Current Issues Although not as rich in tradition as Catskills and Pennsylvania rivers, the Batten Kill is an important part of our angling legacy. It's where Charles Orvis developed his famous wooden rods and ventilated fly reel. The river inspired his daughter, Mary Orvis Marbury, to compile the first standardized recipes of fly patterns in the United States in 1892.
Lee Wulff, John Atherton, and Hoagy Carmichael all lived on the river during the 20th century. Ernie Schwiebert, Vince Marinaro, Nick Lyons, Al Caucci, and Bob Nastasi all fished the Batten Kill. When Wulff and Atherton moved to the Batten Kill area in the late 1940s, the river had a reputation for large brown trout. It was heavily stocked, and the river had been lightly fished for five years while most young men were away at war and gas was rationed. And the river was enriched with domestic sewage.
It's scientifically proven that nutrient-rich sewage improves trout-stream productivity as long as water temperatures stay below 70 degrees, and the river's dissolved oxygen supply doesn't get depleted. In 1979, the old primary sewage treatment plant on the upper Batten Kill was replaced with a state-of-the-art tertiary plant, which deprived the river of nutrients that had been a staple for 100 years. The blanket caddis hatches declined (most caddis species are filter feeders and thrive in water with a high nutrient content) but the number of mayflies seemed to increase. Brown trout numbers waned.
It's nearly impossible to point to a single smoking gun in any ecosystem, and a lot of other things were changing in the watershed. A number of June hurricanes hit southern Vermont in the 1970s, and after the worst one, Agnes, a flurry of channelization hit most of the tributaries.
The site of the Batten Kill Watershed Alliance Twin Rivers project (before restoration) was typical of may side, shallow portions of the Batten Kill.
TOM ROSENBAUER PHOTO
One of the most destructive floods was on the lower reaches of Roaring Branch, the Batten Kill's largest tributary. A campground owner bulldozed Roaring Branch for a quarter mile upstream of its confluence with the Batten Kill. Besides the gravel and silt that were sent downstream in the load of debris, the new channel, with its increased velocity, slammed into an unstable gravel deposit on the Batten Kill's far bank.
Data from the USGS gauging station at the Route 313 bridge in Arlington (about a mile downstream of the mouth of Roaring Branch) shows that from 1928 to 1970 the riverbed rose just 6 inches. After Roaring Branch was dredged, the river rose another 6 inches, and then rose 6 inches again after the flood of 1973 and 6 inches after the flood of 1976. Today, almost 30 years later, tons of gravel still flood the lower river from that same raw scar.
This, and other unstable streambanks and areas of streambed throughout the system, filled in most of the deeper pools and runs on the lower river. And the construction of a limited-access highway, Vermont Route 7, on the eastern slope of the Batten Kill valley in the 1980s disrupted many important tributaries and caused a lot of sedimentation. Old-timers will tell you there doesn't seem to be the same amount of water in the river, especially in the summer.
Other issues may be depriving the Batten Kill of its water. The town of Manchester, in the middle of the Batten Kill headwaters, has grown by leaps and bounds since the 1970s. New homes and outlet stores swelled the town's population, and the water supply for Manchester comes from the same groundwater that feeds the Batten Kill. When you replace trees with lawns and asphalt, rainwater runs off quickly--often superheated by hot summer streets--and does not get a chance to trickle slowly into the river, cooled by subsurface ground temperatures.
Nearby Bromley Mountain is at the headwaters of another Batten Kill tributary, Bromley Brook, and the ski area withdraws water for making snow during the winter, some of which may be lost to evaporation.
Tom Rosenbauer is the marketing director of Orvis Rod & Tackle in Sunderland, Vermont. He is the author of the newly updated Orvis Fly Fishing Guide (The Lyons press, 2007).
This article originally appeared in the July 2007 issue of Fly Fisherman.
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