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More than 2,000 whole trees pulled out of an Olympic National Forest stand are being transported about one mile this week to a big bend in the river, about 11 miles upstream from where it empties into Hood Canal in Mason County.
The transporter is a twin-rotor, heavy-duty helicopter hired by the U.S. Forest Service to strategically place the trees, which will be arranged in engineered log jams.
The large woody debris piles, which will be buried in the stream bed and river banks, will serve multiple purposes, Forest Service fish biologist Marc McHenry said.
“They provide places for fish to hide, help cool the water and retain spawning gravel for the fish to use,” he said.
This section of the river upstream of the Skokomish River gorge was heavily logged in the 1950s and ’60s to prepare a lake reservoir for a dam that was never built.
Starved of trees, the river grew wide and shallow, causing water temperatures to rise and fish to lose habitat.
“We’re trying to jump-start the recovery of the river’s riparian zone,” McHenry said. The woody structures should help create a deeper, narrower river channel that will cool the water temperatures enough so they will no longer violate federal water-quality standards.
Fish likely to benefit from the habitat-restoration project include two stocks listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act – Puget Sound steelhead and Puget Sound coastal bull trout, McHenry said. Other fish that frequent the area include coho, chinook, rainbow trout and cutthroat trout.
The $1.2 million project, financed chiefly with state and federal salmon recovery money, has the support of the Skokomish Tribe and the Skokomish Watershed Action Team, a coalition of government, tribal and conservation groups dedicated to healing the environmental damage done by decades of intense logging in the Skokomish River watershed.
By the 1990s, an estimated 80 percent of the South Fork Skokomish had been logged and hundreds of miles of logging roads had been built, delivering sediment to streams and the river, according to an Olympic National Forest assessment to support the project.
For 20 years, the emphasis in the Skokomish has shifted from logging to habitat restoration. Many of the old logging roads have been or will be decommissioned.
And this summer’s woody debris project in the South Fork Skokomish is the largest of its kind in the watershed, said hydrology technician Larry Ogg, a former Forest Service employee working as a contractor to oversee the project.
Armed with a 150-foot-long cable, the helicopter carried the uprooted, second-growth trees up to a weight limit of about 5 tons.
Each individual load of wood could grow in weight as the fuel supply in the helicopter decreased, Forest Service employee Don Svetich said.
Svetich marveled at the ability of the helicopter pilot employed by Columbia Helicopter in Portland to stand the trees upright along the river so they fell into place like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
In a few days, when the helicopter work is completed, another Portland contractor, Aquatic Contracting, will descend on the site with heavy equipment to anchor the trees in various configurations deep in the ground so they won’t be washed away by high river flows in the winter.
“About two-thirds of the wood will be buried,” McHenry said.
Over time, project supporters hope the braided river channel in this stretch of the river will narrow from about 350 feet to 200 feet, allowing trees that are growing in the floodplain to mature and eventually feed the river with woody debris.
John Dodge: 360-754-5444 jdodge@theolympian.com
