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Lower Columbia River Watershed | Columbia River National Scenic Area |
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When Lewis and Clark first made their way down the spectacular 80-mile canyon that is the Columbia River Gorge, they saw an environment vastly different from what is there today. As the explorers paddled West toward the river's mouth, they observed riverbanks lush with bottomland forests, a rich mosaic of cottonwoods, ash and other hardwood trees intermingled with conifers. Filling the braided channels of the Columbia, pockets of wetlands, mixed with prairies bursting with native grasses. Now, 200 years since that fateful journey, the Lower Columbia estuary - one of the largest in the world - is a mere shadow of its former self. Decades of change have left indelible marks: forests were largely cleared for pasture, massive dams on the Columbia drastically altered the river's flow, and a thriving urban area grew up a stone's throw away. The projects described here - on the Grays and Chinook Rivers and the Sandy River Delta - represent the first steps of a plan that aims to return the Lower Columbia estuary to its historical condition. Through this ambitious endeavor, partnerships of agencies, organizations and private citizens are working to remove dikes, restore marshes and wetlands, and replant low-elevation forests. Their collective aim: to create a network of restored habitat that favors salmon and the other species that once thrived here. If successful, future generations may one day marvel at the Lower Columbia as did those explorers long ago. » » » » » » » » » » » » High in Washington's rain-soaked Willapa Hills, leaky crevices give way to the headwaters of the Grays River. The shallow river elbows its way through valleys and vast forest lands, reaching the expansive Columbia River 21 miles from the Pacific Ocean. From its origins 2,000 feet above in the Willapa Hills to its spillage into the Columbia, the Grays River watershed encompasses 79,400 acres of land. Ducks Unlimited, one of the founding members of the Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership, is working with a team of 10 resource agencies and non-profit conservation groups that aims to purchase 880 acres in the Grays Bay area, which includes the Grays River, Crooked River and Deep River. Three-hundred and forty acres have already been purchased. In addition, the project will connect the floodplain to another 500 acres of tidal backwater, riparian and wetland forested habitat. Historically, the floodplain was diked to create grazing land. Above in the Willapa Hills, heavy logging left slopes unguarded. Sediment tumbled into the river, clouding salmon spawn habitat. "It is a river out of balance," says Ian Sinks, stewardship director at the Columbia Land Trust, which owns the project land. The Trust is partnering with Ducks Unlimited to complete the restoration work on the lower Grays River wetlands. During an early phase of the project, which began in 1999, DU reconstructed seven tidal channels on a 116-acre parcel - a former cattle grazing area at the confluence of Seal Slough and the Grays River. Completed in fall 2001, the work is already paying off. "We caught coho and Chinook in two age classes here this spring," says fisheries biologist Chuck Lobdell. Upriver from the restored piece, the Trust owns land on Kandoll Farm, a former dairy farm where the forked tongue of Seal Slough juts toward the Grays River. DU will begin to restore the Kandoll area next year. The goal here, says Lobdell, is to restore tidal function to 140 of Kandoll's 160 acres. This means breaching several dikes along the Grays River, Deep River and sidewinding Seal Slough to create thousands of acre-feet of flood storage. The Trust hopes to relieve flooding on the Kandoll property while creating restored habitat for salmon and other species. By opening diked areas on the farm, they will create flood storage areas that will increase the volume of water that can be handled in the lower Grays River. Setback levees will also be built to protect neighboring properties. Typical wet wintertime weather combines with 10- to 12-foot tides that can easily overtop roads in the area, according to Sinks. "The community has a legitimate concern that they can't get to work or school," Sinks says of the boggy conditions of the Grays Bay area. "It becomes one large lake." Such flooding has broken off a chunk of soil from county road that traverses bayou-like Seal Slough on the Kandoll land. Lobdell gestures to a pile of rock and sediment that furrows into the foliage below. "There's a nice healthy washout," he says. Dealing with county roads and state highways adds to the challenges and expenses of the restoration work, says Lobdell. And tidegates rest under this road; Lobdell envisions removing them and inserting open pipe to keep the water flowing freely in Seal Slough. In the next year and a half, the project partners will restore 400 additional acres in the Grays Bay area. During that time, they will also work with local landowners to acquire and protect 300 more acres of land. When dikes in the area are eventually breached, soils will be removed offsite to prevent silt from entering the waterway. In addition, some of the soil will be used onsite to create diverse habitat for juvenile salmonids and birds, and promote the growth of native Sitka spruce in the area, which are found along the Pacific Coast in areas with high moisture content. Much of the Lower Columbia's spruce habitat was lost to European settlement, says Sinks. "Finding mature, intact examples is rare," he says, adding that forested wetlands are valuable to birds, such as the marbled murrelet and bald eagle, and young salmon. Lobdell envisions spruce tidal habitat in the lower Grays. "A spruce bog was what it was historically, and what it will eventually be again," he says. » » » » » » » » » » » » The lower Columbia-Clatskanie sub-basin drains 298 square miles, from the top of 3,000-foot Nicolai Mountain to the Columbia River. Before water flows into the Columbia, though, it must pass through the Clatskanie Bottoms, a buffer of land between the mighty river and the small Oregon town of Clatskanie, which sits just 29 feet above sea level. A thick curtain of poplars surrounds the diked floodplain known as Clatskanie Bottoms, the site for another of Ducks Unlimited's restoration projects. DU signed on to manage the project in 2002, after a private landowner expressed interest in converting the property from a poplar tree farm to wetland wildlife habitat. The Clatskanie Bottoms is a long, 1,000-acre piece of land, bordered by the Columbia River. Lobdell stops at a house on the property and arranges to follow the landowner's teenage son on a driving tour of the property. Jostling along in a Suburban, Lobdell follows the young man's beat-up but agile pickup over dusty roads, around a labyrinth of ditches, and through canopies of trees. Although many of the poplars have been harvested, the area looks wild and unkempt. And the landowner wants to keep it that way. The little black pickup leads Lobdell though a stand of poplars into an expansive field where most of the restoration work will be completed. Here, DU will assist the family in creating wetlands and sloughs for migratory waterfowl, and pastures and crop fields for the population of endangered Columbia white-tailed deer on the property. But Clatskanie Bottoms is a large site, and the work is slow. The teenager pulls the truck to a halt. Lobdell stops, too, and follows the young man on foot to a newly built pond where a pump cranks out water from a nearby ditch. With the shielding effect of the Coast Range, the inland area is spared from much of the mist and rain that shrouds the coast. Later, DU hopes to install water control structures to keep the marshes filled, in order to create a significant spot for migrating birds and deer to feed, bathe and rest. The private landowner is eager to see a range of wildlife return to his family's property and has his sons spending their summer working hard on restoration projects, such as clearing blackberries and other invasive species. "No one would argue that there's not a benefit to all wildlife," says Lobdell. This project is on the top of DU's long list of projects to fund in the coming year. » » » » » » » » » » » » Standing amidst tall, dry grasses on the Sandy River Delta, the air literally hums with energy and movement. Massive powerlines overhead give off an ethereal hum as they send electricity from Bonneville Dam to Portland and beyond. Cars and trucks buzz along I-84, the main transport corridor that links cities east of the Cascades with the west side's urban core. And the massive Columbia River, with the waters of the Sandy River joining it, moves slowly and silently toward its termination at the ocean. There's energy afoot on the ground of the Delta, too. As we bounce along a rutted dirt road that sees very few vehicles, we cut through the 1,400-acre mix of former pastureland dotted with remnant forest stands. Soon, we come across an energetic group of workers clearing land and replanting native forest. The workers are contracted through the environmental group Ducks Unlimited, using funds from the Bonneville Power Administration and illustrating the close-knit nature of partnerships working on the Delta. "You can see here we're trying a new approach," says Robin Dobson, a botanist and ecologist with the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, a cooperatively managed, 292,500-acre region overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, the Columbia River Gorge Commission, the states of Oregon and Washington, and six counties. "We're moving in with tractors and starting all over from scratch - completely taking out everything that's there and replanting with native grasses first, then trees. We like to call it 'rapid adaptive management.'" Since the Forest Service acquired the Delta through a land deal involving the Trust for Public Land and Reynolds Aluminum in 1991, Dobson and his colleagues have tried numerous approaches to reach their goal of restoring 600 acres of gallery riparian forest - dense and unbroken stands of black cottonwood, Oregon ash, willows, dogwoods and other native species - at the confluence of the Sandy and Columbia rivers. "We want to get a large block of habitat established," adds Dobson. "This area represents one of the few, if not the only, opportunities to reestablish a big chunk of riparian forest near the Portland area. It would be a big benefit to bird habitat on the Lower Columbia." But there have been plenty of hurdles in pursuit of that goal. Parcels of the Delta had been used for cattle grazing and irrigation ditches had drained most of the seasonal wetlands, creating a disturbed landscape vulnerable to invasion by non-native plant species. "You should've seen it here. It looked like a golf course because of all the grazing," says Dobson, gazing out over reed canarygrass - an exotic species - that stands six feet tall in some places. After the Forest Service took over management of the Delta, it soon terminated the grazing lease. With cows off the land, invasive plant species, most notably reed canarygrass and Himalayan blackberry, exploded in numbers, quickly dominating the landscape. Now the task is to get those tenacious invasives out and replace them with native species, no small feat. When Dobson first started experimenting with different restoration strategies in five-acre blocks, the first plantings didn't fare well, he explains. They suffered from predation by deer and competition with the invasive plants. But with more intensive management, including discing the ground with tractors to loosen the soil, placing protective cages around the younger trees, and keeping non-native plants under control, the native tree species are starting to take hold. "We're trying these different approaches to hit on one that will work, but it's been difficult," says Virginia Kelly, a planner with the National Scenic Area. "There's a lot of maintenance to keep these plantings going, much more work that we originally thought it'd be." Since 1998, the partnership of agencies and groups - including the Forest Service, BPA, Ducks Unlimited, SOLV, Girl Scouts, local schools, Americorps, Ash Creek Restoration, Bureau of Environmental Services, the Oregon Department of Forestry and volunteers from other Portland-area groups - have planted 20 acres of bottomland forest while performing site preparation on an additional 120 acres and maintaining another 90 acres. The cost for that work totals $96,040, with $21,000 coming from the Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership. Restoring the gallery forest is just one part of the broader restoration plan. To bring back the Delta's wetland habitat, the partnership has set a goal of reestablishing 125 acres of wetlands, converting invasive species to native plant communities in seasonal spots of open water and emergent wetland habitat. "In approaching this phase of the project, we tried to locate wetlands where they were historically," says Dobson. "After doing a water table analysis, we found in some areas the water table stayed just one foot below the surface. That's a good indicator that some places were historically seasonal and year-round wetlands." So far, 55 acres of wetlands have been deepened, which helps water pool longer to bring in native plants. Another 80 acres were treated to remove invasive plants in preparation for introducing native wetland species. That work so far tallies $18,300, with no funds from the Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership used. The BPA, as part of its environmental habitat funding, has pledged $150,000 toward bringing back the Delta's wetlands. At one of the three major wetland sites restored so far, small green frogs leap from the grass underfoot. Birds abound, flying between clumps of cattails and other wetland plants. Although this site is covered in water now, by mid-summer it will dry up, says Dobson. "We're pursuing a water right to dig a well, which would let us store water and could augment the wetlands during the dry months of the year," he says. "Historically these wetlands fluctuated with the seasons. With our management we'll try to mimic that, rotating water to keep some wet and some dry throughout the year to maintain habitat." Like much of the rest of the Delta, the wetlands site was overrun with invasive species, which first had to be removed before reestablishing the wetlands. Active management is still necessary to keep the invasives from coming back, but Dobson and Kelly eventually hope to get the wetlands established enough to step back and let nature take its course. With its close proximity to the Portland metro region, the Sandy Delta sits in excellent position to be a living example of environmental restoration in progress. Already, scores of urbanites come to the site to stroll on trails with dogs and families. Recognizing the potential, the Forest Service drafted a master plan for the Delta in 1996 that envisioned a network of hiking and biking trails, equestrian trails, a public parking area, restrooms, and a gateway facility to the National Scenic Area. Before the master plan can move forward, however, the nearby interchange with the highway needs upgrading, insists Kelly. Given Oregon's long list of bridge and road repair projects at the state level, it might be awhile before the Delta's long-term vision is realized. In the meantime, Dobson, Kelly and the rest of the Delta partnership will continue to return the Delta's low-land forest and wetlands to their historical state, providing abundant wildlife habitat and creating one more link in a network of sites that will give us living examples of what the Lower Columbia environment used to look like, ages ago.
Skagit | Dungeness | Lower Columbia | Siuslaw | Umpqua | Coquille
Home | Mission | On the Ground | Priorities | Emerging Coastal Network | Economics © 2003-2004 Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership. All rights reserved. This website developed and hosted by Ecotrust.
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