Utah river journal

Day 1: travel

J. and I meet at a free climbers' camp near Moab, and though I don't climb – the very idea of hanging off that red monolith in the distance makes my heart beat fast – I like the climbing culture. There are probably 30 people here and last night everything was silent, a handful of fires burning under the stars, the bobbing headlamps of some stragglers coming off the approach in the dark. I slept in a cocoon of warmth and happiness and woke this morning to the bright blue skies of a desert spring, flowers unfurling in the morning sun, a man strumming a guitar beneath a juniper. J. has left to meet some friends for a kayaking trip to the north and I'm leaving soon to drive south and meet another group of friends on the banks of the San Juan River. Our paths intersect where they can, sleeping on a bed of dirt under the stars, and I love it. I love it all.

I dreamt last night that I climbed a tree – a very large, very gnarled old tree. I hung from a branch with my arms and legs wrapped around it like a sloth. I hung for a long time; for months maybe. Time passed in a gloomy gray light with no distinction between day and night. One day, I made the choice to swing my arms up in the kind of all-or-nothing move that a climber makes to reach a just-out-of-grasp fingerhold. I can't recall now whether I fell or climbed higher.

Day 2: river

A river is a living thing, a vein pumping the muddy blood of the desert. Early in the spring of a year with little snow, we hardly have to dip our paddles into it except to steer. We drift downstream, watching the landscape change from sandy floodplains crawling with cottonwoods to undulating hills of red sand to sheer canyon walls pocked with shadows and studded with sage. Across it all, the sky is tugged like a sheet snapped tight. We are on river-time now; dream-time.

It feels like the most natural thing in the world to float down this river with friends, surprising stock-still herons in the shallows, trailing my fingers in the water. But I can't help knowing that the tamarisk choking the banks aren't supposed to be there; that the dam upstream allowing more people to live in this scorched country has tamed the spring floods and prevented the river from reaching its natural floodplain, an area once farmed by ancient people now blowing dry with tumbleweeds, another non-native plant. But what's native, anyway? Everything comes from someplace else, and most things move on after they pass through here.

We climb high above the river to an ancient cliff dwelling, to the stone rooms and windows of the ancestral Puebloans, the Anasazi. The ones who left. We find potshards and thousand-year-old corncobs gnawed clean, and – tucked away in a secret alcove away from prying eyes and potential vandals – a piece of skin placed gingerly on a rock, with a lone stitch that's withstood centuries of wind and sand. A scrap of fabric from another world, another time. It humbles me. 

Day 3: rock

Even in March, the desert is a land of extremes. At night the water turns to pans of ice, and I curl in my sleeping bag with my hands jammed between my legs, waiting for the kiss of sunlight. And then in a blink it's afternoon and we're scrambling for shade beneath a blazing sky.

The desert is defined by water, by the river devouring the land. Yet twenty minutes of walking later it's as if such a thing never existed, and you're in a canyon so dry it cracks your lips and crumbles at your touch. Each rock is as distinct as a snowflake. In places it's hard and smooth, strata of glass and molten rock poured over grainy substrate, sensuous tendrils of black and red. In places it's terraced, so many layers in a single vertical foot that to look up at the towering walls is to comprehend millions of layers. Alone, each is flaky and unsubstantial, but together they comprise monuments.

Elsewhere, the canyon walls are dripping with an alkaline water that builds into coral-like globules, nubs of stalagmites sprouting from the earth. Sometimes the rock is green, tinted by minerals or slimed by algae. In places it's crumbled into billions of pebbles, each a different color and shape; and in places it's been pulverized to sand, sometimes white, sometimes red. Under certain overhangs, the rock is gray and rotting, and stepping beneath it is like walking on the dry ash of a fire that's burnt out and gotten cold.

How slowly do you have to move to learn the shapes and colors of a landscape, to memorize its names and absorb its mysteries? Here, I think, it would take forever: a lifetime of lifetimes. Even at our leisurely downstream pace, we miss much. Walking, I can see more, but sometimes I think the only way to see anything at all is to stop moving. When I'm still, I see two birds couple in midair, almost violently, and I don't know whether they've fought or made love. They freefall together for a brief moment and break apart before they fall to the earth. 

 

Day 4: wind

More extremes: This time, wind. Last night was much warmer but windy, and this morning's blue sky was swiftly replaced by a soft-gray cover of clouds. Made it four miles through the biggest rapid of the trip before getting slammed with wind. Absolutely pummeled. The kayak and canoe could've pushed on, but the raft was getting nowhere. We pulled off and ate lunch huddled next to a rock while watching the wind blow whitecaps upstream. Then we found a flat-ish spot and killed four hours drinking whiskey, putting up a giant tarp and abandoning it, sitting a cave, drinking more, getting silly and wondering if we'd be forced to spend the night there. Luckily, just before dark the wind died down and we scrambled to pack the boats and shove off. Made it a mile before getting slammed with another wall of wind. It's good to be out with four other guides – when we need to get shit done or make decisions, there is no mucking about. That night, our boats were unpacked, camp set up, fire crackling and dinner cooked in under 40 minutes. Our faces and hands are raw with wind-burn. There is sand in my teeth and up my nose. Tomorrow we'll make an early start to get off the river. 

Day 5: home

Back home in Colorado, a red-wind terror sweeps the valley, knocking branches of trees and whipping freshly-plowed fields into the sky. The sky is red with Utah sand, kicked up hundreds of miles away and now sticking to our windshields, traveling on currents of air across state boundaries. Utah follows me home; the desert won't let me go so easily.

So this is spring in this part of the world. Dry and violent, a kiss of fire. Tomorrow, I will plant peas, and I think I'll stay home for a while. 

the latest blow in the fight for pebble mine.

Last summer, the excavation of some of the world’s richest mineral deposits – and the degradation of some of the world's richest salmon habitat ­– seemed well within the grasp of global mining interests. But with the release of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's long-awaited environmental assessment on Jan. 15, the development of Pebble Mine in southwest Alaska's Bristol Bay slipped just a little bit further from reach – the latest and perhaps most significant in a series of defeats for the embattled project.

The EPA assessment confirms Pebble’s potential to severely damage salmon runs, using stronger language than previous drafts (“could” has turned to “would”) and describing in detail the acidic waste that could leach into watersheds even under routine operation. The report is also turning the tide of political opinion. "Wrong mine, wrong place, too big," U.S. Sen. Mark Begich told the Anchorage Daily News after reviewing it. Begich, a Democrat, is the first member of Alaska's congressional delegation to publicly take a stand against Pebble Mine, though previous politicians have also opposed it. Former Gov. Tony Knowles called it “terrifying.”

Despite its gargantuan size – the mine itself would consume up to 94 miles of stream and 5,350 acres of wetlands, with an additional 64 streams affected by road building, the EPA found – Pebble has come to represent more than just a fight for one place or one ecosystem. Even people who have never stood on the banks of a river teeming with salmon are deeply invested in this corner of Alaska as a symbol of wildness, a vestige of the ecological and cultural riches that were once bountiful across North America. As HCN senior editor Ray Ring wrote after visiting Bristol Bay last summer, "the restoration efforts I'd reported on (in the American West) were kind of desperate, almost pathetic" in comparison: "The Lower 48 will never regain the kind of wildness that survives in Alaska."

Read the rest of my story by clicking here: http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/final-epa-report-the-latest-in-a-series-of-blows-to-alaskas-pebble-mine

moving water

I've lately discovered that I LOVE taking photos of whitewater. The resolution may not be high enough here to get the full effect (unless you click on an individual photo to see it full screen), but the clarity of the water drops as they're frozen by the film and the fluidity of water as it's cut by a paddle or a boat are amazing to play around with. Thanks to Jesse, Sam and Peter for letting me take their pictures.

sacred rivers.

San Juan River, Utah
Honaker Camp
May 22

When I'm standing in front of a body of water, I can brush my teeth forever.

The air is perfectly warm against my bare shoulders, alive with the chirping of crickets, the gurgle of river and a rustle of wind. I'm not getting paid much to be here, running a gear raft down the San Juan River with a school group, but the idea that I'm getting paid at all to be on a trip I otherwise would have paid for still astonishes me. It astonishes me that I walked into a pub and got this job; that I've managed to see so much of the world this way. It astonishes me that three weeks ago I was in a New Zealand rainforest. How is it possible to move so quickly from one world to another, from green rainforest to ocher desert just like that? Sometimes science fiction seems more plausible than reality -- Dune, for example, where the desert-world exists on another planet entirely. Here, it's mind-blowing that this is one world, one month in a lifetime of months.

Bats swoop overhead. On a muddy, serpentine river cut through towering sandstone cliffs, the sky becomes small, a misshapen canvas of moonlight outlined by the silhouettes of cliffs. The full moon traverses across this oblong patch of sky, and stars come to life in its wake. As with everywhere else I've been, this world is defined by water -- the lack of it, and the power one ribbon of water has to cut through eons of rock.

May 23
Camp three

Days on the river, long and hot, sun beating between canyon walls, onto the brims of our hats, into water thick and muddy. Our boats are small spots of blue against vertical cliffs of red. The sand blows hot, scouring everything. In the afternoon, when I'm tired from rowing, the sun drops behind a wall and brings shade, cool and beautiful, the colors of dusk painting the canyon walls in the middle of afternoon heat, the burnt red striations in the rock becoming hazy and soft. Fighting off a dehydration headache, drinking as much water as possible, I row the heavy gear boat in the back. I challenge myself, thinking about lines and form and technique. I mess up and get myself out of my messes with no one around to see. I try to learn. I get frustrated, landing on the rocks I want to avoid, and repeat to myself like a mantra: don't look at where you don't want to go. Focus on one line. Nervous before a big rapid, I nail it and surge with confidence, only to get stuck on a teeny submerged rock later on. There's so much time to think, but I think about little except the river.

From Siddhartha: "I am only a ferryman, and it is my task to ferry people across the river. I have transported many, thousands; and to all of them, my river has been nothing but an obstacle on their travels. They travelled to seek money and business, and for weddings, and on pilgrimages, and the river was obstructing their path, and the ferryman's job was to get them quickly across that obstacle. But for some among thousands, a few, four or five, the river has stopped being an obstacle, they have heard its voice, they have listened to it, and the river has become sacred to them, as it has become sacred to me."

Now, at night, the moon rises from within a canyon and illuminates the cliffs like a spotlight.  The moon-shadows of mesas on the cliff look like a city skyline. From deep within the canyon, desert frogs scream like pterodactyls.

May 24
Grand Gulch camp

Another magical day in the desert. The last four miles or so of river today were stupefyingly dull except for getting beached on the occasional sandbar, and I was prepared for a lackluster final camp. But Grand Gulch is grand indeed -- breathtaking, surreal. Spillover pools of clear, still water surrounded by oases of green, climbing in tiers higher and higher up a side canyon, each layer revealing a new world. There's more life and diversity in this desolate landscape than in the moisture-laden city where I grew up. I spend the final evening wandering around snapping photos and learning new flowers and cacti, birds and insects and lizards.

water power

There used to be a boardwalk. Now it is closed off, rotting, ridden with holes and plastered in slippery leaves. It has been raining for three days now, really raining, the kind of rain that can only occur in a place that receives upwards of seven meters of rain a year. Three days ago the sky opened up and water began pouring out of it in the way it might during a tropical afternoon storm or a monsoon – a kind of rain that comes quickly and leaves a short while later. But this rain doesn't leave. It continues unabated for days.

On Monday, having played board games, baked, done yoga, ate and watched moves for far too long, we gear up. Everyone digs out the most protective, waterproof combination they can find. I wear my dry suit, neoprene booties, neoprene gloves, a neoprene balaclava and my diving mask. Then we pile into the back of the van and drive to Bowen Falls.

At 160 meters tall, Lady Bowen Falls is three times higher than Niagra Falls. It's fed by a glacier, but the sheer mountains surrounding it lack soil and thus do not absorb rainwater, so when it rains hard like this, Bowen floods quickly. The mountains funnel rainwater into an ever-swelling river that churns through an alpine valley, then shoots like a firecracker into the sky before dropping over a ledge the height of a 50-story building.

Bowen Falls is not only a magnificent example of hydrology, it also supplies the community of Milford Sound with drinking water and electricity. About 150 people live in Milford Sound, and every time one of us flushes a toilet, drinks a glass of water or takes a shower, we are using pure, untreated glacier melt-off that has been locked up in ice for 30,000 years. Humans arrived in New Zealand 800 years ago, so the water coming off Bowen Falls has never before touched another human being. This astounds me. In London, they say, the water coming from the tap has already been cycled through eight people.

We're lucky here. Not only because we can turn on the tap and drink glacier water (as well as brew beer from it), but because when it rains hard and there is no work and the one road into this place is closed off due to rock slides, we venture into the most raw, wild display of nature I have ever imagined. We can go under Bowen Falls while it is flooding.

I've known this for weeks. I think I'm ready. I've been warned to cover every possible piece of skin. I'm expecting it to be intense.

But nothing can prepare me for the reality of it. We pile out of the van – seven of us, five kayak guides and two friends – and walk along a narrow, crumbling piece of asphalt, the start of the old trail. On one side is the loamy, pulsing ocean; on the other, a cliff dripping with ferns, sphagnum moss and rivulets of water. We reach a solid metal gate and climb over it, like teenagers sneaking onto the football field at night. The boardwalk on the other side curves against the ocean for a while, then disappears into the forest. As we follow it deeper toward the falls, water becomes the only sound. Rain pelts the leaves and splatters into a forest that has become swampland practically overnight.

The wind picks up as we approach. Bowen Falls creates its own winds, gusting over 100 kilometers per hour at its base. Trees become gnarled bonsais, their branches and trunks swept away from the falls and frozen in fantastic shapes as if reaching their arms toward the sea in a plea for help, a desperate attempt to get away from this reckless display of power.

Then there is nothing. Even with a diving mask, I cannot see anything but driving water against a backdrop of gray. I can hardly breathe; I must constantly spit out mouthfuls of water. There is no sound but the roar of the falls. I concentrate only on putting one foot in front of the other, battling against the force of the wind, leaning into it with all my weight, trying not to lose sight of Ricki's orange jacket somewhere ahead. At some point, the boardwalk ends, and we struggle on. Often the wind knocks us over and we sit, clutching tussocks of grass, helping each other crawl forward. We cannot talk or see each other's faces, aware only of the vague blurs of color and groping hands that we know belong to fellow human beings.

The force of the wind and water is overwhelming, breathtaking, astonishingly powerful. It is like intense heat or cold: impossible to describe until you've felt it for yourself. I feel like there should be a TV camera on me, like I am a foolish meteorologist risking life and limb to deliver a report from the middle of a hurricane. But there are no cameras. There isn't even the sensation of wetness anymore. Everything else drops away until there is only the rush of adrenaline coursing through our veins and the understanding that for all our bravo, mother nature is able to knock us and anything we build swiftly and surely on its ass. 

 (Above: Bowen Falls when it's decidedly NOT in flood.)

 (Above: Paddling under 150-meter Stirling Falls as it empties into the ocean.)

Bleak News for Vermont's Rivers

     It took months for Vermont fisheries biologist Rich Kirn to fully assess the impact of Tropical Storm Irene on the state’s rivers. But on March 5, six months after one of the worst natural disasters in Vermont's history, Kirn presented his findings. 

    The Fish and Wildlife report Impacts to Stream Habitat and Wild Trout Populations in Vermont Following Tropical Storm Irene quantifies and confirms what many environmental groups and landowners had already feared: while the flooding itself wasn’t without ecological consequence, the most substantial damage came from the army of excavators and bulldozers that descended on Vermont's rivers in the wake of the flood.

     Some of the heavy machinery was necessary to protect life and property and to rebuild infrastructure. But “a significant amount of instream activity was also conducted without proper consultation and oversight and for reasons beyond necessary flood recovery,” Kirn wrote, causing habitat destruction that might affect wildlife for decades.

    Or, as the Vermont Natural Resources Council’s Kim Greenwood put it: “We really screwed up.”

    “People got in the rivers that didn’t understand the impacts of what they were doing,” Greenwood said. “Now that the immediacy of Irene has worn off a little bit in terms of public safety, we’re having to face the repercussions of what we did.”

     In the four state streams surveyed for the report, trout populations were reduced by 40 to 70 percent. Significant losses, to be sure, but nothing fish can’t recover from. Previous data showed that localized flooding in places like Lilliesville Brook in Stockbridge caused precipitous drops in population — from 6,000 trout per mile of stream to less than five hundred. But within a few years, populations rebounded. 

    That is, they rebounded in the absence of channelization, riprapping, dredging or gravel mining. All four streams that Kirn surveyed were free from such human disturbances, suggesting that in streams where the work occurred, the population loss was likely far greater — and will last much longer, he said.

    Showing a series of photos of streams from Bethel and Rochester, Kirn’s report explains that the excessive and sometimes unnecessary streambed alteration destroyed trout habitat, creating “homogeneous, overwidened stream channels … lacking the diversity of habitats, flows and depths necessary to support robust aquatic populations.”

     “The habitat has to recover before the fish populations can recover,” Kirn said in an interview.

     The Vermont Natural Resources Council and other groups raised an outcry over such practices in the months following Irene, saying that the work not only degraded habitat but also changed the velocity and direction of waterflow in many of Vermont rivers and streams, exacerbating the potential for future flooding and further endangering homes and communities. But up until now, it was difficult to quantify the extent of damage done.

    Kirn’s report does just that. He and other biologists worked with officials from the Agency of Natural Resources to conduct roadside assessment of stream degradation throughout the central and southern Vermont, and their findings are illuminating: approximately 85 miles of rivers were affected in central and southern Vermont alone — and the estimates are said to be conservative.

     “It was like trying to hit a moving target,” said fisheries biologist Kenneth Cox, of trying to assess the damage while excavators were still roaming the streams. “I would view these numbers as minimal estimates.”

    Approximately 406,000 feet, or 77 miles, of stream were found to have suffered major habitat degradation because of post-flood stream channel alteration. Major degradation is defined as streams that are “largely devoid of habitat.”

     An additional 8.6 miles of stream were found to have suffered minor degradation: effects were either localized or were limited to channelization. The White River was the most affected of any river in the region, with 27 miles of degradation recorded. The Ottauquechee also saw significant damage, with about 9 miles.

     The long-term impact on trout populations is still uncertain. In the absence of post-flood channel alterations, wildlife usually rebounds from a flood within two to four years. But in places where aquatic habitat was severely disrupted through large-scale gravel and wood removal and channel widening and straightening, full recovery could take decades.

     The repercussions are broad. Flood-related threats to houses and communities are exacerbated, and Vermont’s $63 million sportfishing industry may be at risk, Kirn notes. The ecological impact also extends beyond just fish to include amphibians, insects and the mammals and birds that feed on fish.

    “All of this habitat has been grossly altered, and its ability to support populations has declined,” Cox said.

     The reason that so much streambank alteration occurred without review or oversight was due in part to the unexpected nature and widespread devastation caused by Tropical Storm Irene. Normally, streambank alteration is strictly regulated by one of Vermont’s four river management engineers. But in the wake of Irene, the engineers were stretched thin, unable to get to the hundreds of sites across the state where streambank alteration was necessary to rebuild infrastructure, so the state enacted a two-month period in which “verbal permitting” — a discussion over the phone not requiring paperwork — was deemed sufficient.

     Not all instream work performed during that time went beyond verbal authorization, and much of it was indeed essential to the recovery effort. But river scientists and fisheries biologists agree that the situation was chaotic and could have been better managed.

     In the future, biologists like Cox would like to be included in the process. Efforts are currently underway to streamline Vermont’s response to emergency management work in rivers and better educate town officials and the public about how rivers function and what they need to function properly.

     (Namely, they want to meander and flood over time, as well as dissipate their force around bends and in wetlands. Eliminating any of these factors may lead to unpredictable, erratic flooding.)

     Finally, a bill that’s currently before the Vermont House of Representatives might include mandatory river science training for all contractors that operate in streambeds, Greenwood said.

      “Towns’ highway departments and state transportation agencies know how to reconstruct roads, but what they lack is the knowledge and experience in how to do that in a manner that will allow the stream to recover as quickly as possible,” Cox said. He emphasized that he doesn’t want to prevent future recovery work — just allow it to happen in a more sustainable manner.

     As to concerns that the re-channeling and degradation of rivers could exacerbate future flooding, Greenwood said that the lack of snowpack and relatively low spring flood risk means that Vermonters may have lucked out for the time being.

     But, she added, “we’re going to be dealing with these changes for years, maybe decades. We may have lucked out this spring, but we’re not out of the woods yet.”

The Battenkill several years prior to Irene.

"Living in the shadow of what we learned"

 

Mining Vermont's Rivers

By Krista Langlois
Valley News Staff Writer

Stockbridge, Vt. -- Paul Dougan could be forgiven if he had mixed emotions. As he stood on the back deck of his cabin on a recent frosty morning, a yellow excavator below rumbled over what was once one of Dougan's favorite fishing holes, attempting to repair the ravaged streambed of Lilliesville Brook.

After Tropical Storm Irene, 90 percent of Stockbridge's roads were washed out, forcing Dougan to walk five miles on his bad knees to get to Bethel from his remote cabin. If not for Stockbridge's decision to rebuild roads with gravel from Lilliesville Brook and other town waterways, Dougan and many of his neighbors could have been stranded much longer.

On the other hand, even Dougan -- a proponent of the once-common practice of removing built-up gravel from rivers -- agreed that the emergency work carried out in Lilliesville Brook went too far. By removing the river's natural gravel bank, Dougan said, the town further endangered the road it was trying to rebuild, as well as put Dougan's cabin at greater risk of future flooding.

“That was a mistake, taking all that gravel out,” he said, gesturing to a river that had grown from a narrow trout stream to a channel some 60 feet wide. “Now the brook wants to go down the street.”

Federal officials, state conservation groups and others agree. Lilliesville Brook has been identified as one of dozens of sites in the White River basin where excessive gravel removal after Tropical Storm Irene caused environmental damage and put riverbanks, homes and roadways at greater risk. And it was far from an isolated issue; similar damage happened across the state.

Normally, stream work in Vermont is highly regulated, overseen by one of five river management engineers employed by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

In the chaos following Irene, though, engineers were overwhelmed, unable to visit hundreds of sites where emergency river work was needed. So the state made an exception: instead of requiring written permits for streambed alteration, verbal permits were deemed sufficient. The policy was in effect from Sept. 3 to roughly Oct. 5.

What happened next is now the subject of intense debate.

“The state become lawless for several weeks,” said state Sen. Dick McCormack, D-Bethel, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee. “We had an emergency policy that was pretty much ‘Do what you have to do and we'll sort it out later.' ”

State regulators and town officials reject such broad-brush criticism, saying they did their best under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

In most cases, they say, the work was necessary for rebuilding and was done as authorized. But in other cases, they acknowledge that the gravel removal went too far.

At times, the verbal permitting process degenerated into a game of telephone: a river engineer told a town manager the extent of the work authorized, the town manager told the road commissioner and the road commissioner told the contractor. By the time the contractor told the person operating the excavator, the marching orders had inadvertently changed.

“It wasn't ill-intended,” said Mary Russ, executive director of the White River Partnership. “One guy says one thing and by the time they got back to these places, the verbal permit had been rendered in a different way than intended.”

“We had town road crew members, independent contractors, individual land owners, National Guardsmen, the Vermont Agency of Transportation and the Maine Agency of Transportation all jumping in to help out,” said Jim Ryan, a state watershed coordinator who was pressed into service as an additional river management engineer following Irene. “It was very convoluted, who was working for who and who was taking orders from who.”

But not all excessive gravel removal was accidental.

In some cases, town officials and private landowners seemed to have deliberately taken advantage of the chaotic situation to engage in the kind of gravel extraction that has been all but banned in the state since 1986. River scientists have long warned that “graveling” is damaging to a river's stability and leads to future flood damage, but many Vermonters still believe that digging a river channel deeper actually decreases flood risk -- and that it's their right to do so.

“There's a cultural issue here,” McCormack said. “People who have lived on the river all their lives think that we ought to be removing more gravel with less regulation. Since the flood, people have been able to extract gravel more freely than before, and the attitude among many people was that ‘It's about time.' ”

After the initial shock of Irene wore off, environmentalists began to speak out about the army of excavators they'd witnessed in Vermont waterways. In many places, they said, recovery work did more harm than good.

“Some of the work went too far beyond what was … really necessary,” said Kim Greenwood, Water Program Coordinator at the nonprofit Vermont Natural Resources Council.

“I expect to see the repercussions not only of Irene but of our responses this spring, and for many years to come. I think we'll see rivers move and unfortunately more property loss this spring as a result.”

***

It's difficult to pinpoint all instances of unauthorized gravel removal or stream alteration in the weeks following Irene. Ryan, who issued verbal in the White River basin, said that in approximately one-quarter of the 60 or so sites he visited after Irene, the work went beyond the authorized plan. He also witnessed work being done without any authorization at all.

“I shut down dozens of operators in the river operating without a permit,” Ryan said.

For sites where a town or state agency could be held accountable, restoration work has been planned or has already been completed to mitigate the risk.

In cases where private landowners re-channeled or dug out rivers before Ryan was able to get to the site, though, establishing accountability hasn't been possible -- and therefore, neither has ordering restoration work to protect downstream residents.

River engineer Todd Menees, who covers the Springfield to Rutland area (including the Ottauquechee River watershed), said he witnessed fewer problem sites, putting the figure at about 5 percent in his region. Menees provided records of 36 site visits he conducted, but would not disclose in which instances the work went beyond his verbal authorizations, saying that he didn't want to damage his relationships with the town officials who are his partners in restoration work.

Menees said it was frustrating to be on the receiving end of complaints of graveling gone awry, and that critics fail to comprehend the complex challenge of local and state officials faced with massive roadway damage and scant resources to repair it.

“It's cost some of these towns two, three million dollars. If (gravel) got washed off the road into the river, you go downstream and you get it. People don't understand that, but the hard reality is, we couldn't pay for our road maintenance even before the flood.”

The state's environmental enforcement office received complaints citing roughly 40 sites across Vermont where citizens, river engineers or environmental groups were concerned that gravel mining or river alteration caused unnecessary damage, according to state Compliance and Enforcement Director Gary Kessler.

Environmental enforcement officers investigated a total of 55 sites (including some they happened upon while investigating other reports), but no legal action was taken: in every instance, town officials or individual landowners ceased the unauthorized work when asked to and, in some cases, agreed to take on extra work to try to relieve the damage they caused.

Examining the public record of the sites visited by enforcement officers reveals little about whether the site visit found unregulated or excessive river work, or permitted work within the boundaries of the law.

A collaboration of environmental groups who have taken to calling themselves “the Graveling Guild” is trying to compile a list of places where they say excessive gravel removal occurred, but Louis Porter of the Conservation Law Foundation said that doing so has proved nearly impossible due to a lack of documentation.

Everyone seems to agree that the situation leaves room for improvement.

“We need to have in place a clearer system of what the requirements are (for streambank alteration after a flood),” DEC Commissioner David Mears said in a telephone interview. “Something more than just verbal approvals that would allow critical construction to happen but at the same time assuring that the work is done in accordance with a core set of standards and a way to hold people accountable.”

Still, Mears said, given the magnitude of damage wrought by Tropical Storm Irene, issuing verbal permits was critical. Even with Ryan added to the crew of five river management engineers, there was no way each engineer could personally supervise all the work being done in Vermont's 23,000 miles of streams.

“I don't know that we could've approached it any different than we did in retrospect,” Mears said.

Added Menees, the river engineer: “People have a right to rebuild their lives.”

Mike Kline, manager of the Vermont Rivers Program, suggested that going forward, Vermont could spearhead a national network of river engineers that would respond to a disaster in much the same way that smoke jumpers and firefighters respond to a wildfire. But given the continuing work of trying to clean up after Irene, such an effort seems far down the priority list.

***

Now that the days of verbal permitting are past, the state is shifting into recovery mode, bringing even more heavy machinery into streambeds to try to reverse some of the damage caused by post-Irene recovery efforts.

At least nine locations in the White River basin (comprised of dozens of individual stream sections) have been targeted for restoration work, including the section of Lilliesville Brook just upstream from Paul Dougan's cabin.

While Dougan watched from his deck several weeks ago, Greg Russ, a project manager at the White River Partnership (and Mary's husband), directed as excavator Ricky Andrews built the last of three rudimentary stone structures, or weirs, meant to redirect the flow of water away from the newly rebuilt road -- and away from Dougan's house.

Andrews, who was hired by the town to perform the original emergency work in the brook, was also using his Caterpillar to drop boulders and woody debris into the brook in an attempt to recreate fish habitat.

“In here, they took out way too much material,” Russ said, pointing, as Andrews swung his machine's giant claw over the brook, picking up boulders as if they were marbles and dropping them in the frosty water.

Stockbridge Road Commissioner David Brown said that after Irene, he did not seek authorization for in-stream work in Lilliesville Brook or elsewhere, operating instead under the assumption that he was covered by a state exemption that emergency measures necessary to preserve life or to prevent severe damage to property are allowed.

At each site, Brown said, excavators took out only the material necessary to rebuild the road -- but unfortunately, that was a lot of material.

Though Stockbridge was one of the towns in the region where graveling was most prevalent after the flooding, Ryan pointed out that it was largely done out of necessity -- with 90 percent of roads washed out, rebuilding them was a priority, and in most cases, material couldn't be trucked in.

In other instances, though -- including in a section of Lilliesville Brook farther upstream from Dougan's home -- private landowners dredged significant amounts of gravel, straightened the stream channel and had machinery out of the river before Ryan could get on-site.

“We have some accountability where the town did (the work) or if a landowner hired a contractor, but if … they did the work right after the flood and the machines were gone before the state got there, we don't have much recourse or enforcement,” he said.

“Above Paul Dougan's to the Bethel (town) line, I can think of three or four sites that were dredged by the private landowners that we can't fix or don’t have any resources to fix.”

Ryan noted other similar cases on Locust Creek in Barnard and Bethel and on the Tweed River in Pittsfield.

***

Lilliesville Brook provides a fairly obvious example of how the elimination of a gravel bank could cause what was once a narrow, deep trout stream to become shallow and braided, encroaching upon the roadway and nearby housing. In most cases, though, understanding river science is less intuitive.

“This issue is highly technical and one of the problems is that few people, including myself, fully understand the technicalities,” said McCormack. “If the state wishes to continue to regulate as heavily as it does, we have to do a better job of educating people.”

Some of McCormack's constituents -- including Paul Dougan -- believe that the now-illegal graveling practices of the mid-1900s not only helped towns save money on building materials but also helped rivers maintain their equilibrium. Therefore, they reason, the gravel extraction should resume.

“You've got to keep 'em clean,” Dougan said, of rivers, “and you've got to dig ’em out deeper.”

Dougan said that regular removal of gravel build-up in front of his house once created deep pools for brook trout and made the stream channel deeper, thus creating more space for water and preventing the stream from overflowing its banks. He's seen it firsthand: since graveling ceased in the 1980s, he said, floods have gotten worse, and brook trout have disappeared from Lilliesville Brook.

(Indeed, the Vermont DEC website confirms that an “unprecedented” frequency of flooding has hit the state since 1984.)

But river scientists say that while Dougan's observations make sense on a gut level, science has proven that graveling disrupts a stream's natural stability, making it more, not less, prone to flooding.

The Vermont DEC website states that “contrary to professional judgment and public opinion, extensive mining contributed directly to the destabilization of river channels and increased bank erosion and flood related property damage.”

Even before Irene, 75 percent of streams and rivers in Vermont were deemed unstable due to centuries of human intervention, said Greenwood of the Natural Resources Council. Part of the reason that damage from Irene was so extreme in the White River basin is that graveling in the 1970s and '80s began an “unraveling” process that made the recent flooding worse than it would have been, Greenwood said.

So why does making a river deeper actually contribute to flood damage?

Mary Russ explains it this way: “Think of a river as a conveyor belt,” she said. “They don't just move water, they move sediment.”

The water and the sediment always want to be in balance. While clear water is good for fish and other wildlife, even clear, fast-flowing water must be mixed with a certain amount of fine sediment. When gravel is removed from a river or backs up behind undersized bridges and culverts, the water downstream is out of balance and becomes “sediment starved.”

“It's hungry water,” Russ said. And hungry water is dangerous water: It picks up all the sediment it can get. If there isn't enough on a riverbed, it starts grabbing soil from the banks. Digging out a riverbed to make it deeper also increases the velocity of water flowing through, altering the speed and direction of water as it hits banks downstream.

“You may be protecting your property and your community,” Mears said. “But by digging out the banks, what you're doing is just moving the problem downstream to the next community.”

Other human intervention further destabilizes rivers. Armoring banks with riprap or re-channeling waterways prevent rivers from naturally flooding their banks and meandering across river corridors. It can also prevent rivers from dissipating their force in wetlands or by curving around bends.

“A stream is governed by the laws of physics,” Greg Russ said. “You can't fight it.”

***

Nonetheless, scientific advances don't always mesh with local beliefs. While towns have been responsive to requests that they repair damages done to waterways after Irene, convincing cash-strapped local officials of the need to spend money on restoring river health remains a challenge.

But Mears emphasized that what's good for rivers is often also good for the people who live near them. Spending a bit more now could likely save towns money in the future.

“The idea of recovery and restoring and rebuilding after the flood is entirely consistent with protecting our rivers,” Mears said.

“The two things go hand in glove. … Every time we rebuild in the same way in the same place without thinking about what the rivers have to do is just wasting money. It's just going to be washed away in the next flood event.”

Culverts and bridges are one example where river health correlates directly to human benefit.

The Russ' of the White River Partnership said in the aftermath of Irene, some sections of road were blown out by undersized culverts, while just a few hundred yards upstream, properly sized culverts left roads intact. Along Davis Hill Brook in Stockbridge, for example, too-small culverts became clogged with gravel and debris and no longer allowed the passage of water, destroying 1,000 feet of road.

  Well-designed bridges and culverts that accommodate sediment are also good for fish passage. The White River Partnership received a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to work with towns and landowners to rebuild flood-damaged bridges and culverts in accordance with newer standards, including those on Davis Hill Brook. Mary Russ said the response from towns wanting free culverts has been “tremendous.”

Wherever they can, river engineers and conservation groups are also trying to move roads as far from waterways as possible. But while moving infrastructure is the only surefire way to prevent future damage, it's often a tough sell.

“Where else would I go?” asked Paul Dougan, when asked if he would consider moving away from Lilliesville Brook. It's an issue that river program coordinator Kline deals with on a daily basis.

“I say we manage rivers,” he said. “But we really manage conflict. The conflict between human investments and the dynamics of rivers is really at the heart of our work.”

 Dougan said that had he known what the future held when he built his cabin back in 1968, he would have surely chosen a different location. Those who study rivers hope other Vermonters considering new development will think similarly.

Towns can plan for the future by adopting updated floodplain maps and exercising more regulatory control over where new development springs up, Mary Russ said.

While towns were reluctant to have such discussions before Irene, one silver lining of the storm has been that officials and residents are now more willing to discuss flood-related planning.

Building in wetlands, for example, may exacerbate flooding downstream, because wetlands absorb floodwaters, dissipating a river's force.
Another step is for landowners to take part in river corridor easement programs. Organizations like the Vermont River Conservancy have been working to purchase land along streambeds from private landowners to conserve it from future development.

Native vegetation is planted along stream banks, and the land can still be used for agriculture -- but no permanent structures or roads may be built, allowing the rivers to run their natural course and dissipate their force

A similar program to help homeowners affected by flooding is available through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, FEMA pays homeowners approximately 75 percent of their home's value to rebuild outside of the floodplain.

The Vermont River Conservancy is working with qualifying homeowners -- including four on Route 14 in Sharon -- to come up with the additional 25 percent.

If all goes as planned, at least a handful of vulnerable structures will no longer be in harm's way, and the river there will be allowed to flood and ebb as it had done for centuries. Elsewhere, though, the balance between river stability and human development is still precarious.

As Vermont looks toward a future made ever more uncertain by a changing climate, many hope that the state can move forward from past mistakes -- both those from a century ago, and those from last month.

“We're kind of living in the shadow of what we learned,” Greenwood said.

“We're still learning. You're really making your best guess about what the river needs, but in the end, the river always decides what it needs.”

 "Look, honey, bank erosion!"

The saga of Irene continues. In the aftermath, questions arise. A story on the effects of dams on the Connecticut River and its tributaries, reprinted with permission.

Wilder -- The mighty Connecticut River might seem to operate with a force all its own -- rising in the spring, falling in the summer, naturally carving its serpentine path through fields and forest. But this behemoth in the Upper Valley's backyard is in fact a highly regulated, carefully monitored mechanism, manipulated over centuries to suit human needs and bent to human will.

Most days, the river chugs along to the Atlantic without fanfare, powering businesses and providing recreational and agricultural opportunities. But when rising waters push the limits of human control -- as happened Aug. 28 and 29 during Tropical Storm Irene -- how does the great machine function? Do the dams built over the decades protect people living and working near the river, or is it foolish to imagine that the great river can be controlled?

Those who have studied the river's rise and fall concede that the answer might be a little bit of both.

When the Connecticut and its tributaries rise dramatically, as they did during the onslaught of Irene, expertise, manpower and reams of data are called upon in an effort to get the river to run smoothly.

But the owners of the homes and businesses swamped by the chaotic rush of floodwaters in West Lebanon and White River Junction could argue that the Connecticut ran anything but smoothly last month. And some have questioned whether water released from the Wilder Dam played a role in their damaged property and lost livelihoods.

The answer to that seems to be an unequivocal no.

Experts across the board agree that, love 'em or hate 'em, the dams did what they were designed to do and, in some cases, prevented millions of dollars worth of damage.

“None of the flood flows could be attributed to the dams,” said David Deen, the Twin States' river steward for the Connecticut River Watershed Council, responding to suspicions that releases from the Wilder Dam caused flooding along the Route 12A commercial strip.

Cleve Kapala, who has worked for hydroelectric company TransCanada and its local predecessors for nearly 30 years, said that dam operation and flood control on the Connecticut went exactly as planned.

Indeed, flood-control dams helped mitigate flooding, he said, and hydroelectric dams, such as the one in Wilder, played a minimal role in fluctuating river levels.

“There wasn't any damage as a result of our operations,” said Kapala, TransCanada's director of government affairs and relicensing. “We have high-water operating procedures that kicked in. The facilities operated as they were expected to.”

‘Let the Flood Flow Through'

In the post-industrial era, the Connecticut River no longer powers mills and carries logs the way it once did. Nonetheless, 13 hydroelectric dams owned by TransCanada provide 567 megawatts of power to regional businesses, and additional private dams dot the length of the 410-mile waterway.

In Wilder, a dam was first built in 1882, at the former site of the 40-foot-tall Olcott Falls. The current dam, built in 1950, was constructed three-quarters of a mile downstream, flooding the site of the waterfall and previous dam and creating an “impoundment,” like a giant pond, behind it.

Under normal operating conditions, the Wilder Dam raises and lowers water levels by approximately two feet as it holds water back and releases it to generate electricity. About 42 megawatts of power for the New England grid -- enough to power roughly 7,500 homes -- come from the dam. Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center are both major consumers, Kapala said

Because it was built as a hydroelectric dam, the Wilder facility lacks the ability to store much water and thus plays a minor role in flood control. The Wilder Dam can hold back about 4 billion gallons of water -- enough to act as a sort of speed bump to check the Connecticut's raging waters, but not enough to offer the sort of flood protection that larger facilities, like the Union Village Dam in Thetford, can.

“Hydro dams do not store water,” Deen said. “They have to just let the flood flow through. Believe me, you don't want those dams storing water. If they did, and there was a catastrophic failure, you've got much bigger problems.”

Dan Grossman, a local historian and blogger from Thetford, writes that a hydroelectric dam like the one in Wilder has a huge impact when it's first built -- stumps from flooded fields and woods can still be seen when the water is low. But after the initial shock, Grossman said, hydro dams have little effect. They “neither mitigate nor exacerbate flooding.”

The Wilder Dam was designed to handle flows of 162,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) -- the size of the infamous 1927 flood against which most other high-water events in the region are measured. Irene's waters, though dramatic, came nowhere near that. The dam's release peaked at 27,623 cfs, while the flow of the Connecticut River below the dam -- after the White River poured into it with floodwaters that had already scoured West Hartford and other communities upstream -- reached flows of 104,000 cfs.

On Aug. 25, several days before Irene's arrival, TransCanada had begun incrementally releasing water from Wilder and other dams so that the Connecticut would be as low as possible before the storm hit, Kapala said.

Cat Buxton, education coordinator at Cedar Circle Farm upriver in Thetford, credited the release with helping save farmland in Thetford and surrounding areas. “We were comparably unscathed because someone was bright enough to release the dam the day before,” she said. “Even the night of the storm, the water didn't even come close to the riverbank.”

Prior to Irene, TransCanada employees also opened the company's emergency operations center at North Walpole, N.H., for the first time in 2011. During high-water events, the logistical center employs between six and 14 people working around the clock to monitor precipitation and water levels and coordinate dam operations along the Connecticut.

By Saturday, Aug. 27, TransCanada had drained as much water as possible from behind the Wilder Dam. The rain started that night. By about noon on Sunday, enough rain had already fallen that the dam's 4 billion gallon impoundment was full, and operators were forced to open the gates partially to allow excess water to spill through.

By 3 p.m. Sunday, the dam was essentially just passing the floodwaters downstream, experts said, though it was still holding back the 4 billion gallons it had already stored.

The dam's output reached its highest flow at noon on Monday, Aug. 29, after floodwaters had already inundated the Route 12A commercial strip. Dartmouth flood ecology expert Frank Magilligan -- along with Kapala, Deen and several other experts -- all agree that the vast majority of flooding along Route 12A in West Lebanon was caused by the raging, uncontrolled waters of the White River.

“When the White River does its thing, there's nothing that can be done,” said Ken Alton, a Strafford resident with a 40-year history of working with area dams. “No controls, no flood control, no dams or anything. It's going to do its thing and it’s going to do an unbelievable thing.”

Flood-Control Dams Prepare for Irene

In addition to the 13 hydroelectric dams, the Connecticut River and its tributaries host 16 dams specifically designed for flood control. Two -- the Comerford Dam at 15 Mile Falls in Monroe, N.H., and the Moore Dam in Littleton, N.H., -- are owned by TransCanada. Neither was filled to capacity during Irene, though the water storage they provided in the northern stretches of the Connecticut helped mitigate flooding as far downstream as Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Local flood-control dams -- including those at Union Village, on the Ompompanoosuc River, and at North Hartland, on the Ottauquechee -- are operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Under normal operating conditions, each stores only about 5 percent of its total capacity, just enough to create a small reservoir for recreation.

As with the hydro dams, operators of flood-control dams began preparing for Irene well in advance. Mike Curran, the Corps' operations manager for the upper Connecticut River basin, said all reservoirs were lowered to or below normal levels by the weekend of Aug. 28.

“We knew we were going to get a big storm,” he said. “A couple hours after it started raining we shut down to our minimum release at all our reserves and kept shut down until the situation stabilized.”

The total capacity at the 1,100-foot-long Union Village Dam is 12.3 billion gallons. During Irene, the water behind the dam reached a depth of about 90 feet, or 27 percent of its capacity. The Corps estimates that more than $15 million of property damage in Thetford, Norwich and beyond was prevented by flood control at Union Village Dam.

At the 1,640-foot North Hartland Dam, a 1,100 acre lake is capable of holding 23.2 billion gallons of water.

But though Irene dropped between 6 and 11 inches in the Connecticut River drainage area -- approaching a once-in-500-years event, the Corps reported -- the North Hartland reservoir peaked at just 61 percent of its capacity, or 126 feet. Officials said the dam prevented $38 million in damages.

Army Corps of Engineers officials estimate that the 14-plus flood-control projects in the Connecticut River basin, built with federal money, prevented $540 million in property damage in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut from Tropical Storm Irene.

The Corps' also estimates that in some places, the Connecticut River could have risen as much as 10 feet higher without upstream flood-control dams.

While both the rains and the floods were historic, some dams saw far less water than in 1974, when a big snowpack coupled with back-to-back springtime rainstorms caused the dams at Union Village and North Hartland to reach 100 percent capacity, Curran said, spilling over walls that stand nearly 200 feet high.

To prevent that from happening again -- and to avoid the potentially catastrophic results -- hydraulic engineer Greg Hanlon, of Lyme, said the Corps began releasing water from its dams on Monday, Aug. 29, after Irene's rains had ceased and the “downstream channel capacity” was well below flood level.

At that point, the Corps began releasing some of the water that had been stored behind the dams, to make room for the water that was continuing to flow from upstream. It continued releasing on Tuesday, after water levels began to further decrease.

‘We Can't Completely Protect Ourselves'

The problem with flood-control dams, Dartmouth's Magilligan said, is that they breed a false sense of security. Some people believe that, with the Connecticut River so thoroughly dammed, roads and buildings can be constructed with little concern about floods.

“Places that had dams still got hammered,” he said. “You can't dam the entire watershed.”

Magilligan, who studies municipal policies related to flooding, noted that planning for natural disasters is challenging because greater protection comes at a higher social and economic cost. That's particularly true on Route 12A, where PetSmart, for example, successfully sued the city of Lebanon several years ago to avoid having to build in accordance with a flood prevention ordinance that would have required a more elevated -- and more expensive -- structure.

PetSmart never built its store, but Jeff Goodrich, a civil engineer based in Lebanon, said if it had, the building surely would have been inundated by Irene. He added that retail stores built after 1980 that complied with the ordinance, such as Shaw's and The Home Depot, remained dry.

Nonetheless, Magilligan said, “we're not living in a risk-free world. When it comes to natural events, we can't completely protect ourselves.”

Deen, the river steward, noted that much of the damage inflicted by the White and the Connecticut rivers during Irene hit structures that had been built in the flood plain after the 1927 flood, including the Route 12A commercial strip.

“We've known for a long time that you shouldn't build in flood plains,” he said. “And we continue to build in flood plains. Not in the 100-year flood plain, maybe, but guess what? We build in the 500-year flood plain and that's what we ran into.”

Several of the experts interviewed for this report noted that in New England at least, the heyday of dam-building is past. Public opinion has largely turned against dams, they say, and it seems unlikely that future dams will be built. TransCanada's hydroelectric dams are all up for review in 2018, and stringent environmental reviews will accompany the relicensing process, Deen said, possibly leading to changes in the way the dams are operated.

In the meantime, though, the Twin States are rebuilding.

Deen, who has been watching the Connecticut River for 40 years, worries that some of the projects -- rebuilding in the flood plain, trying to continue manipulating the river's natural channels -- will ultimately place the region again in harm's way.

“It's really frustrating,” Deen said. “Right now, we're watching the work going on in rivers in terms of putting the river back exactly where it was, putting in bigger berms and riprap, and it's not going to work.”

The Connecticut, Deen said, has clearly shown that it can't be completely controlled.

I've been doing very little personal writing lately. It comes in spurts, I guess, and right now I'm in a spurt of exercising rather than writing. Barefoot running and hot yoga will, I'm sure, inspire some good words in the future. Today my bikram yoga instructor said, "Your thoughts become your reality. Think carefully."

I'm so grateful that the Valley News has given me so many opportunities to write about rivers. Here's another. Reprinted, as always, with permission, and not to be reproduced or distributed. Photos, also as always, are my own, and are from the Rockies, not the Appalachians, where I also got to shock the hell out of some finned creatures.

Originally published July 20.

Etna -- A cloud of bug spray hung thick in the air as a group of volunteers pulled on waders and rubber gloves on a quiet roadside above Mink Brook last week.
   "This is exciting!" said 10-year-old Oliver Morgan, scrambling down the steep bank. "I can't wait to zap fish!"
   The group of six Hanover and Etna residents had gathered for the first of a three-day project helping state fisheries biologists collect data on brook trout populations in Mink Brook, part of a statewide research project to assess -- as a prelude to protecting -- wild "brookies" in watersheds across New Hampshire.
   "There's a lot of uses for this data," said fisheries biologist Matt Carpenter, who gets to spend much of his summer splashing around coldwater streams. "Data gives you the power to make policies: prioritizing areas for protection, ... protecting what's good and intact, and restoring what can be improved."
   Though it was a hot, muggy afternoon, the air was cool and inviting down in the shady gulch, and everyone seemed glad to be working outside. Another fisheries biologist, Ben Nugent, stood in the water with an intriguing device strapped to his back: an electroshocker, used to send a low-voltage electric shock into the water to temporarily stun fish so they can be collected and counted.
   "Everyone helping needs to wear rubber gloves," Nugent instructed the three young boys watching him eagerly. "OK, now ... get your nets ready. It's like basketball or lacrosse -- you can't make a play unless your net's in place."
   Positioning themselves downstream of Nugent, Oliver, 10-year-old Spencer Brown and 14-year-old Ethan Winter stood ready with their long-handled nets in place. With a beeeep-beep-beep-beep that sounded like a metal detector, Nugent lowered a metal rod into the stream and zapped the water. Immediately, the boys lunged forward, trying to scoop up the slippery silver shapes that floated to the surface.
   "They're all over the place," marveled volunteer Chip Brown, of Hanover. "Look at all those fish!"
   Calls of "got one!" and "zap it again, zap it again!" rang out as the team made their way upstream. The boys' fathers, Brown and fellow fishophile Chan Morgan, sloshed behind with five-gallon buckets into which the boys dropped squirming fish one by one. By the end, 100 meters upstream, the buckets were full of small, flopping fish, and the results were ready to be tallied.
   Sawyer Brown, Spencer's 7-year-old brother, crouched on the bank next to Carpenter. Together, the two measured and weighed each fish, while Nugent recorded their findings along with habitat information such as stream temperature, width and GPS location.
   Nugent explained that data from watersheds such as Mink Brook will be used alongside Geographic Information System (GIS) maps showing population density, agricultural development and other land uses to eventually determine "threshold points" -- at what point, for example, a watershed becomes too developed or too dirty to support brook trout.
   New Hampshire's effort to sustain and improve native trout populations is part of the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, a Maine-to-Georgia initiative organized by Trout Unlimited. Brook trout are a good indicator of water quality, anglers value them and they're essential to healthy, functioning aquatic ecosystems.
   But brookies are under duress. Results from the studies so far show that intact brook trout populations exist in only 5 percent of streams where they once thrived, and they no longer exist at all in most large rivers. Maine has the majority of the "intact" populations, while Vermont and New Hampshire each contain fragmented, but self-sustaining, populations.
   "These streams are still recovering from a century of agriculture and industry," said Brown, a Trout Unlimited member and lifelong fisherman who helped lead the push to get Mink Brook included in New Hampshire's research efforts. "The trees didn't get big enough to fall, so large woody debris was really lacking," he added, referring to conditions that create the shadowy pools favored by trout.
   Though some brook trout populations have rebounded as the state has been reforested, challenges such as sediment run-off, urban development, dams and culverts continue to threaten the species' full recovery. Additionally, said Nugent, biologists have thus far lacked the data needed to thoroughly evaluate populations.
   The need for more data was one of the reasons that Chip Brown, when he learned of the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, contacted the state wildlife department to find out if Hanover's largest stream could be included in the research.
   The other reason, though, was to give local students the chance to take part. In all, more than 20 people volunteered over the course of the project, including a dozen Hanover students from second to ninth grade.
   "We don't usually get this much interest from volunteers," said Nugent. "This is really helpful."
   "Part of the reason I love seeing these guys down here," said Brown, referring to his sons and the other student volunteers, "is that I got into fishing as a kid. It's fun to go to a stream and pick up a rock and just find stuff.
   "The high schools have been actively involved in bringing kids to local streams and getting them excited about stream biology, and this is just an extension of that," he added.
   At the end of the day, the students were happily exhausted from chasing trout, skipping rocks and dashing after frogs. And the adults were pleased that Mink Brook appeared to be a thriving watershed. After three days of electroshocking at 16 different sites along Mink Brook and its tributaries, the study yielded 213 specimens of wild brook trout (all of which were released), caddis fly larvae and 54 wild Atlantic salmon fry (which may have been introduced to the brook in an effort to reintroduce that species).
   "It seems like it's in good health," Brown said of the brook, "and we'd love to keep it in good health."
   Adair Mulligan, executive director for the Hanover Conservation Council and another driving force behind the Mink Brook project, said education is another key component of keeping brook trout populations on the incline.
   "Two things that residents can do for the fish community are to plant a riparian buffer zone -- vegetation for shade along stream banks -- and create rain gardens -- depressions with native plants that can collect and filter run-off rather than having it go straight to the stream," she said.
   "This is remarkable to have so many state biologists on our watershed," Mulligan added. "The Hanover Conservation Council is excited because (Mink Brook) is our highest priority."