The Kings River has been significantly degraded in recent years by poor streamside management practices including people purchasing homesites and then cutting down trees all the way to the river to get a view.
Also, climate change producing heavy rainfall that scours the river causes major erosion, as opposed to earlier years when it was more common for rain to be spread out over a period of days. Those and other impacts have turned what was once a narrow, deep river into a sprawling, broad, shallow river that provides less habitat for fish and a considerably shortened float season.
Arkansas State Sen. Bryan King organized a meeting this past week in Eureka Springs where a group of people concerned about health of the river gathered to hear from Arkansas Game & Fish Commissioner Austin Booth, AG&FC Deputy Director Ben Batten, AG&FC District Biologist John Stein, Doug Allen, author of A Riverman’s Guide to the Kings River, fishing guide Jeff Fletcher. and representatives from the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality.
King talked about growing up enjoying the Kings River that he used to float. After he started to float the river recently, he became concerned about the negative changes he saw. King says he plans a series of meetings to bring together diverse groups to work on a plan to restore the river and prevent further deterioration.
“We want a better Kings River in the future,” King said.
Allen said there are a lot of people fervent about the Kings River, making it important to look at what is happening, including a decrease in the months the Kings can be floated. That impacts the local economy with lost sales from boat rentals and guided fishing trips.
The length of the float season used to be six to eight months a year. In the past decade or so, the time span for floating has shortened to about four months. Trigger Gap Outfitters, which rents kayaks and canoes, had to shut down several times this year.
“There are areas upstream that are just not floatable past July,” Allen said. “The lack of smallmouth bass is also concerning. We see problems with bank destabilization and more silting and gravel in the river from the high floods we’ve been seeing for the past five and a half years. Tons of that stuff has built up in the river, which is causing the decline in fish numbers. Fish need clean water. From Trigger Gap to Highway 62, it’s a challenge to catch fish. That area used to hold monster fish. We are also seeing more people putting pressure on the river, including people coming over from Springdale, Fayetteville and Rogers. All those factors are having a negative impact on the river.”
Allen said people need to be aware of the U.S. Forest Service plan to build 70 miles of roads and clearcut 11,000 acres of land in the Robert’s Gap area—one of the more environmentally sensitive areas of the state serving as headwaters for the Kings, Buffalo, Mulberry, White and War Eagle rivers. He said the Robert’s Gap area that covers 40,000 acres is as large as Holiday Island. He urged everyone to learn about this project that some fear could be extremely damaging to the rivers.
Fletcher, a fishing guide for 42 years, said in the 1980s and 1990s, they ran six to ten groups a day on weekends and fish were plentiful. Fishing continued to be good from the mid-1990s to 2005. It wasn’t unusual for groups to catch 100 to 150 fish in a day.
“Those days are over,” Fletcher said. “Our rivers have so much gravel in them. It hurts me that most of the guiding I do these days is on Table Rock Lake. I love the lake, but it pains me that we don’t have good fishing in the river anymore. There is no water in the holes where we used to find plentiful fish. Our float season used to be March-October. Now I’m lucky to have a dozen trips over there in a year.”
Fletcher also said something needs to be done about the river otters that were reintroduced in the area by the State of Missouri in the early 1980s. He described them as fish killers that have spread and are overpopulated. In some areas of the Kings, you can find an otter slide every 50 to 100 feet.
“The otters are something we need to address,” Fletcher said.
More must be done to bring awareness to the problems. “The Kings is a great resource we could lose if we don’t do something now,” he said. “It will continue to decline.”
AG&FC commissioner Booth agreed the fish in the Kings are on decline. He blamed it on habitat destruction that has led to more gravel than water. And, unfortunately, the problem is not confined to the Kings.
“Nearly every single Arkansas river is filling up with silt,” he said.
Booth said forests are being allowed to grow up to the water’s edge which kills native grasses important for erosion control and habitat for insects that feed the fish. It doesn’t help when cattle are allowed to graze to the water’s edge. But he said he understands why ranchers do that when they have lost so much pastureland to the river’s spread.
Booth said bank stabilization is $1,000 per yard, and property owners have a problem with tax dollars being used to improve someone else’s land. One solution being considered is a conservation tax credit that would encourage landowners to do streambank stabilization. AG&FC is doing a pilot project for bank stabilization and wants to create long-term incentives to develop a conservation workforce to do work like bank stabilization.
AG&FC Deputy Director Batten said there are 90,000 miles of streams and rivers in Arkansas, and the things people do nearby almost always make the rivers worse. He said it is important to replant native trees and grasses. And he said expanding catch-and-release, reducing what anglers are allowed to harvest, will not address the declining fish population problem because currently only about one percent of the fish are being harvested.
Batten said that with climate change, it is common to get seven inches of rain in a day instead of two or three inches. Those big rainfalls destabilize banks and dump a lot of sediment and gravel in the rivers.
“That kind of flow creates a lot of problems,” Batten said. “We agree the Kings is not as good as it used to be.”
Batten said one program designed to help is taking out old road bases in the river that can create dangerous vortexes and cause erosion.
Batten agrees pressure on the river is likely to get only worse because traffic on the river increases each year as the population of Northwest Arkansas continues to grow. “You can love a river to death,” he said.
AG&FC is working to improve access to some rivers closer to Bentonville, Fayetteville and Springdale in order to allow residents in the fastest growing area of the state to use instead of driving over to the Kings.
Another consequence of high-volume rainfall is that it creates more high-water events on the lakes, which backs up into the streams. “Flooding in the river is horrible,” said AG&FC District Biologist Stein. “And we are also seeing a lot of silt come in from the tributaries after large rain events.”