With this year’s field season wrapping up, the Chehalis Basin Fisheries Task Force hosted a tour last week for members to visit three completed project sites in Grays Harbor County. Of these projects, the Grays Harbor Conservation District oversaw two, one the Mox Chehalis Creek and the other on the east fork of Wildcat Creek, while the Chehalis Basin Fisheries Task Force oversaw the third project on Damon Creek.
Beginning the day in east Grays Harbor County, the group’s last stop was at Damon Creek. In attendance were staff with the Quinault Indian Nation, Mason Conservation District, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Coastal Salmon Partnership, Chehalis Basin Noxious Weed Coordinator Sofia Shermanand with the Grays Harbor Conservation District, including Conservation District Supervisors Mike Machowek, Phil Stegemoeller and Rick Boyer. Kirsten Harma, the watershed coordinator for the Chehalis Basin Partnership, arranged the tour.
Mox Chehalis Creek
John Stepanek, a watershed restoration project manager with the Grays Harbor Conservation District, led the tour of the riparian restoration project at river mile 5.3 to 6.3 on the Mox Chehalis Creek. Within this creek are coho, fall chinook and steelhead.
This restoration project builds upon a Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program the landowners enrolled in 2017. This project involved an 11-acre planting on the north side of the creek and was overseen by Jim Gretchman, forest stewardship project coordinator with the Grays Harbor Conservation District.
The Salmon Recovery Funding Board provided funding for the project, whose original scope of doing more planting was expanded to include in-stream work. Additionally, a neighbor downstream of the bridge signed on to have three acres of riparian planting on his property. In total, the project encompasses 19 acres of planting and a mile of creek. Within this mile, 63 in-stream structures, a combination of post-assisted log structures (PALs) or beaver dam analogs (BDAs), will be installed.
“This has been a really fun project to work on,” Stepanek said.
For this year’s field season, the riparian buffer was planted in the winter, and this summer, a contractor installed 37 BDAs; next year the PALs will be installed.
Last spring, during the creek survey, there was evidence of one beaver and remnants of an earlier dam.
“Part of the reason I added this site last minute onto our tour is that three weeks after we built these structures, there’s three structures that have a lot of new beaver dam activity on them, which is really exciting and like happened very, very quickly,” Stepanek said, adding that, “Our motto [for] doing these types of hand-built projects has been if you build it, they will come,” said Stepanek. “We’re putting a lot of faith in the beaver that if we give them the tools, the resources, and some structure in the stream, that they can actually do what they do best and provide the habitat for salmon, which is the ultimate goal of the project, and improve the health of the stream at large.”
The BDAs are designed to be leaky, and some don’t span the full channel to create more sinuosity. (Sinuosity describes the amount of meandering or bends that a stream has. If a stream has more sinuosity, when large amounts of water enter the stream, the water flow is moderated or slowed.)
“This is definitely the biggest creek system that we’ve tried these hand-built structures in and so we used longer and thicker posts and went for a deeper embedment here,” Stepanek said. “But it’ll be a little bit of an experiment to see how they hold up this winter with flows.”
The goal of the project is adding more complexity into the creek through adding more wood and replanting the riparian buffer. Through this stretch of creek there are no trees along the bank and fewer than 10 logs.
“And we know that wood in the creek is really important for salmon,” said Stepanek. “It disrupts the flow, it kind of slows things down, it creates deep pools, it helps have temperature gradients. It helps get pool and ripple complexes where salmon can hang out in different velocities and different eddies. Having that diversity of flow is really important for salmon at various life stages.”
Additionally, the BDAs will increase water storage by reconnecting the stream to its floodplain.
East fork of Wildcat Creek
The restoration project on the east fork of the Wildcat Creek spans two miles and four landowners: two small family forest landowners, Green Diamond Resource Co. and Port Blakely. A five-year grant through the Aquatic Species Restoration Program through the Office of Chehalis Basin is funding the project. At project’s end, there will be 100 PALs and BDAs installed in the creek.
“We have a mature and healthy riparian area intact here and the incision though is a lot higher than it was like at Mox Chehalis,” Stepanek said. “These are also very deep pools but the incision is really, really high here and so it’s going to need more aggressive in-stream treatment to build that bed back up than at Mox Chehalis.”
And compared to the project on the Mox Chehalis, planting is a relatively small portion of this project, and the goal of planting is to increase the riparian buffer and replace the invasive reed canary grass with native plants.
This summer, 37 structures have been installed, beginning upstream and moving downstream. Planting will be done in the winter in areas where the in-stream work was completed.
The Grays Harbor Conservation District’s in-house crew and Washington Conservation Corps crews built the structures, of which there are six types (A-F). For example a type A structure spans the channel and the purpose of which, said Stepanek, “we’re trying to create roughness on the bed, usually at the top of the ripple, so that we can upgrade, we can capture sediment and re-aggrade that bed, especially in areas where the creek is in incised, where it’s eroding down and is getting disconnected from the floodplain and from the banks.”
The D, E and F types were designed for this site by Anchor QEA and the first time built by the crews. The Type Es are similar to the BDAs on the Mox Chehalis creek, while the types D and F are one sided or two-sided versions of bank-anchored PALs.
A reason for including this project site on the tour is to show the group these type of BDAs, because “these types of structures are new for Western Washington,” said Harma. “What can we learn from this? Can we do more of it elsewhere?”
One thousand bundles comprised of woody material were used in the construction of the BDAs; the material was sourced from a Washington Department of Natural Resources cost-share pre-commercial thinning project that one of the small family forest landowners conducted earlier this year.
“They had to do thinning in one of their Douglas-fir stands and needed to be able to clear a lot of that material out of there, and we need a lot of material to be bundled so it was a really nice synergy on this project,” Stepanek said. “It was built right on site, and we only had to truck it over like 1/4 mile, which is really great.”
And some of the larger logs added to the stream were remnants of a commercial harvest on the other small forest landowner’s property, and the landowner helped bring the material to the stream.
The group had the opportunity to see several types of structures and the thought process that went into deciding where to place the BDAs to restore the creek bed and increase water retention. Within the past decade, this stretch of the east fork of Wildcat Creek has dried out, where it hadn’t previously in recent memory, and a goal of this project is to retain year-round areas water so the fry aren’t stranded during the summer.
“This is a really productive creek,” Stepanek said. “Just downstream there’s an index spawning survey reach for coho and we’re barely in what’s called a supplemental survey reach, where instead of coming out for the entirety of the spawning window, [DFW] come out one week in the middle of the spawning window. … And there are so many coho up here. The first year we surveyed in November, dozens and dozens of coho all the way over here.”
Damon Creek
At the third site, Camp Bethel hosted the group and provided refreshments for a celebration that recognized the accomplishments of Lonnie Crumley, the former chair of the Chehalis Basin Fisheries Task Force. Crumley is retiring and the Damon Creek culvert replacement is his final project. Jill Warne, member at large for the Chehalis Basin Fisheries Task Force, joined the group at Camp Bethel.
Over the course of his work in the Chehalis Basin, Crumley has corrected 107 barriers and made 233 stream miles accessible to salmon.
“I just want to say thank you for all of your work over the years in the Chehalis,” Jane Atha, with Coastal Salmon Partnership. “When I think of fish passage, the Chehalis Basin, I think Lonnie and Brett, and the way that you were able to work with partners and collaborate and do so many great projects. Through time, it’s also become this much more apparent how you’re able to do it in such a cost-effective way — keep jobs local, keep costs down.”
The new culvert that conveys Damon Creek beneath Kirkpatrick Road is a 35-foot-wide pipe that’s nearly 20 feet high and 80 feet long. The project was sponsored by the Chehalis Basin Fisheries Task Force and took about five years to work through the design and secure funding. Crumley consulted with engineers around the county because of the challenging site conditions due to different soil types. Water control was also a significant factor on this project.
“We had water pouring into all directions, and John Oldman with Brumfield did a really good job with the water control before we even broke ground and that made all the difference,” Crumley said.
With the previous culvert deemed a partial barrier for fish passage, this culvert replacement opens up a little over five miles of habitat.
“We worked with the landowner [Camp Bethel] and without their cooperation, we wouldn’t have been able to do this, but Manny’s [McGinnis] been very good to work with us and it’s been great and it’s been a real pleasure and nice people to meet,” said Crumley.
“We are so delighted with the work that’s been performed because of what it means to our camp and the people who are going to be coming here from now on,” said McGinnis. “We have not had as much coordination or collaboration or assistance in having anything done at this campsite in the 2 1/2 years that my life have been here. We are ecstatic at the degree of detail that has been paid to make sure that everything goes just so that project and our needs here at camp were met beyond any expectation. We are so grateful to have Lonnie and your crew to put this thing together.”
The week following the visit, Crumley said the project would be finished with guardrails added. This winter, the Grays Harbor Stream Team will assist with planting the creek banks with Douglas-fir, grand fir, western redcedar, willow and red osier dogwood.
As part of this culvert replacement, the existing boat ramp was updated for safer public access.
