Web-posted May 28, 2006

Of The Oakland Press

It all started with a simple e-mail.

The sender, someone on the listserve of the Clinton River Watershed Council, posed an open-ended question: Is it possible to canoe the Clinton all the way from Pontiac to Mount Clemens, near where it spills into Lake St. Clair? It was late winter, and the prospect of paddling a sun-drenched river fl ush with spring rains appealed like nothing else, so we immediately took it as a challenge.

Several weeks of phone calls and planning later, we found ourselves loading a canoe into a narrow sliver of the river on a sunny Saturday morning in April, envisioning a two-day voyage. The day before, a river veteran who aided us in planning had e-mailed to inform us that the river's flow had been reduced the night before. We took wary notice of the high-water marks still visible on the tree roots, rocks and cement chunks on shore, nearly a foot above the current water level. We set off and periodically scraped the rocky bottom.

It took us more than two days to finish the voyage, and it's safe to say there is no easy answer to the e-mailer's question. For starters, you can't really canoe in Pontiac, thanks to a decades-old decision to cap the river downtown and because the river snakes through two wastewater treatment plants and a pipe under M-59 before crossing Interstate 75.

But it's a heck of an interesting float, one that tells a story of neglect and rebirth, but also of vexing, ongoing problems.

Know this if you're thinking of canoeing the Clinton: Water levels, and flow itself, can vary greatly.

Water flow on the Clinton is largely a measure of two things: weather, which plays its biggest role after heavy rains, and control structures that maintain court-ordered water levels for Cass, Sylvan and other upstream lakes in Oakland County.

"Sometime in the spring, they start to put boards in them and stop the water up to keep the lake levels," said Dan Keifer, development director for the Clinton River Watershed Council in Rochester. "In most summers, there's not much left for the river." In summertime, he explained, releases of treated wastewater from wastewater treatment plants in Pontiac can account for half the river's fl ow.

A little farther downstream, the Clinton's flow is recharged by groundwater in Auburn Hills and Rochester Hills, and then by the confluences of Galloway Creek and the Paint and Stony creeks, both coldwater streams. These factors combine to produce probably the best water quality found on the river's main branch, Keifer said.

From the paddler's perspective, there are some dynamite stretches to be found on the Clinton. The meandering river flows through public or otherwise undeveloped forested lands for most of its length, and sightings of steelhead trout, deer, muskrats, beavers, minks, herons, kingfishers and other wildlife are common.

"It's one of the unknown gems in southeastern Michigan. People don't know about it," said Jack Robinson, a member of the Rochester Hills Green Space Advisory Board, a panel charged with determining how to direct funds from a $10 million, 10-year open space preservation millage approved last year.

The river also presents plenty of technical challenges for the adventurous paddler. Slicing through a 10,000-yearold glacial deposit, the river drops roughly 600 feet from its headwaters in Springfi eld and Brandon townships to its juncture with Lake St. Clair in Harrison Township. It drops close to 100 feet while passing through Rochester Hills alone.

That kind of slope creates lots of ripples, pools and runs that make for thrilling paddling and also for good fi sh habitat, Keifer said. Geological evidence also shows that, before the arrival of civilization, the river shifted its channel laterally by several hundred feet through what is now Rochester Hills, he said.

Donna Folland, executive director of the Oakland Land Conservancy, said the river east of Rochester Road has carved out steep slopes and bluffs "that are really dramatic. And the evidence of the glacial formations as that river was being formed are so clear there. And those steep slopes are at such a risk of development."

Mostly, the massive homes visible from the water through this area are well set back from the water, although many are perched precariously close to the bluffs, creating erosion and runoff problems. Keifer said the watershed council has for years been pressing city officials to enact a steep slopes ordinance and require setbacks for development.

"The status quo is sometimes kind of daunting," Keifer said. "But again, that's why we start with (the premise), it's in mighty good shape. And if we just keep working at it, it's just going to get better."

For the most part, the Clinton River wears its his- torical scars well. They come most visibly in chunks of broken concrete that litter the forested banks in many areas and spots where scrap metal, old tires and even engine blocks are partially buried in the riverbanks and that sometimes visibly leach runoff into the soil or water itself. In a few areas, houses or condominiums are perched practically on top of the Clinton's mercurial banks.

The Clinton is listed as one of 42 areas of concern in the Great Lakes by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The 760-square-mile watershed has more than 200 sites listed by the agency as contaminated. There are two federal Superfund sites alone near the Yates Dam one in Rochester Hills and the other in Shelby Township that are being cleaned up, according to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Another Superfund site is in Utica, according to the DEQ's most recent legislative report. All are former landfi lls.

Other problem spots include combined sewer overflows on the Red Run/Bear Creek tributary, which drains southeast Oakland County, and sediments contaminated with PCBs and other metals in the river's mouth and other areas, said William Smith, a member of the EPA's Public Advisory Council for the river. Among the worst, Smith said, has been a World War II-era Army tank arsenal in Warren that created a number of Superfund sites that have been the focus of large cleanup efforts, he said.

"There's been a lot of work done on containing the water flows, shutting off some of the landfills, restoring the fish in some areas and cleaning up some of the contaminated sediment," Smith said. What's missing, he said, is attention to many other closed and abandoned landfills that he said are leaking.

But by and large, the biggest source of pollution and other problems on the Clinton today doesn't come from industry or wastewater treatment plants. It comes from surges of stormwater that accompany heavy rains.

Unlike wastewater from municipal sewage treatment plants, stormwater is untreated. Stormwater carries oil, sediment, fertilizers, insecticides and other contaminants picked up from parking lots, lawns and other hard surfaces and flushes them into storm drains that empty directly into the river.

When canoeing on the Clinton, the evidence of storm surges is everywhere. For example, branches of fallen trees that lie across the river are strewn with debris left by high waters. And the banks above a certain level are filled with lush greenery; below it, they are scoured bare. The root structures of trees along the banks are exposed, some with little or no soil remaining behind them.

"It's a pretty angry stream," said Robinson, whose Rochester Hills home sits about an eighth of a mile above the river. "In fact, we almost lost the bridge across Livernois two years ago when we had fl ooding. When it rains and rains heavily, the river really rises and rises quickly."

Keifer said heavy development in the watershed causes water runoff to reach the river more quickly than when the river was in its natural state. That's because there are fewer natural wetlands and open spaces to absorb rainfall and more rooftops, roads and parking lots that repel it.

Spend an afternoon paddling just about any portion of the river, and you'll quickly become acquainted with the most concrete symptom of the storm surges: Massive and impassable logjams. These are the Achilles' heel for paddlers attempting to enjoy the Clinton.

During our first day's journey from Riverside Park in Auburn Hills to Shelby Township's River Bend Park, we had to portage around fi ve or six logjams - not fun, but we figured the worst surely was behind us. We were wrong.

After putting in for Day Two, the logjams began immediately, came one after another and quickly turned our canoe trip into a hiking trip through mucky fl oodplain forest with a heavy canoe. Exhausted and frustrated by the lack of progress (just 4 1 /2 miles in five hours, with 13 miles left before Mount Clemens), we made the decision to temporarily suspend the trip at Utica.

The logjams are the result of storm surges that inundate the river and erode the river banks. The massive swells of water claim whole trees, forest debris and trash. Items such as water bottles, tires, wrappers, basketballs and other assorted urban refuse get swept into storm drains during rains and back up behind the logjams, transforming parts of the river into miniature dumps.

The job of clearing the river falls largely to riparian landowners, volunteers, advocacy groups and river enthusiasts such as Tom Cleaver. With the nonprofit cleanup group We Are Here Foundation, Cleaver is in the fourth year of working to free the Clinton of its logjams. Macomb County in 2004 and 2005 gave the group $40,000 to remove 14 logjams that he said would have cost a contractor $350,000 to remove. Ford Motor Co., Visteon and Home Depot also pitch in on funding, and Michigan Caterpillar donates an excavator with a bucket to scoop debris into a large trash container and a telehandler that can enter the river to remove large logs.

"We've been concentrating basically from Yates Cider Mill through to Mount Clemens," said Cleaver, of Sterling Heights. "Now what we're doing is we're really concentrating our efforts on the bike path - starting up at Utica, being able to put a canoe in and go all the way down to Mount Clemens."

Cleaver and an estimated 50 to 60 volunteers adhere to what's called woody debris management, which stresses cutting a channel through the center of some logjams to improve flow but leaving much of the logjam intact. That remaining woody debris is good for fish and wildlife habitat and for reducing erosive storm surges on the river. Also, tree root balls left in the river banks, even if the tree is dead, help prevent erosion of the bank.

For other jobs, where logjams are deemed harmful and must be completely removed, Cleaver and company must apply for permits from the DEQ. In problematic areas such as River Bend, which is full of such sites, such removal is complicated by the park's remote nature. Cleaver said the group once had to cut a 400-yard road through the woods there just to allow machine operators access to the river.

Keifer said that while logjam removal is necessary, "we're treating the symptoms, not the root cause," which is stormwater surges. To that end, the group conducts frequent workshops to educate landowners about the effects of mowing lawns all the way to the river's edge, or about the benefits of planting rain gardens, for example.

"We have generally had a very good response from property owners that we approach, even where they are doing some pretty undesirable things, like lawns and play sets and firewood piles," Keifer said. "It doesn't take much information and they understand it because they want to be on the river. ...

"They see it when it fl oods and we get a lot of complaints and concerns, they see it when it's low. They really want to know what's going on with the lake level control structures because it's really impacting their appreciation of the river."

Other groups are chipping in to improve the overall health of the river in their own ways, as well. Folland and the Oakland Land Conservancy maintain the 24-acre Clinton River Rookery Preserve, a nesting site for blue herons along a mile of the river northwest of Hamlin and Adams roads. The group last year worked with Trout Unlimited, the CRWC and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to clear logjams and improve steelhead habitat through the easement. Folland said the group plants blooming native plants to encourage other landowners to follow suit.

"We're trying to maintain a presence to keep people knowing that we're working on this," she said.

Robinson, of the Green Space Advisory Board, said the group may present a list of properties up for sale to city officials as soon as August. Many will be along the Clinton.

"That river should be attracting fi shermen and canoers and kayakers and hikers," he said. "... That trail network should be a real economic plus for us, and we haven't understood that completely yet."

Cleaver said he can see the fruits of the foundation's labors. Every year, he said, removing logjams get easier as fewer recur.

He also said he takes his golden retriever to Yates Dam every spring and reports seeing more and more steelhead jumping the dam and entering Oakland County. That brings more fishermen to the river as well, he said.

"It's almost like up north, and it's right here in our back yard," he said.

Tips for canoeing the Clinton

There are no liveries on the river. You're on your own as far as supplying a canoe, paddles and life vests. It's also a good idea to bring at least one extra paddle in case one gets lost. They're not easy to find, but it's a good idea to get a good map of the river. The Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority - (800) 477-2757 - has a few old, out-of-print maps of the river from Rochester downstream that show launch and take-out sites and list mileage and estimated paddling times. If not available, the Clinton River Watershed Council can make you a copy: (248) 601-0606. You're going to get dirty - and wet. Waterproof or water-resistant paddling shoes or boots are recommended since the river's banks are very mucky. Good launch or take-out spots are few and far between, and you'll inevitably have to portage around a number of impassable logjams. You're also likely to bushwhack, voluntarily or otherwise, through messy tree branches that hang over the river. Stow valuable items such as cell phones and wallets in waterproof dry bags. It's also a good idea to lash any bags, coolers or other items to the canoe itself in case it capsizes. Bring a bilge pump. You're likely to take on some water, if only from frequent portaging and standing in the water. The upper portion of the river - from roughly Auburn Hills through River Bend Park in Shelby Township - requires better-than-average paddling skills. There are strong currents, lots of tight twists and felled trees and other obstacles. Above Yates Dam, rocks are common obstacles. Starting in Utica, or especially Dodge Park in Sterling Heights, will guarantee a more leisurely float. But the Clinton can always lull a paddler into a false sense of complacency. Lastly, check with the U.S. Geological Survey Web site, which lists up-to-date information about water levels on several areas of the river. Go to waterdata. usgs.gov/mi/nwis/rt and drag your mouse over the dots to find the gauge you're looking for.

Homeowners can help reduce stormwater entering river - Staff writer Sven Gustafson

Stormwater runs quickly off impervious surfaces and carries pollutants such as oil, sediment, fertilizers and pesticides into storm drains. Stormwater surges are the biggest source of pollutants in the Clinton River today.

Four things you can do to alleviate stormwater runoff from your property, courtesy of the Clinton River Watershed Council, are:

Install rain barrels to collect and store rainwater that runs off your home's roof through a spout. Rain barrels, which cost between $75 and $150, can be screened or covered to prevent mosquito breeding, and can also lessen summertime demand for water for lawns or gardens.