By Topf Wells

I was preparing to fish my favorite stretch of my favorite Columbia County trout stream but demurred when I reached the creek.  What happened, I wondered.  Where I was used to stepping onto a nice patch of gravel with a prospect of pleasant wading and fish eager to eat dry flies, I found a mess: big stretches of sediment topped by dense clumps of aquatic vegetation.  The small amount of current that showed was shoved under overhanging clumps of reed canary grass topped by wild parsnip. I went elsewhere but wondered if I wasn’t becoming a bit of a wuss.

Nope. The fish biologist for that stream said he had never seen such build ups of sediment and vegetation in the 11 years that he has surveyed that site. Where the wading is usually easy, he and his crew were sometimes sinking up to their waists. The change is this part of the creek was so drastic that he thought the amount of fish habitat had been reduced. Had I tried to fish there, I might still be stuck.

Nor was this a wholly isolated occurrence. A Dane County staff person had noticed the same situation on Token Creek while a scientist with the USGS reported that a section of Black Earth Creek at one of the gauging stations had a similar set of sediment bars and dense mats of vegetation. At Token Creek and BEC, the water was nearly out of the banks even though the drought had reduced the amount of water in the stream.

The drought is the cause of this phenomenon. Without flushing rains,  the sediments form those bars and the vegetation finds an ideal spot to grow and proliferate in lower gradient parts of streams.

I don’t know if this  accumulation of silt and vegetation hurts the stream in the long run. I hope a strong storm or two will restore the streams to a more normal state. It might force you to find another part of the stream to fish. It’s also an example of a change that droughts and climate change might have on our streams.