#101 Mud!
September 4, 2008
A trip down to Rivanna Mills and the James after a high flow gives an opportunity to experience this first had (or first foot, one might say). This segment originally aired in the first season of the Rivana Rambler (July 2006) and has been updated with current information.
This show originally aired in September 4, 2008 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net
We were warned that the launch is really muddy. “You may want to wait a couple of days,” the landowner tells me the night before our trip down to the Rivanna Mills sampling site. Last night I’d checked the river level online –it’s come down from a high of 1600 cubic feet per second during last week’s rains to a mere 500. Worry about a little mud? I think not.
My friend Becky and I drive our cars across the fields at Hells Bend Farm to drop off the canoe. The river is a light chocolate brown, moving along smartly, and holding unknown tons of sediment it has dragged from banks upstream during the high waters. The slope down to the river is caked with mud, already dry and cracking open in the rising heat of what promises to be a scorcher of a day. As Becky carefully steps down, her foot, then ankle, then calf, disappears in muck.
We rig a 100-foot climber’s rope from the truck’s tailgate to the water’s edge, giving us a handhold to climb back out. This works well enough. And, not surprisingly, when we leave the truck at the public boat launch on the James six miles downstream at our take-out, we find the same scene. During the flood, the James has deposited a slick, deep load of mud on the paved ramp. But we’re committed, and one expects to get a bit dirty doing river work, so we drive one vehicle back to the put in, and take giant, sliding, mucky steps down to the water, shake the load of mud from our sneakers, and depart for our sampling site.
No one knows for sure the source of the sediment in our Piedmont streams. Sediment transport is, to some degree, a natural and important function of rivers – over the slow time scale of centuries, one expects water to work on the land, to cut away at the mountains, to broaden floodplains, to bend straight, fast rivers into meandering streams. Unfortunately, like the startling climate changes that are now irrefutably linked with our human activities, increasing sediment loads in our rivers have the same source – us and how we live and have lived on the land the last couple of hundred years.
During the 17 and 1800’s, much of our region was cleared of trees to make way for farm fields and pastures right up to water’s edge. The erosion from this time was extraordinary and massive amounts of topsoil simply washed downstream.
While better land use practices in recent decades have slowed this type of erosion, the volumes of water continue to cut away at banks already steep and exposed. Those studying the problem in the Rivanna basin are beginning to think that the quantity of water entering streams from overland sources is as much of an issue as the polluting substances it carries.
Our paddle down to the sampling site is swift – though the water is only a foot deep in some places, it is opaque, and we only know where the bottom is by feel. There’s a good flow over the riffles at Rivanna Mills – stoneflies, mayflies, and dragonflies are in abundance, a sign that this stretch has weathered the storm, for now. Along the way back to Columbia, we see the high water line of the flood, leaves coated with a layer of dried mud, twelve, fourteen feet over our heads. A towering sycamore has toppled into the river, its root exposing a bare bank, a casualty of this most recent storm
The Rivanna perceptibly slows in this lower stretch, and we have to work to keep moving. We hug the slender shadows of the banks, seeking shelter from the sun directly overhead. Rounding the bend under the rail bridge in Columbia, we see the James a half mile ahead and press on. As we ferry across the strong current to our takeout, we survey the muddy ramp. Just as we thought, it’s a foot-sucking mess. We lumber slowly up the ramp through mud a foot deep, pulling the canoe that actually floats over and up the dense and drying surface.
There’s no real complaining, just a job to be done. Besides, river work is dirty, and this day, we’ve had a good and hot AND muddy time of it.