East off Highway 89 about 3.5 miles south of I-90 at Livingston is East River Road, which crosses over the Yellowstone River. On the east river bank just north of the bridge is the Carter's Bridge Fishing Access site. It is here that the High Water Mark has been attached to a tree on the bank. The mark was placed to mark the water level of June 6, 1997, at which time the river's flow was 38,000 cubic feet per second and the level was 10.72 feet (above what we have no idea). We visited on June 12, 2017 and the water was barely a foot lower than the mark. Apparently it had been higher earlier in the month.
Pure serendipity is how we came across this high water mark. Prior to this trip we had no
waymarks so made a list of known towns in Montana in which NOAA had placed high water marks. After striking out in two previous towns we walked into the Livingston Visitor Centre and asked the rather young lady manning the store if she might know of the location of any high water marks placed by NOAA after either the 1948 or the 1964 flood (the ones for which we had information). She replied in the affirmative, outlining where she had seen a high water mark, which was this one. It turned out to be totally different from the ones we were seeking, but was a high water mark nonetheless.
The last wild river
The Yellowstone burst its banks during the summers of 1996 and 1997, when supposedly rare 100-year floods hit twice in a row.
Suddenly, the river everyone wanted to cozy up to was eroding its channel, acre by expensive acre, toppling entire groves of mature cottonwoods and taking them downstream as battering rams. The floods captured world-renowned and big-dollar spring-creek fisheries, took out bridges, drowned houses south of Livingston to the first-floor windowsills, turned pastureland into fields you could plant rice in, and gobbled up the occasional home. The river did all this, not just once, but twice, back to back.
Two years running, late-season storms built massive snowpacks in the mountains. Cool, wet weather persisted into early summer. Then, when the heat came on, meltwater roared into the drainage in an astonishing, prolonged rush. At the gauge in Livingston, floodwaters crested at more than 37,000 cubic-feet per second (cfs). Between May 23 and June 28, 1997, 82.4 billion cubic-feet of river whistled past the gauge, a tremendous slug of water by anyone's reckoning (HCN, 7/7/97: The West weathers unusually wet times).
The floods definitely got people's attention. Landowners along the watershed were scared silly by the power of water. Witnessing the abrupt erosive changes wrought by flooding, owners of vulnerable land felt the threat to their property on a visceral level. Given the siege mentality, to ask whether people should have built along the banks in the first place, and why building along the banks continues to go on unabated, was not a popular stance to take...
Read on at the High Country News