Monday the 22nd

Today we had another early morning at 6:00am, no extra hour of sleep for us! We had to make sure we would have plenty of time for our activity today, making beaver dam analogs! I would like to express my gratitude to Yakima Nation fisheries and the Yakima nation for allowing us the opportunity to visit and attempt to restore some of their ancestral lands. I realize the significance and importance of the land we were permitted to try and help improve. The people helping us learn what to do and who are in charge of working on this project are Jeanette Burkhart, who is a watershed planner, Gerard Foley, who is a habitat biologist, and David Lindley, who is a habitat coordinator. We spent the day working in a meadow that swamp creek runs through, and we were attempting to raise the creek to allow the wetland to flood. This will slow down the water as it goes to Cunningham creek and eventually the Klickitat River. This will improve conditions for Steelhead and salmon, and is going to be very important work moving forward as the climate gets hotter, our glaciers recede, and our snowpack dwindles each year. It will also increase biodiversity in the valley itself, allowing birds like the Sandhill Crane to return, which is currently threatened and relies on beaver habitat. At some point in the past, this job was actually done by beavers, and we could see some of the old dams that they had built, with one running the span of almost the whole valley we were in. Unfortunately, there are no beavers in the area now and the lack of willows and trees would make it hard for them to move back in. That is another reason we were making these dams, in the hope that one day beavers can be reintroduced here. The valley we were working in was hit by the Cougar creek fire that tore through the area around Adams in 2015.

It burnt this valley even though the beaver dams had been keeping everything as wetlands, and the crew we were working under didn’t know why! They said typically that areas with beavers wouldn’t burn, but either due to a drought or a backburn or even that the beavers had left could’ve been the reason the fire was still able to spread here. It was a lot of hard work to get these two beaver dam analogs built, but I had a great time doing it. We started by laying smaller lodgepole pines down in the streambed and used willow stakes to secure them. We then weaved in copious amount of willow branches and piled sediment from upstream between them. At the end we placed some large dead trees over all of the material to hold things in place, and also wedged them into the sides of the stream. Getting to see the stream start to back up as we worked was great motivation to keep pushing! I think we did a darn good job, and our dams look very sturdy. We also spent around 10-15 minutes repairing a dam that was built last year on the POBR trip, and got it to slow the water and back up the stream very quickly. Thank you again to Jeanette, David, and Gerard for the experience today and helping us learn more about restoration, I’d love to be able to help out again someday!