ATVs 'play' in beautiful Missouri Rivers ?!

“ATV riders take to Missouri streams

By Tom Uhlenbrock

Of the Post-Dispatch

06/14/2005


ATV riders play in the Jacks Fork River near Eminence.
(TOM UHLENBROCK/P-D)


Floaters on some of Missouri's finest streams found unwanted company
this spring - drivers of ATVs, Jeeps, even pickups, playing in the
rivers.

More than a decade after a statewide crackdown on recreational motor
vehicles in the water, the practice is present, and growing.
"It has once again gotten relatively active," said Ken West, a regional
protection supervisor with the Missouri Department of Conservation.

Riders are churning through the Current and Jacks Fork - whose scenic
beauty earned them the distinction as the nation's first federally
protected rivers - and the Black, which, despite its name, is one of the
clearest of the spring-fed Ozark rivers.



Canoeists approaching Eminence on the Jacks Fork on a Saturday this
month found a half-dozen ATVs on a gravel bar, and several in the river.
"Is that legal?" asked one floater.

No, is the answer in most cases. In 1990, Missouri banned motorized
vehicles from streams for recreation, citing studies that showed the flow
of traffic through a riverbed harmed aquatic life.

But some riders are using a technicality in the state law that allows
vehicles to ford rivers at "customary crossings." Most of the crossings
were used by farmers decades ago, and the only people now using them
are recreational vehicle owners who enjoy playing in the rivers.

Noah Poe, superintendent of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, the
national park set up in 1965 to protect the Current and Jacks Fork
rivers, this spring asked for a legal opinion from the U.S. Department of
Interior on the term "customary crossings." He expects an answer within
weeks.

"We are seeing a significant increase in ATV use in the park," Poe
said. "A ford may have been used by farmers or ranchers getting from one
place to another in the past, but do we have to allow that use to go on
today even though it's all recreational? The question is: Do we have the
authority to close those fords now? It's a big problem, and I think
we're going to end up in court, where we want to win."

Frank Manganaro, of Glendale in west St. Louis County, celebrated his
wedding anniversary by floating and fishing the Black River last month.
As he and his wife rounded a bend they found two Jeeps and several ATVs
in the river.

"They were churning up mud and gravel," Manganaro said. "From there
down, that crystal-clear river was murky. They waved, but we didn't wave
back."

Mike Lancaster, the conservation supervisor in charge of the Black
River basin, said his agents issued 13 citations for vehicles in the river
last month. But Lancaster said the $200 fine, plus $79.50 in court
costs, doesn't seem to be a deterrent.

"It must not be because we'd see a decrease in the amount of use, and
we're not seeing it," Lancaster said. "I think an increase in the fine
would help."

Missouri once was a mecca for river riding because adjoining states had
laws against driving in streams. Lancaster said many of the illegal
riders in the Black River area still come from out of town and, in some
cases, other states.

"Of the violations we have written, 80 percent were from St. Louis," he
said. "And there's a significant number from out of state, quite a bit
from Illinois and Indiana.

"We're going on 15 years fighting this, and most folks know it's
illegal and causes problems. You're putting petroleum products in the water -
we had complaints of oil in the river - you're stirring up sediment
that can choke fish beds, you're compacting the gravel and that can change
the river's hydrology."

Attorney general steps in

The problem previously came to a head in the mid-'90s and was centered
on the Parks Bluff Campground on the Black River in Lesterville. On
summer weekends - and especially on Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor
Day - the campground would draw up to 8,000 owners of off-road
vehicles, including Big Foot trucks hauled in on flatbed trailers. License
plates came from as far away as Oklahoma, Ohio and Kentucky.

The Black River was turned into a fuming traffic jam, with floaters
complaining they could not get through.

Gary Cravens, a Conservation Department supervisor who viewed the scene
from a helicopter on Memorial Day of 1996, said at the time, "It was a
mess, a congested mess."

But the department found it was hogtied by a ruling from a local county
prosecutor, who said off-roaders had been crossing the river to gravel
bars for years at the campground, so it must be a "customary crossing."

Nonsense, said Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon, an avid floater
himself. He threatened a suit that would seek fines of up to $25,000 per
day, per incident, against Jayme Parks, the owner of the campground.

Parks responded by posting signs warning riders to stay out of the
river, and by opening mud pits on her property and inviting the off-roaders
to slosh through those. But several serious accidents, at least two
fatal, followed and Parks now bans off-road vehicles and operates a family
campground.

"It's a nice, clean-looking campground right now," said Lancaster, the
conservation supervisor. "No ATVs are allowed through her gates. But
that's a good and a bad thing. A lot of the traffic that was in her mud
pits is now in the river, again."

Driving underwater

Eugene "Woody" Woodcock of Lesterville agreed that most of the river
running these days on the Black is done by outsiders. "People come down
here and camp, splash around in the river on a four-wheel-drive or a
dune buggy for two days, and go home," he said, but, "we're local, we're
the ones that's guilty."

Woodcock, 68 and a retired trucker, is a charter member of the Black
River Jeep Club, which started in 1967 and has a new wave of members. He
remembers the old days when club members would drive through one of the
river's deepest holes in rigs modified with "snorkels" on the exhaust
to go underwater.

"There'd be 50 to 150 people waiting for us with cameras," he said.
"The water was 13 feet, 6 inches deep. We'd go in one end, and come out
the other. It was fun, it was an every Sunday thing, to go on rides up
and down the river.

"But people who were supposed to be real smart with Conservation come
down on us that we were killing fish, and doing this, and doing that. We
never gave it much thought at the time."

Woodcock said he no longer owns a snorkel rig, and has given up driving
in the water.

"The locals still go down to the river, the women sunbathe, the kids
play around in the river," he said. "I'm not saying that, occasionally,
somebody doesn't drive across the river here and there.

"As far as problems, the locals get the bad rap on this. Most people
who come down here don't even know what 'no trespassing' means."


Stuck in the river

Tony Rolls lives at Sutton's Bluff, a picturesque area where the Black
River bends around a towering bluff. The area is bordered by woods
designated by the U.S. Forest Service for off-road vehicles. Riders must
get permits and are asked to stay on the trails through the forest.

"Last Memorial Day weekend, it sounded like I was sitting in the pits
of a grand prix racetrack - it went on until 2 a.m.," said Rolls, who
works for Black River Floats. "Thirty vehicles were out on the gravel
bar, and a black pickup got stuck in a deep hole in the river. He was in
the water for over 20 minutes, before a Jeep pulled him out.

"There was no conservation, no forestry, no sheriff's office saying
anything to them."

Reynolds County Sheriff Gary Barton echoed the common reply when asked
why law enforcement could not curb the river running.

"On any weekend there's going to be a vehicle in the river somewhere,"
Barton said. "I've got four guys and I can't patrol that river like it
should be. I told a governor's committee that I needed four to five
additional deputies with four-wheel drives at a minimum. They turned it
over to conservation."

Lancaster, the conservation supervisor, said his agents responded to
the report of the black pickup stuck in the river, but arrived at the
scene after the driver was long gone. Lancaster, too, said his department
was understaffed.

"There's no way that we've got enough people to handle the ATV traffic
and work everything else," he said. "Because we have to work the ATVs,
we're ignoring other things, like fishing. We have one agent in
Reynolds County, although we're getting another one in October."

Indeed, Lancaster said the biggest concentration of off-road river
traffic on the Black is between Highway K and Clearwater Lake, in another
federal jurisdiction. The Army Corps of Engineers governs that 12-mile
stretch, and Chief Ranger Randy Devenport had a familiar complaint.

"It's a manpower issue," Devenport said. "We have 18,000 acres; that's
a lot of ground to cover. Plus, you have to consider their mobility.
The ATVers tend to have pretty good ears and eyes when it comes to a
white corps vehicle."

Barton, the sheriff, added: "I grew up on the Black River. You've got
to keep in mind, this is what these people like to do. In behind
Lesterville, there are probably 50 to 60 customary crossings used for more
than 20 years.

"Personally, I don't see anything wrong with crossing a shallow part of
water and going up to the next fishing hole. But that's different than
playing in the water. We're on the same page there."

Here are a few examples regarding ATVs and concerns about water
pollution:


April 2004
New Mexico
The U.S. Forest Service undertakes a major initiative to revive a Jemez
Mountain watershed and a fishery that was choking on its own streamside
sediment, churned loose in part from excessive vehicle traffic. The
initiative bans car, truck and ATV traffic along stream banks in an effort
to bring the watershed into compliance with water quality standards and
restore a lost fish habitat.

February 2004
Duluth, Minn.
The Duluth City Council bans ATVs from city-owned property after
residents complained the vehicles were degrading streams, trails and land.
The proposal was pushed by Minnesotans for Responsible Recreation, who
argued that the ATVs were creating deep ruts and erosion in city woods,
through trout streams and near wetlands.


August 1999
Arkansas
Officials from Arkansas' Ouachita National Forest announce they will
curb the use of ATVs in two popular areas of the western Arkansas forest
to ease erosion that is causing water-quality problems. Off-road use of
ATVs is banned from nearly 12,000 acres of national forest at Wolf Pen
Gap and 45,000 acres south of the Little Missouri River in Polk and
Montgomery counties. Violators can be fined and sentenced to up to six
months in prison.

- Matthew Fernandes,
Post-Dispatch news research

Reporter Tom Uhlenbrock
E-mail: tuhlenbrock@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8268”

“Sad.
It's illegal in MS to drive an ATV in a stream. Very high fines.
Most of the ATV use is for hunting, but a sizeable group goes 'mudding'. Find the biggest baddest mudhole on the dirt roads in the woods and make it worse.”

“How big are the fines in other states? Those Missouri fines need to go up at least an order of magnitude. Then those idiots will start thinking twice before "playing in the river". Hell, if they bump up the fines enough they could easily cover the cost for a couple more deputies that they complain they need.”

“For comparison.... you get caught camping without a reservation in Kettle Moraine Forest in Wisconsin -- or even just without a park sticker -- the fine is around $150, I think. And that doesn't have a pittance of the chance for bad pollution and damage that the ATVs in a river do!”

“Give it fifty to a hundred years or so...

Fossils fuels will all be gone.

It will be quiet again then :)”