Firewood in Abundance

 

         I went to Bull Shoals Lake last week and you can see the effects of the drought there, as it is lower than I have ever seen it.   The Ozarks of both Missouri and Arkansas need inches of rain badly to fill our lakes and rivers to a level they all need to be.  The Buffalo River is so low that only the lower portion is full enough to float.  On upper sections, nearly three quarters of the river, there are shoals so shallow canoes can’t pass through or over without dragging.  That doesn’t bode well for all the canoe companies there.  Spring rains may fix that but my feeling is that we won’t get the kind of rains in the spring to raise lakes like Bull Shoals or Truman or Norfork.   

         Speaking of Norfork, my spring magazine carries a story by Robert Page Lincoln which was published in 1952 in an outdoor magazine. It is all about the new Norfork Lake, in which he expounds on its wonders as a fishing lake and one which is different than any others as it won’t fill in with silt as all others seem to be doing at that time in the Midwest. Lincoln didn’t like reservoirs because of many factors; chief among them is the fact that they destroyed free-flowing streams.

         When I was a boy there was talk of damming the Big Piney River where I grew up, but the problem seemed to be the hundreds of caves along the river, which would drain any impoundments there.  Right now, the up-river sections of the Piney are so low, even in the spring, that where my dad and I once floated in wooden johnboats, you can’t get down the stream in a kayak.  It is little more than a creek now in the area north of Cabool.  I think the Missouri Department of Conservation could use some of its millions to place a dam there on those headwaters, which could create a 2- or 3- hundred acre lake which would not hurt the stream at all and provide some good fishing for the folks in Cabool, Willow Springs and Mountain Grove.  That portion of the Piney is ruined for good, with not enough water for anything but green sunfish and punkinseeds.           

            Landowners have removed most of the trees, and in places where I remember deep holes with rock bass and smallmouth, there is little more than shallow, gravel-filled little eddies where even crayfish are few.  I would give anything to see a conservation-oriented group get behind the idea of a small dam there.  It wouldn’t put much of a dent in the MDC budget to create a dam, which would have no affect on the lower river.  Most of the upper third of the river that I know like the back of my hand is something of a skeleton of what I remember from the fifties and sixties.

         Down in Arkansas on the watershed of the White River, in a stretch of highway between Mountain View and Calico Rock, there is an ugly scar where a fire has destroyed several hundred acres of National Forestland.  Enough standing dead timber there would fill the stoves and fireplaces of thousands of Ozark homes if the National Forest Service would get behind a project to allow woodcutters from all over the Ozarks to come in and cut trailer loads of the dead oak and hickory and pine trees that will soon fall and rot. Right now it is illegal to go into that blighted area and cut firewood.  

         We are a nation of great waste and it tells you a lot about the Forest Service, willing to see so much wood going to waste when it would be so simple to build a road or two into the dead areas and invite woodcutters to have at it.  I believe some would come a long way and there is thousands of truck and trailer loads of good firewood there to be harvested and used.  But we are a wasteful nation, and government agencies like the Forest Service and even the National Park Service, that I once worked for, are bound up in regulations that prevent common sense approaches and solutions inside their boundaries.  But anyway, there is enough wood there in that burned wasteland to make a woodcutter rich. Maybe if someone were to contact the Forest Service there could be a way by filling out the right forms, to go in and cut some of it.

 

Don’t forget that I write columns each week for my websites.  See larrydablemontoutdoors and larrydablemont.com. My email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com.

My magazine, The Lightnin’ Ridge Journal, spring issue, will come out in late March. If you want to get a copy you should email me or call my office at 417 -777-5227 for details in getting a copy. The cost is $8.50.