Re-tangling a river: Practicing the art of salmon-friendly waters

By Riley Yuan, the Chinook Observer

It's late November, and the flows in the Grays River and its various forks and tributaries are starting to swell. One of these is Mitchell Creek, on the banks of which stand four men in hard hats and rain gear, marveling at the sight before them: a riotous jumble of criss-crossed, piled-up logs, over, under and through which the stream gurgles and courses. It's a game of pick-up sticks for giants. And it's not just the fact that they've managed to pull it off that's worth marveling at. It's also that what they did defied the prevailing wisdom and scientific consensus that governed their professions for decades.

The four men are Pete Barber and Justin Isle, restoration ecologists with the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, Mark Smalley, a harvest manager with Rayonier, and JP Huhta, a forest engineer and contractor. They, along with many others, are collaborators on an ambitious habitat restoration project that saw 43 acres of Rayonier's trees tipped over - root wad and all - and placed strategically in and around the river's east fork. Planning for the project began more than five years ago. But the bulk of the actual implementation, which involved dropping hundreds of trees into narrow stream reaches with helicopters and ballasting channel-spanning logjams with boulders, took place in the summer and fall of 2023.

It is truly a staggering quantity of wood, as field technicians with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife who have since tried to survey these reaches will attest to, and as Barber, the project's lead, will gleefully admit. All told, more than 6,000 stems were inserted, directly affecting about three miles of waterway. Some have wondered if the scale of this intervention is overkill. To Barber, the heavy-handed approach - the over-correction - is the point.

"We want to do 30% [of the watershed] or more, and it's all based off of that [Intensively Managed Watersheds] study out of Abernathy [Creek, west of Longview], which really showed and highlighted that if you only do a small amount, you're going to see a small response," says Barber.

"It's not just placing a couple pieces of wood and saying that reach is treated. It's hitting it hard and placing a lot of wood and reconnecting the flood plains. It's that big picture treatment where you'll see a response that lasts. That's something that's taken me a number of years to figure out, and I don't know if I've cracked the code per se, but I feel that there is a scientific basis to what we're doing, and we can have a predictable response coming from this type of treatment approach."

To meet that 30% goal, Barber has other restoration and enhancement projects queued up throughout the Grays basin, all of which leverage a combination of federal and state funding sources. His "Grays 4C" project aims to break up two, fish-blocking debris flows far up in the river's headwaters, as well as regrade scoured stream beds with the recovered sediment and gravel.

His west fork project, on the other hand, will both dismantle the man-made fish barrier that is the old intake for the now-defunct Grays River hatchery and place logjams at other critical junctures in the channel. Barber also hopes to implement a second phase of restoration on yet-untreated reaches of the East Fork - what he calls a "rinse-and-repeat" of the work they did two summers ago.

For years, projects like this wouldn't even have been dreamed of, let alone implemented. Loggers and agencies alike made a point of getting slash and debris out of channels, on the basis of improving stream flow, minding aesthetics and easing both human transport and fish passage. In reality, fish need the exact opposite, as research began to confirm in the 1980s and 90s. Both incoming adults and out-migrating juveniles depend on large woody debris to provide myriad, habitat-related benefits: shady nooks in which to shelter from predators and floods alike, slow-moving pools to rear in, the influx of food and nutrients that come from decaying organics and the critters that attracts, relatively stable stream banks and beds in which to bury redds (nests).

These, of course, were the exact conditions that a century and a half of splash-damming, diking, straightening and generally tidying up rivers made rare in watersheds like the Grays. What remains is the simplified, flashy fire hose that not only degrades upstream salmon habitat but also transports enormous quantities of sediment downstream, thereby worsening the risk of catastrophic flooding and channel avulsions in the lowlands.

Results in the redds

Barber's approach to restoration, in both the forested thicket that is the watershed and the bureaucratic thicket that is wrangling salmon recovery dollars, is relentless. And the logjams, almost as if they are unwilling to disappoint him, have already started to produce observable results.

In the span of a single season, new bars of fine gravel and silt have started to form at the edges of Mitchell Creek. An adjacent floodplain full of alders that remained dry in years past now has side channels flowing through it. (Barber's team scattered trees throughout that floodplain, too.) This past spring, he discovered a steelhead's redd in the treated reach, along with pools teeming with juvenile coho and steelhead.

Farther downstream, and one fork of the river to the west, a different species of salmon continues to show up where it always has, and in numbers that are less a sign of sudden change than of incremental, albeit consistent improvement. In Crazy Johnson Creek, a tributary of the Grays' west fork, the chum, or "dog" salmon are spawning and dying in their preferred freshwater habitat - fine gravel beds through which groundwater upwells. All told, the Washington and Oregon Departments of Fish and Wildlife, along with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, estimate that 20,400 fish entered the mouth of the Columbia last fall - a little under the 10-year average return of about 22,000 adult fish.

At their peak, Columbia River chum - not to be confused with distinct Willapa Bay chum - used to return to the river in the hundreds of thousands, before suffering a precipitous decline that began in the mid-20th century. Of 17 distinct populations that once existed between the mouth of the river and the upper gorge, on both the Oregon and Washington sides, all but three have been functionally extirpated. The Grays River, along with some incidental spillover into the Chinook and Elochoman Rivers, was one of the three populations that maintained a self-sustaining run of fish, or something close to that.

Unlike coho and steelhead, the Grays River chum won't ever make direct use of Barber's logjams and the habitat they provide. Those treatments are too far upstream, and chum, which return to freshwater later in their lifecycle than other salmon species, tend to stay further downstream, in flatter-grade side channels like Crazy Johnson.

But they do benefit indirectly from the enhancement in upstream floodplain connectivity and overall system complexity. The sediment load transported by the river and abated by logjams can still bury their redds, not to mention the fact that the very transition between lowlands and uplands favored by the chum is where the "fire hose" effect is most severe and risk of channel avulsions is greatest. The 1999 channel avulsion (relocation) in the Gorley reach of the Grays' mainstem, which destroyed several artificial chum spawning channels, is a testament to this phenomenon.

Recovering complexity

In a word, what the watershed lost, what fish and people alike stand to benefit from, and what Barber's projects aim to recover, is complexity.

Out in the field, Barber also speaks of "sinuosity" and "roughness," and the "banging around" that the river will have to do once it has more obstacles in its way and is forced out into long-disconnected floodplains. All of these terms are referring to the same condition, though. Namely, a messier, more heterogenous condition, harkening back to the one that would have existed in pre-colonial times, when the hills were still dominated by old-growth.

Back then, a few big trees falling into the river could accomplish what ballasted, engineered log jams do today. But there are hardly any of those trees left. What is left is the ingenuity and persistence of those who are trying to kickstart the natural processes that once governed these ecosystems. "I've got a fair bit of that fire," says Barber. "If I really believe in what I'm gonna do, I will find a way to do it."