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Umpqua River Watershed | Umpqua National Forest |
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Oregon's Umpqua River basin is unique in many ways. For starters, the Umpqua is massive, encompassing three million acres that stretch from Cascade mountains to Oregon coast. It is also one of the few rivers in the entire country that lies within one political district, giving rise to a collection of agencies and groups all operating together in the same area. And the Umpqua's twin forks - the North and South - present a picture in contrast and diversity in their respective sub-basins before they join together to form the Umpqua mainstem west of Roseburg. The Umpqua National Forest, which manages one million acres of the watershed, is in the midst of a historic shift, focusing more energy toward restoration and reassessing a decades-long record of timber harvesting, where three logging trucks per minute once traveled from upland forests to mills in the valley below. The Forest's Watershed Restoration Business Plan, spearheaded by recently appointed Supervisor James Caplan, serves as the long-term guidepost for restoration in the entire basin. » » » » » » » » » » » » At Deadline Falls on the North Umpqua River, salmon leap high into the air, attempting to fly up and over the onrushing whitewater. Some make it, others slam into rocks, bouncing back into the swirling wash before instinct drives them forward again. The scene draws ohhs and ahhs from our small crowd, perched a mere five feet away on moss-covered rocks. It is a marvelous sight to behold up close, made even more so by a fact everyone in our group - on a two-day tour of the Umpqua basin - knows too well: this used to happen on virtually every falls on every creek and river in the Pacific Northwest, but it is now reduced to a dwindling number that includes the North Umpqua. In fact, the North Umpqua watershed is faring somewhat well, says Jeff Dose, a fisheries biologist with the Umpqua National Forest. The river has four different species of anadromous fish, including salmon, and six separate runs, all made up of native fish. Soda Springs Dam, a hydropower facility that local salmon advocates contend makes a good candidate for breaching, blocks anadromous fish beyond its location at river mile 34. Despite Soda Spring's 67-foot-high blockage of upstream salmon habitat, one key reason the North Umpqua still supports a range of both resident and anadromous fish species below the dam is its water temperature. Unique among the region's rivers, the North Umpqua's temperature is actually colder than many of its tributaries, thanks to a continual discharge of snowmelt making its way downriver from high Cascade lakes. Yet despite the North Umpqua's relative health, says Dose, restoration work on the forest could further benefit salmon and other fish species. Three years ago, the Umpqua National Forest crafted a Watershed Restoration Business Plan, which focuses on six priority watersheds within the basin as main targets for restoration. The Plan is a response to decades of intensive forest management practices that altered aquatic, terrestrial and riparian habitats, and it organizes a matrix of restoration priorities along the broad goals of "quality of life, a resilient forest and clean water and healthy streams." "The Business Plan is our touchstone to check in with how well we're doing," says Forest Supervisor James Caplan. "It's not a static document. It will change as we learn more." The Plan identifies Steamboat Creek, a major tributary of the North Umpqua, as "the number one priority" for restoration, says Barbara Fontaine, a resource assistant with the North Umpqua Ranger District. And within Steamboat's own sizable watershed, Little Rock Creek rose to the top of the Plan's restoration rankings. After winding through spongy moss and webs of vine maple branches, we emerge onto Little Rock Creek, now a mere trickle during summer after flowing fast and furious in winter. Fontaine describes how the creek's natural hydrologic regime was "broken" when she first walked the creekbed, which was scoured out down to bedrock. Now, thanks to large logs placed in the stream with a helicopter, rocks and gravel are returning to the creekbed, creating riffles and eddies that slow the water's flow and create habitat for fish to establish their redds, or spawning beds. Jumbles of logs pile up at the creek's curved points, forming pools for juvenile fish. In all, the Little Rock Creek project placed more than 70 pieces of wood in eight miles of stream, restoring the natural condition of the creek after decades of timber harvests cleared nearly 25 percent of the forest and created 34.5 miles of roads in the Little Rock's watershed. The logging activity "simplified" the creek's instream habitat, says Fontaine, with the combination of roads and clearcuts triggering flash-type flooding in the creek that scoured out prime fish habitat. "What we have here now is a good foundation for restoration," she adds. Robin Hartman with the North Umpqua Foundation, a local nonprofit that assisted in the project, says the creek's restoration is a good example of how it takes a cooperative effort to get work like this done. "It was a team effort. I can't imagine how it would've been done without people investing their own time and effort to make this happen," she says. "We were all dedicated to doing it, and that's what makes it special." The $324,000 instream project, which includes annual monitoring until 2005, was partially funded through the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board as well as the Steamboaters, a local angling advocacy group, and the Umpqua Valley Audubon chapter. A host of other regional agencies and groups also lent financial and volunteer support, including the Umpqua Basin Watershed Council, environmental group Umpqua Watersheds and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. Little Rock's instream work, however, is one part of a larger restoration picture. "The Business Plan dictates that we take a tributary-by-tributary approach," explains Fontaine. "It isn't scattered. It's a systematic, holistic approach that includes instream restoration, road decommissioning and thinning for habitat." Road decommissioning has already started in earnest in the Steamboat watershed. About half of the basin's 26 miles of roads have already been decommissioned, says District engineer Miles Barkhurst, and when they are done with the Little Rock sub-basin, essentially all mid-slope and valley bottom roads will be eliminated, leaving upgraded ridgetop roads as access. As restoration work continues in the Steamboat basin's upper reaches, a separate, ongoing project that helps preserve the North Umpqua's steelhead population - renowned among flyfishers around the world - is housed in a nondescript roadside trailer. The North Umpqua Fishwatch Program, a unique, cooperative effort of state and federal agencies, keeps close watch on what fisheries biologist Dose calls "the strongest population of summer steelhead in the North Umpqua, Oregon and perhaps the entire Northwest." A makeshift viewing platform with wooden benches sits above a deep, wide pool on Steamboat Creek, where as many as 600 steelhead and salmon mill about, resting from May until autumn when cooler water permits them to continue upstream. The fish are highly vulnerable during these times, and problems with poachers spurred the creation of the Fishwatch Program to protect them. "I'm one lucky son of a gun," says Lee Spencer, the volunteer who has spent the past five summers overseeing the Steamboat pool. "This is a truly exceptional place that deserves this type of protection, and I'm fortunate to stumble upon something as simple and positive as this." The grating sound of metal on metal tells the woeful tale of the South Umpqua River's declining fish populations. One of the oldest operating smolt traps in the state, the South Umpqua's trap is a floating metal cylinder that creakily rotates with the river's flow, trapping juvenile fish inside. Every day for the past 23 years, fish biologists have gathered smolts from the trap, cataloging them before setting them free downstream. Along with another strategically placed trap on a nearby tributary, the pontoon-floating pen serves as an indicator for the entire basin's fish production, and lately, the numbers have not looked good. Bob Nichols, a fisheries biologist with the Umpqua's Tiller Ranger District, explains how data from the traps show the South Umpqua basin supported roughly 70,000 smolts during the early 1990s. By the mid 1990s, those numbers dropped to 15,000, and now, they are plummeting even lower. "In the South Umpqua, we don't need any more scientific studies to show what's going on here," says Dose. "We already know the fish here are in trouble. A lack of science isn't preventing restoration here. It's getting the societal and political momentum to get it done that's lacking." In fact, Dose and colleague Brett Roper published a landmark report in 1995 - the lone published study on the viability of anadromous fish that passed peer review in the Journal of Conservation Biology, insists Dose. The analysis compared stream channel data from 1937 to present-day information. The study's findings suggested that timber harvesting and road construction in the uplands of the South Umpqua were largely to blame for plummeting fish stocks, lending scientific credence to something many people already suspected. "We've already had one extinction here - summer steelhead," Dose explains. "The other stocks are tenuous at best. I'd be hesitant to wager a bet that they'll be here in the next 50 years unless we do something about it." The status of fish on the Tiller District's 350,00 acres illustrates the stark contrasts that differentiate the Umpqua watershed's North and South portions. The upper watershed of the South is steep, dissected country, its forests a patchwork of former clearcuts and remaining stands of late-successional reserve. But the river's gradient is much shallower than its northern counterpart, with peak flows that can be eight times less than those of the North. As such, water temperature is a key concern, since on the South lacks a significant Cascade lake discharge. The temperature problems force many fish to push upstream earlier in the year to avoid what Dose calls the "line of death," the threshold point where the river's temperature becomes lethal for fish. Compounding the challenges facing the South Umpqua is an age-old problem in Western forests: fire. In 2002, wildfires burned nearly 90,000 acres of the Umpqua, roughly nine percent of the Forest. The massive fires, largely in the Tiller District, not only drained funds from the Forest's budget, but also put restoration projects on hold and prompted the Forest to create a Wildfire Effects Evaluation Project document to address how to deal with the burnt-over areas. While the entire South Umpqua basin is labeled a key watershed under the Northwest Forest Plan, the ranking of restoration priorities placed Dumont Creek, a 31-square-mile sub-watershed, at the top of the list. Studies show that the Dumont is "ground zero for coho recovery in the South basin," says Dose, and for the past five years, Nichols and the Tiller District have focused their efforts on restoring the watershed using the usual techniques - road decommissioning and instream wood placement. Following a plan that Nichols and his colleagues mapped out in detail beforehand, they placed 254 logs into Dumont Creek with a helicopter, mimicking natural accumulations of instream wood. Like Little Rock Creek in the Northern basin, gravel and wood are now giving the creek a more complex profile. "This was a flat, wet sidewalk before this project," declares Nichols, standing in a dry portion of creekbed now strewn with rocks and boulders. A comprehensive monitoring program will also help document the previous and current conditions of Dumont Creek and give guidance that will help make other stream restoration projects more successful. Nichols is enthusiastic about future prospects for restoration in the basin and how they might help nurture the South's fish populations back to health. Thirty-five percent of roads in the Dumont watershed are set for decommissioning, and he is preparing plans to salvage wood from the Tiller District's mosaic of charred portions of forest mixed with healthy stands to supply future instream restoration. "We're going to do surgical removal with helicopters," he explains, adding that 500 logs from burnt areas will add to the more than 800 logs he is planning to place in nearby Boulder Creek. "We'll be taking the trees in groupings from different areas, so we'll still be leaving plenty of snags as habitat." While the North and South Umpqua basins present different restoration challenges, Forest Supervisor Caplan insists the risk of embracing a long-term plan for restoration will be worth it. Preparing restoration projects is costly for the Forest, he says, as the formalities of following the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandate documentation of environmental impacts and scoping of public comment, have taken a "bite" out of budgeting. "There's a risk in what we're doing, by moving ahead in the anticipation we'll get funding," he says. "But we're poised for the future. It's about getting real, engaging the public early in the process and opening up political and community discussions." Indeed, affecting change in the formerly timber-dependent communities of the Umpqua basin will be a challenge. But with the Umpqua Forest and its host of public and private partnerships moving forward with a strategic, long-term plan that continually builds upon each success, they are off to a good start.
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