arrives. They are working on placing the blast mats over the holes containing the explosives. It’s like a mat jigsaw puzzle. The blast mats will help contain the explosive force when it detonates. So those are pretty important. We’ll wait.

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIN. I am not kidding. I am hanging out in a picnic pavilion in the pouring rain. This will cause another delay. At least people will leave the park and stay out of the river, so there’s less of a safety concern.

The excitement and nervous energy is building in the picnic pavilion. A number of our closest project partners and a few regulators have gathered for the breach. Everyone asks if people are hearing a signal. No… just the train rolling along.

Around 4pm or so we hear three horn blasts. It is the three-minute warning. Everyone is standing. This is it! Then… a rumble like a roll of thunder sounds from upstream. I shout WOO HOO!! Cheers all around.

We get the “all clear” and start our trek up to the dam. We had to be a distance away from the dam for safety reasons. No one got to see the blast in person. Thank goodness for modern technology.

My first glimpse of the dam is surprisingly dry. The river is hiding. Where’s the breach? I can’t even see it yet.

The big hole comes into view. I have never been so excited to have put a giant hole in something before. I feel like a toddler run rampant with their first pair of scissors.

The feeling of triumph is prolific. There’s no turning back now. This dam is coming down. Finally.

The next step will be to knock down the remaining structure with hydraulic hammers. You can check out the Maryland Department of Natural Resources Bloede Dam website to see that progress.

We are removing Bloede Dam so that no one else dies in the undercurrent at the base of the dam and so that migratory fish can be free to move upstream to live and spawn. This river will be healthier, and people will be able to paddle through this site, play in the flowing water, and find their zen in fishing. I cannot wait to see the Patapsco come back to life! Don’t worry… we’ll share it with you too.

Among the many heart-felt reasons people turn to the church, ones that resonate with me are to look for peace, to find a purpose, and to seek a connection to something that goes beyond our understanding and our lifetime. For me, the place I find these things is a mountain trout stream.

There is a feeling I get as I come into the forest and hear the river – a calmness from being where things are as they were meant to be. Seeing bright green moss on the rocks, hearing the laughing sounds of small waterfalls, sensing the strength of tall poplar trees watching over it all, and seeing the clean, clear water gathering and then flowing and then gathering again as it comes down from above and heads to where it can find its own level. If it is an old and natural place, you feel that it has always been that way with the rocks worn smooth over thousands of years and the soil rich and deep from generations of the forest falling there – and the river always alive and at the center of it.

This past weekend was no exception. Hiking along a beautiful, small stream in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, the sounds and the coolness from the water made every step seem a little easier and the pack a little lighter. After several miles, we got to where it was time to pull out the wading shoes and the fly rod. This is where my church is. Looking upstream, the river comes down through the forest, bathed in filtered light from above. It is a cathedral in nature that happens in many places if you look for it. The alter is just a little farther ahead.

And the confirmation that this is someplace pure comes when a native Brook trout, whose ancestors have been here since the Ice Age, takes the fly. If the river was alive before, it’s even more so now as it cuts around rocks and through the pools. And then to hold this beautiful fish, with bright colors and sleek shape, before letting it go confirms that in this place, all is right with the world.

The good news is that this stream, its forests, and its trout are protected as part of the national park. Too often though, that is not the case. With less than one-half of one percent of our nation’s rivers protected by “Wild and Scenic River” designation, protecting more rivers is important work. It is the goal of our 5,000 Miles of Wild campaign, which you can read about here. What a wonderful calling to keep these natural cathedrals the way they were meant to be.

It’s time to talk trash again, or more specifically, plastic litter.

Last year, American Rivers teamed up with dedicated litter picker-upper and blogger, Erin Fitzgerald, on an initiative to – you guessed it – pick up litter. But this wasn’t an ordinary litter cleanup; it was a cleanup with a twist… Think scavenger hunt.

We had a lot of fun and received submissions from across the country. We raised awareness about the high prevalence of litter and sent a resounding message that we all have a shared responsibility to leave our wild places and waterways better than we found them.

Now is the time for another Litter for All Seasons scavenger hunt!

WHAT LITTER FOR ALL SEASONS IS AND HOW IT WORKS

A Litter for All Seasons is an invitation — an opportunity to clean up your favorite river, trail, park, riverbank or neighborhood and share your achievement. If you have kids, we encourage you to invite them along. It’s a great stewardship activity for all ages. You’ll be able to clean up your community, make a difference for rivers, and set an example for other stewards. And like any good scavenger hunt, there are prizes.

This month and throughout next year, we’ll announce a “Litter of the Season.” Then the hunt is on to find the challenge litter, take a picture of it, and post it to your personal Instagram or Twitter account with the hashtags #MakeAPactPackItOut and #RiverCleanup.

This fall, our Litter for All Seasons hunt, will be focused on plastic litter.

RULES & REMINDERS:

• Discard of the litter responsibly (recycle it or put it in the trash).
• Feel free to keep the hunt going – you can pick up and tag as much litter as you find, but you’ll only get one entry per person for each season.
• Your picture(s) will populate on American Rivers’ Virtual Landfill and Erin’s online gallery, Make a Pact, Pack It Out.
• Grow the scavenger hunt – share this blog post and your plastic litter photos with your friends, family and co-workers to encourage them to join you (maybe a little friendly competition to see who finds the most of plastic litter). Your friends, family and co-workers will be more likely to join in if they see that you are.

THIS SEASON’S LITTER CHALLENGE

Your challenge is to find discarded plastic of any kind (bottles, straws, bags, cutlery, packaging, caps/lids, etc.). Once you find plastic litter, take a picture of it and post it to your personal Instagram or Twitter account with the hashtags #MakeAPactPackItOut and #RiverCleanup (make sure your accounts are public!).

Plastic is one of the most heavily littered items and can take hundreds of years or longer to break down — or not at all. Plastic breaks down into smaller pieces called microplastics.

Alternatives exist for most single-use plastics – we encourage you to adopt a mindset of reusing, refilling and repurposing to reduce your plastic footprint. From the garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean to plastic water bottles and straws on a roadside, plastic litter surrounds us and threatens our pets, wildlife and waterways.

PRIZES: Three (3) winners will be chosen at random and matched with a prize that is the perfect complement for outdoor adventures. One (1) winner will receive an American Rivers branded Klean Kanteen reusable insulated bottle and two (2) winners will receive both a Chaco® Fit for Adventure notebook (8×8”) and a LOKSAK® reusable waterproof bag (8×7”).

TIMING

This season’s scavenger hunt kicks off Tuesday, September 18 and ends on Monday, October 1. Your picture(s) must be uploaded to social media account(s) with the hashtags #MakeAPactPackItOut and #RiverCleanup by 11:59 pm PST on October 1 to be eligible to win (see complete rules).

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ANTICIPATED SCAVENGER HUNT SEASONS

Don’t miss a season – make sure to check American Rivers’ The Current blog and Adventures in Thumbholes’ blog for updates on timing. Scavenger hunts will also be announced on social media, so make sure you’re connected to @AmericanRivers and @Thumbholes on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (@AdventuresInThumbholes for Facebook).

• September 2018
• March 2019
• July 2019
• September 2019

PRIZES

Each Litter Season will have a different treasure (prize) up for grabs. Prizes will be in the spirit of sustainability and stewardship. At the conclusion of each scavenger hunt, a winner will be selected at random from all entries.

As environmental stewards, we know picking up and packing out litter not only keeps our public spaces looking great, but all of our wild places. When litter is left on our lands, rain and floodwater can carry it into storm drains and then quickly into our creeks, rivers and even oceans.

We look forward to seeing your submissions, as they represent stories of stewardship and care behind every piece of litter picked up. While traditional scavenger hunts focus on a treasure – here the treasure is knowing you left the environment better than you found it.

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Author: Erin Fitzgerald is a trail runner from Portland, Oregon. Her blog, Adventures in Thumbholes, has two initiatives (Small Change and Make a Pact, Pack It Out) that focus on stewardship and giving back to the communities where we race and adventure. Erin’s passion for preserving wild places has earned her the reputation of a litter-picker-upper, which she happily embraces.

This blog is a guest column by Donna Stevens, Director of the Upper Gila Watershed Alliance, and was originally published in Desert Exposure magazine.

We’re all a little bit in love with rivers. Like a teenage crush, we’re first dazzled by their beauty. Soon we crave how they make us feel when we’re near them, like the world is new and everything is possible. We hear their songs, and fall deeper. We realize that rivers feed us, our bodies and our spirits. As we play and fish in them, our joy mingles with their waters.

When we grow up, we understand that real love means not just taking what we want, but also giving back. We discover that the river needs something from us, and because we’re in love, we want to give it, protect it from harm.

In the early days of this country, there was an expectation that the land and water would always provide for us. To develop and grow, we dammed all the big rivers, and then began to exploit the small ones.

In the 1960s, river lovers began to acknowledge that our nation was just taking from rivers, and not taking care. They saw wild rivers disappearing and determined to give back to them in a permanent, protective way. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (Senator Tom Udall’s father) joined the cause. Together, they persuaded Congress to protect the rivers we love, and in October 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

As part of this act, eight rivers, including the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico, with its tributary, the Red River, were immediately designated as Wild and Scenic Rivers. Since then, the East Fork of the Jemez River, the Pecos, and Rio Chama in New Mexico have also been protected as Wild and Scenic. Residents enjoy these rivers, and local economies continue to prosper as visitors flock to them, spending their tourist dollars.

Across the nation, more than 12,700 miles of rivers have received Wild and Scenic River status. Sounds impressive, but that number represents less than one percent of the total river miles in the country. Now is not the time to rest.

In the Land of Enchantment, there are no protected rivers in the southern part of the state, and not for lack of deserving river segments. In this arid landscape, rivers and streams are the lifeblood of the land.

The Gila River, with its headwaters in the Gila Wilderness – the nation’s first designated wilderness area – is eminently qualified for Wild and Scenic status. The last free-flowing river in the state, the Gila is unmatched for activities like hunting, hiking, fishing, and just enjoying the outdoors. Miles downstream of the Gila’s three Forks – East, West, and Middle – is the Gila Middle Box, a tight canyon of towering pink cliffs “boxing in” the river, with flood debris wedged twenty feet overhead, spanning the river.

There are many such wild river segments in the Gila National Forest: the Lower San Francisco, with its soothing hot springs; McKnight Canyon, where the East Fork of the Mimbres is lush and shady; Whitewater Creek above the Catwalk; Black Creek, arising from high headwaters at Reeds Peak in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness. There’s an intriguing litany of history in these names: Indian, Mogollon, Diamond, Sapillo, Turkey, Iron, Gilita, and Little Creeks – not to mention Holden Prong. These streams feed our imaginations and provide a home to native fish, resident plants, and wildlife.

During the 14^th Annual Gila River Festival, participants can experience firsthand some of these cool river stretches, and see for themselves why they deserve protection.

Because we love these rivers, we want to keep them as they’ve always been. This won’t just happen on its own. Protection, like love, is an active process. Wild and Scenic River designation means that we keep the river as it is now. Proposed projects that would degrade the river – water quality, wildlife habitat, and wild characteristics – would not be allowed.

The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act has three designation categories: wild rivers are rivers, or sections of rivers, that are free-flowing and usually reached by a trail. Scenic rivers are also free-flowing, but accessible by roads in some places. Recreational rivers have easy motorized access and often some development along their shores.

Demands on our rivers will only become greater as the human population grows. Precipitation and water levels may decrease, and new threats are likely to materialize. Just as we safeguard our beloved children and grandchildren against peril, we need to protect our rivers and streams. It’s time to move beyond a mere crush, send a valentine to our rivers, declare our undying love, and ensure that these rivers get the protection they need and deserve, so future generations can fall in love with them, too.

The Gila River Festival features field trips to some of these river segments. For more information, visit www.gilariverfestival.org