What does the streambed look like without the water?

Now that the water has been drained out, a lot of the streambed looks like a wide, flat road. As the silt and muck has accumulated over the years, it has filled in all the nooks and crannies that were once there. What is left has almost no variation--no places for water to eddy or swirl, no places for fish to hide, no places where the water can speed up, no places for anything other than the shallow and slow flow from the north lake to the south lake. With no water covering it up, the evenness of the bed is remarkable.

I'm surprised that the muck doesn't smell really bad. After 30 years of anaerobic decomposition under the water, I was prepared for some pretty nasty odors. So far, the material that is being dredged out of the streambed just smells like mud. That's a relief!