Land trust begins restoration work on parcel that includes winding Skookumchuck River

A section of the Skookumchuck River and the land it runs through is being restored by the Capitol Land Trust and several other state and private agencies to make the river better habitat for salmon.

Capitol Land Trust secured a conservation easement for the 74-acre parcel from its owners and is working with land conservancy non-profit Forterra, the Office of the Chehalis Basin, the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office, the Thurston Conservation District, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Department of Ecology to enhance the land’s natural features.

The owners of the land (who declined to be interviewed) presented a great opportunity for conservation, Capitol land Trust Land Protections Manager Thom Woodruff told The Olympian. “They not only want to protect the land altruistically, keep it like it is for habitat, but they want to go to the next level and they’re allowing all this restoration to occur on their property.”

The easement will permanently protect the land from future development, and while the owners will still be able to use the land for agricultural purposes as they have done in the past, the land’s transformation into habitat for salmon and wildlife has already begun.

New vegetation including endangered oak trees are being planted on the property, and in the river, 20-foot-long logs are being put in horizontally to stabilize the banks.

Other logs are being placed in the river vertically to create beaver dam analogs, man-made structures that mimic the function of beaver dams. The logs will give fish places to hide from predators and oxygenate water as it flows through.

A runoff channel also is being dug and when complete, it will prevent the river from overflowing and eroding its banks in the event of heavy rains or an increase in water flow. The runoff channel may end up creating an oxbow lake, which Woodruff said smaller fish especially like.

All this work is being done to create a better environment for salmon, Woodruff said. “If we can do restoration work, the idea is we’ll be able to increase [the salmon’s] numbers, increase the habitat for them, and what’s good for salmon — they’re like an indicator species— is good for everything, particularly once we get out to the ocean where we have the orcas.”

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is renovating the river upstream from the easement location and in other rivers in the Chehalis Basin, Woodruff said, as part of the Chehalis Basin Strategy, which was initially proposed by former Gov. Chris Gregoire after devastating floods in 2007 and 2009.

In 2014, Gov. Jay Inslee ordered the strategy’s proposed work begin, which in the near-term would restore aquatic species habitat and reduce the damage that could occur during a flood. The long-term goals for the strategy are finding ways to reduce damage from flooding while also improving the habitat for aquatic wildlife, the state Department of Ecology website says.

The Chehalis Basin is roughly 2,700 square miles of river systems that flow from Lewis County, through Thurston and up to Grays Harbor. In between the many rivers lie wastewater treatment plants, homes, businesses, farms and other structures that if flooded can have devastating impacts on the environment.

Work to secure properties throughout the basin has been completed over the past few years with more to come. The Chehalis Basin Strategy’s website boasts that roughly $23 million in state funding is invested in “local projects throughout the basin.”

The section of Skookumchuck River the Capitol Land Trust is helping restore is only a small section of river, but it could have big impact: It is roughly two miles from a Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife salmon hatchery that releases hatchery-raised salmon into the river.

Woodruff wants to work on a longer stretch of the river, but to do that he’d need to get permission from the adjacent property owner, TransAlta. Ideally, TransAlta — a Canadian energy company that owns and operates the Skookumchuck dam the river flows from — will help with the conservation efforts in the region.

“They may come around and become a cooperator on this whole effort and then instead of 3,000 or 3,600 feet like this river, now we can start talking miles,” Woodruff said.