Story and photos by Jamie Bass, Olympic Field Forester for TNC in Washington
In September 2020, thanks to the funding from the state Washington State Coast Restoration and Resilience Initiative, The Nature Conservancy completed a step towards whole system restoration of our coastal streams on our Olympic Forest Reserves. The grant funded a series of thinning, planting of native riparian trees, weed treatments, and, most impressively, the installation of large woody debris jams "log jams" in Shale Creek, a tributary of the Clearwater and Queets River.
It is still dark out when I pulled the truck into the gravel pit, and yet this dim rock quarry is already full of white trucks and bustling people. Behind me a crew van pulls up and out tumbles a handful of chortling men, exchanging greetings in mixed Spanish and English. Wet dew on the grass and a sleepy forester aside, it looks like we have an absolute bluebird of a day on the way. Perfect weather to teach trees how to fly.
Light dapples Shale Creek, a tributary to the Clearwater and Queets rivers in our Olympic Rainforest Reserves.
When the sun does come up, it comes right up over the tree line and casts green-gold beams of light on the twin rotor helicopter resting in the grassy landing before me. After months of late night last minute calls and recalculating budget numbers until “=sum(X:X)” was tattooed on the back of my eyelids, it seems a prophetically good sign, a blessing on all our work nearly done.
As for myself, I twist and stretch in the September dawn light as the crew gathers for a morning safety briefing. Behind my face mask I'm groaning as I attempt to relax the last vestiges of a stress-induced sciatic muscle clench that had sent me crying for heat pads and ibuprofen the night before. I'll be up at the gravel pit or "landing" for the first part of the day helping the contractors find what they need and sending it flying to Shale Creek just on the other side of the road. As Kyle Smith, our TNC Washington Forest Manager, starts breaking up teams and I get outfitted with a radio harness that will allow me to talk to the pilots and landing crew, I'm eyeing the piles of root wads and bundles of slash, redoing sums, rechecking details of lengths and weights in my head.
Columbia Helicopter is well-practiced in conservation work installing woody debris log jams in streams for restoration.
Luckily this helicopter crew, Columbia Helicopter, is well practiced in building homes for salmon. There are three maintenance crew members fueling the copter now, telling me what to expect and how to stay out of the way. One of the two pilots approach me, and, from six feet apart, we talk about the inherent hilarity of threading 24-inch-wide, 60-foot root wads together with an 80-foot helicopter floating 200 feet in the air.
The field crews take off and I pull out the packet of engineering specs done for TNC by Natural Systems Design. Our goal today is to build, via the placement of root wad, slash, and boulder, 8-10 large woody debris jams in Shale Creek. We'll go until we run out of materials or run out of money for operating the helicopter, whichever comes first.
Huge logs with big rootwads are chained together to create log jams that will add complexity to a riverbed, making places for salmon to rest, hide and feed.
Each jam has eight root wad trees (a log with the root wad still attached), four 3-foot wide bundles of slash and logs bound with rope, and fifteen rock collars. The rock collars are the newest development to our plans, an attempt to keep a bundle of logs from getting blown downriver by the fury of Washington's coastal winter rains, like happened during our last pilot project. Two boulders, each weighing 3,000-4,000 pounds, are connected by a 5/8" wire drilled in six inches and held via an epoxy that is truly a miracle of modern science.
I glace over at the hunks of purple and taupe basalt, 280 of them, waiting in rows to be hauled into the air and dropped into a creek. They remind me of glacial erratics, boulders placed far from their source by a slow and steady, but immensely powerful process. Not unlike the force of the Salmon Recovery state grants that has funded this project and other similar projects to bring these boulders here. Years and years of trying to stabilize and improve salmon populations via log jam trial and experiment in streams statewide, years and years of lobbying and public outcry for the proper funding to save streams before they erode too deep and dry out in the summer.
Looking to my right I see the root wads similarly stacked and ready to fly, but these pilgrims came from less than a few miles down the road. The beauty of our forest reserve is not only can we grow trees to generate diverse habitat or timber resources, but we can grow the materials we need to restore the streams on our property. Finding big timber can be hard these days, but when you've invested in long rotational harvests and conservation forestry on this kind of scale, you know you'll never run out.
It might look like a pile of logs but it’s a powerful force for salmon restoration.
The field crews are in place, and the helicopter starts up its 50-foot rotors. The chin strap on my hard hat squeaks alarmingly as the rotor wash wind hits me hard, kicking up dust and then my anticipation. The hat stays on, though I lose my engineering papers. The helicopter is floating overhead, dangling a 200-foot cable with a choker hook on the end, and then it grabs one of the root wads and zooms away high and out of sight behind the tree line.
After this the morning goes fast. Rocks swinging on their little wire rope and bundles of branches and logs zip away. Part of me laughs, thinking of the months of logging, permits, surveys, and hair-pulling it took to bring in and stage all that material, just vanishing before my eyes. Catharsis.
At some point Kyle calls me on the radio, they need me in the river with the site crews. Tomorrow I have to build these salmon Lincoln-log houses myself and I need to learn before the day is done. When I park my truck at the access site, the helicopter is hauling root wads overhead a little way away. For a moment seeing a tree fly strikes me thoughtless. It's not just a log, I can see little confused sword ferns and moss clinging to the base of roots, a remaining Douglas-fir needled branch, all fluttering wildly as I see a bit of forest fly by at high speed.
Once I'm down in the river, the calm I had at the gravel pit is gone. It's all action and rotor wash, running over wet rock beds and shouting into radios. Every time the helicopter comes to drop a payload, something in the lizard brain bellows as this huge force comes in from overhead, making trees sway and water ripple, and then extend a long arm into your little cove to place a massive chunk of wood or boulder down. Even from the safe distance, the experience is a pure adrenal gland blaze. At some point it occurs to me that I'm getting a lesson in the experience of salmon. It's summer and they're at sea right now, but what it must have been like being a fish when these streams were logged of old growth cedar and spruce back in the day. Immense forces beyond your control.
As soon as the copter leaves you have to run back in, place flag markers while examining your tattered engineering specs, give instructions to the gravel pit crew, and then evacuate back to the safe distance. This repeats every 2-4 minutes so the day passed in a hyper-focused burn of muscles and hormones. The field crew is used to this, they joke and snack while Kyle and I babble excitedly and stare wide-eyed at each other in amazement. At some point I'm throwing my body over a massive mossy log when a big crack noise comes from my back. Just like that my tight sciatic muscle is loose and happy. The rest of the day I'm laughing, the last bit of stress over this project purged physically from me, and all that's left is exhilaration and joy.
Heading to a safe place after flagging a log jam.
The next day we finish up the jams, using up all the materials we had staged into nine gorgeous (to my eyes) log jams placed to slow the stream down, prevent erosions, keep gravels and sediment in place, etc. To be honest this fades from my mind as the river quiets back down to the normal sounds of water trickling and red alder whispers. One of the rock bars has become my nap spot as I wait for Kyle to finish up with the crew who all shouted goodbye to me over the radios. Tomorrow they'll be in Clallam Bay for another conservation NGO's log jam install. Next week we'll be back to install cameras and bolt the log jams together.
Near my feet is a little red cedar seedling we planted last spring to re-establish shade tolerant conifer in the creek where it will be needed long after I'm no more than dust. All I can deliriously think of now is how beautiful it looks, twinkling green in the rainy sun by my boots
A tiny cedar seedling holds the promise of the forest to come.
With the time dilation vision all foresters possess, I can see the cedar seedling already 20 feet or 100 feet tall. I see its top breaking in a bad winter storm and sprouting four tops like a candelabra. I see it huge and dark and moldering, another log caught up in a future log jam next to where it once grew, once the ecological cycle of this river is reestablished. Cedars smell the sweetest when they're river-pickled like that, and I can't help imagine that some salmon pilgrim smelling it in the water would find it as pleasing as I do.
Forester Jamie Bass explores one of the trees that will become a log jam for salmon and stream restoration.
