During the summer of 2023, NOSC undertook a comprehensive habitat restoration project at the Jefferson Land Trust’s Snow Creek Uncas Preserve. This reach was deeply incised and contributing over 890CY /year of fine sediments to the creek from its continually eroding banks to the detriment of area and downstream redds. The majority of ESA Listed Summer Chum spawning occurs in or below this reach.
The reach had very low wood volumes, poor channel complexity and disconnected floodplains.
The project elevated the stream bed through the use of wood structures filled with imported streambed gravels and also lowered/connected the adjacent floodplain and created side channels through excavation.
Cleared trees and imported wood were installed into extensive logjams in the channel to slow flows, provide habitat, and sort and aggrade Snow Creek’s abundant sediment load. During the winter of 2023, reconnected floodplains and the surrounding forest was planted with 9,000 trees and the site maintained by NOSC’s WCC crew to prevent colonization of the area by invasive weeds.
The project restored 0.5 miles of critical spawning habitat for ESA-listed Hood Canal Summer Chum, reconnected of 1.4 acres of floodplain and installed 39 log jams on a degraded reach of Snow Creek in Jefferson County, WA.
The metrics of this project — miles of habitat, acres of floodplain, trees planted, log jams installed — don’t fully convey the results of a project like this. Kevin Long, Senior Project Manager recently spoke about returning to this project after it was complete.
“Taking on a large-scale stream restoration like the Snow Creek Uncas Preserve Restoration Project is something I’ve still not grown accustomed to. After nearly 20 years, marching into the woods and the stream to set things right with heavy equipment remains daunting. A great deal of care and thought goes into not just a project’s results, but also into how to get those results without damaging the very resources we are working to restore. Restoration work often means that trees get pushed over and earth gets turned, and a little piece of me still cringes, maybe even yells, “Watch out for that frog!” Sure, the trees end up in the stream and the turned earth gets smoothed, mulched and planted, and most of the frogs survive to double their numbers in all the waters we are creating. But the process to get there feels messy and hard!
This fall I had one of those moments that reminds me that all the hard work is worth it. I was paying the Snow Creek Uncas Preserve project a visit to see how it was evolving. I knew the summer chum run was on but also realized that they rarely run up this high due to their depleted numbers. As I walked up the channel, I didn’t see fish, simultaneously thinking to myself “gosh I hope they can clear all this wood we stuck in the channel” and “well, they don’t usually get up this far”. Then, a white patch in the streambed, a dead spawned out summer chum came into view. A little further up I found a dead spawner up on a log, leftovers from a river otter lunch.
“They are making it into the project, this is great!” As I turned the next bend in the creek that excitement became elation. In the reach before me I saw a gob of summer chum, rolling, spawning, shooting through the shallow riffles! These fish were higher in the system than had ever been documented since their decline, and they kept going. On up out of the project I went, peering over onto private lands and seeing even more summer chum up there, tearing the riffle crests into redds.
My time up, I turned to return to the car, amazed that just 13 months since construction had concluded, these fish had moved higher than ever before to use this newly restored habitat. Deep down I always knew the hard work would benefit the fish, but a part of me needed to see it to believe it. And here we are, the fish splashing on the restoration practitioner as if to say, “Have faith, it’s working, and it was worth it.”