I’ve been fascinated by rivers much of my life, by the very nature of rivers and streams, their geology and hydrology, the history of their human interactions, and my personal experiences with them.  As an adolescent, I lived across the street from the Fox River in Geneva, Illinois.  The Fox flows south from its upland headwaters in southern Wisconsin to the Illinois River near Ottawa, 50 miles south of Geneva, and ultimately into the Mississippi.  The present-day Fox valley is the result of late glacial melting 8,000 years ago.  Meltwater torrents rushed into the ancestral Mississippi River drainage as continental glaciers retreated northward into Canada.

My brother and I fished during the summer and ice skated when cold temperatures froze the river above the Geneva dam just south of our house.  The Fox River was a natural wildlife corridor.  Reptiles, amphibians, opossums, foxes, and a gaggle of aquatic birds inhabited the neighborhood.  Ducks wandered into our yard searching for food scraps scattered by our mother, braving traffic on Bennett Street.  The Fox formed a long narrow lake above the dam.  The river would be a fraction of its current width if the dams along its course were removed, but public outcry, especially from people with property along the shore, would prevent that from happening.  I often imagine what the river and its local ecosystem might have been like before Euro Americans first moved into the region in the 1830s.

The river was horribly polluted in the 1950s and early 1960s, but we fished anyway.  We never ate our catch but doubled our allowance by selling fish to anglers from Chicago, folks who drove to Geneva on the weekends for a cheap break from inner city life.  The river was also a geologic pathway providing me with exotic pebbles and cobbles shoved or flushed downstream by advancing and retreating glaciers.

We were bait fishermen back then. We attacked our prey with night crawlers, minnows, grasshoppers, and dough balls.  We harvested catfish, bullheads, carp, and an occasional bluegill.  Rumors occasionally spread of phantom fishermen catching legitimate sport fish, like northern pike and bass, but I never believed those tales.  I had my own secret recipe for doughballs, a concoction requiring a smidgeon of my father’s Four Roses bourbon.  The backyard compost heap was a prolific nightcrawler source, and we assembled our own set lines, a fishing technique where multiple hooks are attached to a long line, anchored at one end, and floated at the other with a prominent buoy.  This was an ideal technique to snag bullheads and catfish that wandered up the water column for a meal.  Our neighbor, Larry, even found an abandoned rowboat nearby that we used to float our lines, some with 20 or more hooks.  The next morning’s visit usually produced a bevy of lunkers.

Our father took us to Fox Lake near the Wisconsin border a few times where the water was considerably cleaner.  We (mostly he) caught bluegills and crappies on artificial lures.  A spring-fed trout farm west of Geneva was also a rare treat.  We’d show up with our fly rods ready for action, hoping for a few hours of angling excitement.  Unfortunately, the pond was so thickly populated with rainbows, we usually caught one on the first cast.  We’d continually release them until we were just about ready to leave.  Then, on the final casts, we’d keep the unfortunates and haul them home.  Between visits to the trout farm we tied our own artificial flies and debated which insects to replicate.  My home-made arthropods never seemed to resemble anything from the real world. 

During winter months, we anxiously waited for the river to freeze.  My brother and I had ice skates and played hockey with neighborhood friends.  I was actually a pretty good skater.  We bundled up and headed down to the river, either skating for fun or playing hockey.  We were careful to steer clear of the dam and the thin ice patches near small tributary creeks.  When the fishing bug infected us, we’d chip a hole in the ice and drop a line.

By junior high school, I had already made up my mind to become a geologist.  I read everything in the Geneva Public Library on the earth science shelf, books about rocks and minerals, mountains, and especially rivers and lakes, about their origins and geologic history.  I learned that the modern Fox River valley is a geologically recent feature.  Ten thousand years ago, the ancestral Fox followed a southward path about 10 miles west of its current location, a cascade choked with glacially-sourced sand and gravel.  Using topographic maps, I traced the modern Fox into southern Wisconsin to its headwaters in an upland area west of Waukesha.  I read about major rivers around the world, their classification, and histories.

As a geology major at South Dakota School of Mines, I became fascinated with geomorphology, the study of landforms, especially where rivers played a role in the evolution of landscapes.  Since I grew up in post-glacial Illinois, I devoured books and papers about rivers in glacial meltwater landscapes.  I learned about glacio-fluvial systems in the geologic record, outwash planes, kames, eskers, and deranged rivers, an apt term for drainage basins with a disordered arrangement due to recent glacial advance and retreat. 

I also studied the importance of rivers in American and World history.  Throughout the flow of history, rivers played an important role in transportation, trade, food and water, and migration.  They are associated with disasters from flooding by inundating low lying areas.  I read about great rivers of the world, the Nile, Yangtze, Mississippi, Amazon, and others, about their affect on early human civilization and the industrial revolution.  I devoured Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn while listening to Down by the River. 

My interest in rivers continued in graduate school.  One of my favorite courses at Syracuse University in the early 1970s was geomorphology taught by Dr Ernie Muller, a long-time faculty member in the geology department.  Dr Muller was an astounding teacher, one of the best I ever had, a knowledgeable lecturer, careful grader, devoted to his students.  I still remember my first assignment, to write a paragraph about our favorite geomorphic feature.  Dr Muller’s real goal of course was to evaluate our writing skills.  I selected the Sandhills of Nebraska, a large physiographic province in the north-central part of the state with a through-flowing drainage system amid mountains of sand deposited by retreating continental glaciers.  He apparently liked my paragraph and gave me an A.  Most of the students were from the east and wrote about the geomorphology of upstate New York, features much closer to campus.  

A drainage basin is a watershed or catchment area separated from others by a drainage divide.  Rainfall flows in opposite directions along the divide into separate adjacent basins.  A drainage basin analysis is a method to assess surface waters and aquifer characteristics in a basin, to identify rivers and streams, discharge, gradients, and hydrologic processes.  It’s an important tool for communities to understand local water resources.  Dr Muller had each of us prepare a basin analysis for a river system of our choice.  I can no longer remember the river I chose and have long since trashed the final report, but I do recall loving the project, especially the preparation of my finished topographic maps.

Later as a graduate student at Washington State University, I chose a research project to identify rocks with a fascinating story to tell, one of ancient rivers flowing into an inland seaway separating the western half of North America from the east.  A Cretaceous world of rivers and streams emptying their hydrologic load into an inland sea in what would become modern-day Montana.  The rocks tell a story, of a sea advancing and retreating, as changing climate, mountain building, and subsidence influenced the course and geometry of rivers and deltas.  After graduating, I continued to investigate 90-million-year-old Cretaceous rivers, upland waterways with steep drainages capable of carrying huge boulders downstream, and lowland, low gradient dendritic streams choked with mud and silt carried far from the mountains into the sea. 

In the mid-1990s I was with a group of U S Geological Survey scientists that trekked to St Petersburg to work with Russian petroleum geologists.  During one of our visits, the Russians arranged a floating fieldtrip along a tributary of the Pechora River in a remote region in the Komi Republic to observe oil and gas source and reservoir rocks.  We flew by helicopter from the tiny Vuktyl transit depot to the headwaters of the Shchugor River in the central Ural Mountains.  There, we boarded rafts with enough food and gear for a week of exploration science.  We were specifically told by our hosts to bring fishing gear because the Shchugor River was a pristine source of grayling.  During our off hours we used artificial lures to angle our way downstream.  I recall my first casts on that cloudy, drizzly September day near the arctic circle at our riverside campsite in the forest-tundra of larch, spruce, and fir.  It reminded me of the trout farm west of Geneva.  Rarely would a cast not bring in an 8-10-inch grayling.  For dinners, we pan fried grayling, or prepared grayling soup, grayling stew, or grayling sushi, all with vodka of course.

More recently, I’ve mentored graduate students studying rocks formed by ancient rivers, especially low gradient streams near the Cretaceous seaway.  These Mesozoic upland  waterways and surrounding lowland regions hosted a rich environment for reptiles and invertebrates.  Graduate students from Montana State University have found dinosaur tracks, egg shells, bones, and skin impressions in these rocks.

I’ve hiked and backpacked along rivers and streams in the desert southwest, waterways like Grand Gulch, Dark Canyon, and the Escalante, San Juan, and the Dirty Devil Rivers.  I’ve worried my way through slot canyons in southwest Utah during monsoon season as storm clouds gathered, fretting the possibility of flooding in an ever-narrowing passageway.  Dry, pebble strewn river beds reveal an intricate tale of upstream geology, a story of weathering and erosion.  Derek Ager, in his The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record said: 

“The final conclusion I come to therefore is that, though the theories of plate tectonics now provide us with a modus operandi, they still seem to me to be a periodic phenomenon. Nothing is world-wide, but everything is episodic. In other words, the history of any one part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.” Ager summed it up well.  He may have referenced a 1915 World War I article in the New York Times describing the life of a soldier in combat.  Geologic phenomena may be likened to war, albeit a long one lasting millions of years. 

Ager’s quote reminds me of a whitewater trip I took down the Yampa River in northwest Colorado in the early 1980s.  The Yampa’s headwaters lie above the town of Yampa, west of the Continental Divide in the Flattops Wilderness.  The river flows north and west for 250 tortuous miles and empties into the Green River at Dinosaur National Monument.  I signed up for a five day commercial raft trip on the Yampa embarking near Craig, Colorado and ending in the monument 50 miles downstream at Echo Park near the confluence.  Significant winter snows and a wet spring contributed to unusually high water flow.  The trip was idyllic at first, steep canyon walls, petroglyphs, azure blue skies, spectacular geology.  It was fun until our flotilla, consisting of two large rafts reached Warm Springs rapid on the third day, a class five impediment under the best of circumstances, now a roaring foamy mass of muddy water cascading over a recent rock avalanche.  Huge boulders and adjacent holes dominated the channel.   It was a class five gone mad.  Our boatman made it clear that we needed to avoid the massive hole in the middle of the channel and stay far to the right bank to avoid a catastrophe.  (A hole forms when water flowing over a large rock or other exposed obstacle flows downward, then back onto itself in an eruption of whitewater.  This causes water on the surface to be drawn backward toward the rock, a potentially hazardous scenario -modified from Wikipedia).  I clearly recall what I said while sitting in the bow holding a taught rope used to secure our gear and yelling to the boatman: “We’re heading into the hole.  We’re heading into the hole”.  (There may have been an expletive attached to the phrase).  Our boatman had lost control of our raft.

We entered the hole head on, descending several feet, surrounded by the deluge above us. The bow suddenly buckled in front of me, pushed upward with a shudder as our raft was punched by the backside of the hole.   I was violently shoved backward but held onto the rope.  A wall of water gushed over the raft drenching everyone, but we passed through without further incident.  A smaller raft would have been trapped in the hole, unable to escape the inward-directed force.  I later discovered that a boatman was killed at Warm Springs a year earlier when he was thrown from his raft.

The Rapid City flood of June, 1972 also comes to mind when I consider Derek Ager’s quote.  That catastrophe occurred five years after I left South Dakota School of Mines.  I had several friends still living in town, and of course the national news was full of the event.  Rapid Creek, normally a mild-mannered drainage flowing east out of the central Black Hills became a torrent when a slow-moving thunderstorm dumped more than 10 inches of rain on the region.  West of town, Canyon Lake dam failed, and an enormous deluge inundated low lying areas of Rapid City and beyond.  The aftermath was devastating, 238 deaths, 3,000 injured, and $165 million (1 billion in today’s dollars) in damage.  One friend survived because he was out of town, another because his house was high above the creek.  In probabilistic terms, it was an event that occurs once every 500 years.

In 2010, I drove to Minnesota to visit a few bucket-list hot spots including the headwaters of the Mississippi River.  My first stop was Morton, a small community along the Minnesota River, a tributary of the Mississippi in southwestern Minnesota.   It was a must for me because the local geologic formation, the Morton Gneiss, is the oldest rock in the United States.  The river there has eroded early Archean continental crust, part of the early proto North American continent.  I pulled into a parking lot near a BP gas station, grabbed my rock hammer and started banging away.  For geologists, holding a chunk of 3.5-billion-year-old gneiss and musing over its long history is truly a spiritual encounter.

My next stop was 100 miles north of Morton on US-71, to briefly visit the Sinclair Lewis boyhood home in Sauk Center.  It was classic Midwestern Americana.  In his novel Mainstreet, published in 1920, Lewis explored and satirized small-town America by describing the characters of Gopher Prairie, a fictional community modelled after Sauk Center.  I crossed the Sauk River south of town and navigated my way to Itaska State Park, a two-hour drive north.

 While visiting my son, Ken, in New Orleans and wandering through the Mississippi delta region sampling hot sauce and avoiding Jax beer, I developed an urge to see the headwaters of Old Man River far to the north.  The Mississippi drainage basin is 1.2 million square miles, the largest in the U.S., but the river is only the second longest (2,350 miles long).  The Missouri, its largest tributary, is actually a few hundred miles longer.  I knew much about the western boundary of the Mississippi basin, a mountainous area along the Continental Divide, but I wanted to see the northern terminus, the source of the river in Clearwater County, a 20-ft-wide creek flowing out of Lake Itaska.  It was another spiritual moment, a series of short jumps across the shallow drainage on well placed rocks at the edge of the lake.  I had crossed the Mississippi River on foot.  I met two adolescents on the other side, a sister and brother team spearing carp for their family fish smoking enterprise.  Considering my vast experience with Cyprinus carpio on the Fox River, I shuddered at the thought, but carp found in clean waters are apparently a delicacy in certain parts of the World including northern Minnesota.  That evening I celebrated my accomplishment by driving to a nearby pub.  I ordered an Old Fashioned and scanned the menu for fried fish hoping to sample a local delicacy.  My entree consisted of whitefish from the North Atlantic, fries, and coleslaw.

Through the years, my geologic work has taken me to tributaries of the Missouri River near the Continental Divide in southwestern Montana.  Near the town of Three Forks, the Missouri splits into the Gallatin, Jefferson, and Madison Rivers.  South of Three Forks, near Twin Bridges, the Jefferson divides into the Ruby, Beaverhead and Big Hole Rivers.  Even farther south, at what is now Clark Canyon Reservoir, the Beaverhead divides into the Red Rock River and Horse Prairie Creek.

In August, 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Corps of Discovery, reached the three forks of the Missouri and named them for Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury; Thomas Jefferson, President; and James Madison, Secretary of State.  The Corps decided the Beaverhead had the greatest volume and should be followed upstream to eventually reach the Pacific Ocean.  Merewether Lewis and three companions (Shields, McNeal, and Drouillard) hiked ahead of the others, up the Beaverhead and then along an old Indian trail west following (what is now known as) Horse Prairie Creek.  The four trekked several days and came to a ridge top summit now known as Lemhi Pass.  As Lewis stated in his journal: “We proceeded on to the top of the dividing ridge from which I discovered immense ranges of high mountains to the west of us with their tops partially covered in snow”.  They had reached the Continental Divide, the far westernmost headwaters of the Missouri and the western end of the of the Mississippi drainage basin.

The Ruby River is a tributary of the Jefferson and flows north for 60 miles from its source high in the mountains of southwest Montana. It flows through a grass-covered valley separating the Snowcrest from Gravelly Ranges.  It diverges and forms three separate drainages near Three Forks Cow Camp.  Since the beginning of the Ice Age, it has been eroding an upland mass of Cretaceous thrust-faulted sedimentary rocks.  These now-tilted layers were deposited by rivers flowing into the vast interior seaway 85 million years ago.  The South Ruby drainage (or middle fork) ultimately ends at an 8,000-ft saddle between the two ranges.  There it forks yet again at its headwaters in both the Gravelly and Snowcrest Ranges.  It’s here in this remote region that my son, Ken, and I spend a week every year fishing for trout.

I first took Ken to southwestern Montana in 1987.  He was my 12-year-old geologic field assistant.  One could do this sort of thing years ago at the U.S. Geological Survey, kind of a take your son to the office week.  He actually received a small stipend for food and camping expenses.  We worked hard during the day, fished in the evenings, and slept in my truck camper.  His responsibilities included carrying rock samples, spotting outcroppings, swatting mosquitoes, watching for bears and rattlesnakes, and collecting nightcrawlers.  My hope of course was that he would become a geologist.  He’s now an accomplished architect and highly skilled fisherman.  Next to Gary Webster, my graduate school advisor at Washington State University, Ken is the best bait fishermen I’ve ever known.  This is not just a father’s bragging rights.  He’s damn good.  He knows how to use his gear, he carefully reads the water, the riffles and pools, and always catches fish.  Back home in Florida, he fishes for snapper, mahi-mahi, and kingfish in the Atlantic.  He’s a farm to table guy, an artisan who carefully builds a hot wood fire to attain abundant coals, and using a tempered cast iron skillet and the best oils and seasonings, prepares gourmet meals outdoors.

I arrive in Bozeman early in the day to stock up on supplies, food, enough scotch and beer for a platoon, ice, miscellaneous camping gear, and of course, nightcrawlers.  I’m here to pick up Ken. We are of course devoted bait fishermen but carry fly rods just in case an opportunity arises.  Later, I pull into the day use parking lot at Bozeman-Yellowstone International Airport.  I’m shocked at the size of the crowd, a mass of incoming and outgoing humans, mostly tourists from all corners of the globe.  A year of pent-up frustration from Covid confinement had finally sent people into the skies, to far flung places, ultimately to the national parks, everyone seemingly bent on experiencing Montana.  We are no exception.  Ken’s flight is on time.  We are both excited when we meet, about our adventure and anxious to escape the Bozeman hordes.  I had reserved two remote Forest Service cabins high in the Gravelly Range above 9,000 feet for a week of fishing, ideal locations for our angling foray into the headwaters of the Missouri. 

It’s a three-hour drive southwest of Bozeman to our first cabin.  We drive west, then south on US-287 where we join the Madison River north of Ennis.  The skies are increasingly smoky.  It’s warm for Montana in July.  A large wildfire 20 miles south of our first cabin is creating significant smoke and haze.  The Forest Service had warned me that bears might be migrating north (toward our cabin) away from the burn.  We turn west at Lyons Bridge and cross over the Madison River onto a gravel road that follows Standard Creek.  Our cabin is still 30 miles away, uphill nearly 3,000 feet on a rough pot-holed gravel road.  As the afternoon wanes, we see moose, deer, elk, and an occasional marmot as we continue upstream.  We stop to inspect Standard Creek several times for likely fishing opportunities.  Within a mile of our destination, the forest disappears, and a broad grass covered meadow full of late blooming wildflowers greets us.  I park my van just outside an old-style buck-and-rail fence in front of Black Butte cabin.  We inspect our temporary home, a tidy one room log shanty appointed with a bunkbed, propane stove, cabinet with cooking gear, table and three chairs.  We unload the van after opening a couple of brews.  Yes, there is a well-tempered 12-inch cast iron skillet, enough firewood for our stay, a large grated fire pit nearby, and a vault toilet across the road.  Not a soul in sight, but dozens of mooing cows soon arrive to greet us.  Ever curious creatures, they mosey over to our van and leave lick marks on the hood to show their pleasure at our arrival.

The sun has just set, the temperature is dropping precipitously in the rarified air, and we are in evening shadow.  It’s an exquisite location, just downhill from the source of Standard Creek at the Gravelly Divide, a low swale in the range that separates the Madison River drainage basin from the Jefferson.  We look around our site.  The top of Black Butte, a massive volcanic massif, peeks just over the fir trees a mile away to the southwest.  The 23-million-year-old laccolith is comprised of iron-rich volcanic rock. It’s the highest peak in the range (10,542 ft) and a haven for ravens and vultures.  Cottonwood Creek, a headwaters source for the Jefferson, begins at springs just north of Black Butte and flows down the west flank of the Gravelly Range into the Ruby River.  The Continental Divide and the Snake River drainage basin actually lie 30 miles south in the Centennial Range far out of sight.  Eastward, far down Standard Creek, distant peaks of the Gravelly Range jut above the horizon as a full moon rises through Earth’s shadow in a dull pastel sky of pinks and blues.  It’s time to build a fire and ponder our week’s angling opportunities along the headwaters of the Missouri River.