Bottom Creek Adventure

First, you should know this adventure involved a bright orange hard hat and ridiculously heavy and ungraceful hip waders.

I spent today out in the field in the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company lands observing the progress of road improvements and in-stream habitat improvement projects on the Bottom Creek. I will be writing a case study brochure about this project site later in the year.

The most interesting site we visited was a series of ten engineered log jams that had continued to “recruit” more logs and downed trees in the wet fall and winter seasons of 2008. Before this project, the stream bottom was bedrock not providing salmon spawning or rearing grounds. The idea is to slow the water down and give a chance for gravel to fall out and to add complexity to the stream, adding pools and runs. The success of an engineered log jam is measured by the change in area of riffle gravel (which is ideal salmon and trout spawning ground – where they lay their eggs) and the change in area of pools (which is areas of calmer water where “alven” – young salmon and trout – can live for their first year before going out to sea).

Unfortunately for everyone’s olfactory glands, there were at least two dozen coho salmon carcasses along the stream. But that is a good sign that the salmon are able to travel this far up stream (this site is at least 40 miles from the ocean) and were a good size meaning they must have had a good life out in the ocean before coming back to spawn. In other news, I saw lots of elk, bobcat, and raccoon tracks and Jon actually found a naturally-shed five-point elk antler.