Paddlers should be aware of spanning logs along the Nisqually. This log, located a couple of river miles upstream of the Centralia Diversion Dam, spans half of the river.
As the end of summer approaches, you may be thinking of doing some boating or floating on the Nisqually River. With its relatively undeveloped shoreline and impressive natural landscape, the Nisqually is a popular river for kayakers and rafters. However, some of those natural features that make the Nisqually desirable for recreation can also lead to dangerous situations.
Earlier blog posts described some of the shoreline changes that happened along the Nisqually during the February 2020 flood flows. Over the last few months, we’ve received several reports of spanning logs that are across the river along the same reach of the river – the 6 mile stretch above the Centralia Diversion Dam – starting a bit upstream of river mile 26 and extending upstream to river mile 32 (just above the confluence of the river and Tanwax Creek).
Before your next trip on the Nisqually, be sure to research these potential hazards and talk with experienced paddlers who have been on the river recently.
The passage of time is confusing for a lot of us right now, but let’s try to do some mental time travel. Can you remember what you were doing six months ago?
If you are a Nisqually Land Trust volunteer or staff member, you were likely planting live stakes!
Last winter was the first time I encountered a live stake. I didn’t plant any during the 2018-2019 planting season, and though I’d heard people talk about them and seen evidence (in the form of surviving live stakes planted in years past), they seemed somewhat mythical. When I took the truck to pick up the first round of live stakes from Sound Native Plants and saw several bundles of sticks waiting for me, I wasn’t entirely convinced they would become plants.
Live stakes are branches that are harvested from mature hardwood trees and shrubs while they are dormant during the winter. Usually, live stakes are planted along stream banks and in wetland areas. The stakes we planted last winter—black cottonwood, Pacific willow, and Sitka willow—were three feet long and cut diagonally on one end. The goal is to insert the sharp end into the ground so only half the stake protrudes. The nodes underground become roots, and the nodes above ground grow leaves and eventually, branches. Species that do well as live stakes have naturally high levels of the plant rooting hormone indolebutyric acid (IBA).
In practice, planting live stakes feels a bit silly, like you’re just shoving a stick into the ground. If the soil is wet enough, you are sometimes able to push the stake deep enough without a tool. If the soil is too compacted, you can use a tool that looks like a pogo stick made of rebar (known as a dibble bar) to make a pilot hole, and then drive the stake in with a mallet. We planted 1450 native trees using this method last winter.
Last week I went to check the growth of our live stakes, and was delighted to see that they are thriving throughout the watershed!
When we planted these willow live stakes in the Lower Ohop, some volunteers were skeptical they would grow well due to compacted soil conditions. Despite this challenge, and surrounding grass that’s taller than me, the plants look great! Even stakes with frayed tops from the impact of being hammered into the ground during planting are shooting out green leaves and new stem growth.
This willow at the Mashel River Protected Area was planted several years ago as a live stake. Hopefully, the live stakes we planted last winter will continue to thrive and look like this in a few years!
Thanks to the rain this spring, the sites at Lackamas Flats and Van Eaton are wetter than when we planted them. Even in the Lower Ohop north of Peterson Road, where it was difficult to plant even with the pogo sticks due to compacted soil, they are shooting out leaves and new growth like crazy.
At Brighton Creek the reed canary grass is taller than me, but the live stakes don’t seem to care. They’re on their way to growing taller than the grass, so they can eventually reach the sunlight and shade it out.
We all know that it’s been an unusual year so far. Even before a virus introduced us to a new world of teleworking and bleach wipes, winter floods had already caused radical changes for the Nisqually and many other western Washington rivers.
Along the Nisqually River mainstem, the Land Trust property that has seen the most dramatic shoreline changes is our Lackamas Flats Protected Area. Back in 1996, flooding here cut a 70-acre island off from the mainland. This island persisted through these most recent floods, but now has a log jam made up of hundreds of logs on its previously open shoreline. Here are pictures from approximately the same spot on the south edge of the island taken in January and March 2020. The first two are looking upstream and the second two are looking downstream.
January 2020 – View upstream from south edge of the Lackamas Flats island.
March 2020 – Stewardship Assistant Courtney peers upstream from her perch on the new Lackamas Flats log jam.
Although difficult for us humans to clamber around, log jams like this one are beneficial to the Nisqually River ecosystem. Log jams improve habitat quality by creating pools and providing cover. Wood also increases the retention of organic matter and nutrients and helps create islands and new channels. These river features provide additional refuge and habitat, especially for rearing juvenile salmon and trout.
January 2020 – View downstream from south edge of the Lackamas Flats island.
March 2020 – View downstream at log jam deposited during February flood.
Across the river and less than a mile upstream, the flood’s impacts were less positive. Here, one area lost 30 horizontal feet of bank, with the river creeping ever closer to a life estate residence. And just downstream of this area of bank erosion, we now have the opposite problem: too much land. Some of our newly planted native trees and shrubs, including some that are hundreds of feet from the river, are now covered in a foot or more of sand and mud deposited by the river when the floodwaters retreated. Hopefully, some of these plants will tough it out – but many probably won’t.
March 2020 – Gravel beach widened by flood.
Further upstream, at the Powell Pastures, we found that the river had shifted east, doubling the size of a gravel beach there and cutting a side channel off from the river. And further downstream, at our Thurston Ridge Protected Area, we found the opposite situation. The side channel along the toe of the bluff there is now deeper and wider than before.
It’s sometimes hard for me to take the long view on this flood when I’m looking at our scraggly baby trees covered in dirt or hearing about the flood’s human impacts. But flooding on the Nisqually is normal. We can see signs of this in the land. The floodplain is marked by countless old channels that the river has abandoned, often by carving a new path during a flood. The Nisqually River has been flooding and wriggling around in its basin for as long as there’s been a Nisqually.
Floods bring challenges and dangers, for sure. But I also feel lucky to work around an ever-changing river—one that will keep surprising us with new twists and turns, new places to explore, and new giant piles of sand.
Imagine you’re walking and you come across a plant or creature that looks unlike anything you’ve seen before. You don’t know what this thing is- but its bright colors and sharp features set off some internal alarm. You feel as if this unknown thing is out of place, is threatening to the norm, could it be a new invasive species?
A few of us had this experience while working in the Ohop Creek Protected Area a few months ago. We were focused on adjusting some bird boxes in the trees and were distracted by an unusual plant on the ground. It was February and there were several stalks standing tall, taller than the trees and shrubs planted a year ago. It had a bright red stem and long, drooping, sharp, bright green leaves. It looked out of place, downright alien. Instinctively, we knew not to touch it.
Caper Spurge at Ohop Creek Protected Area.
Fortunately, we live in a time where we can access seemingly limitless information from devices in our pocket and as they say, ‘there’s an app for everything’. To identify the strange plant we’d found, we enlisted the help of a smartphone app called Seek by iNaturalist. This app uses a photo and crowd-sourced data to instantly identify plants and animals. Amazingly, we were able to name our unknown plant within minutes of finding it.
According to Seek, what we found was called Caper Spurge. Other names for the plant include Euphorbia lathyris, Paper Spurge, Gopher Spurge, and Mole Plant. Our suspicion that the plant was invasive was confirmed, the Caper Spurge is native to Southern Europe, Northwest Africa, and Western Asia.
All parts of the plant are toxic, which is the origin of the name ‘Mole Plant’. It is planted in gardens to repel pests such as moles. This is also the reason it was brought out of its native range.
It’s always exciting to learn to identify a new species; the instant gratification provided by the Seek app is fantastic. This new tool gave us the information needed to immediately control the new weed, and is a great addition to our stewardship tool box.
And it turns out that the Caper Spurge is easy to remove. The shallow roots easily come up with a shovel. We donned gloves for handling and disposed of it in plastic bags to prevent any vegetative regrowth.
In February, the Nisqually River reached a flood stage of 12.09 feet, the highest since the historic flood of 1996, when the river rose to 17.13 feet at the McKenna gauge.
The shorelines of many Land Trust properties underwent significant changes—the river cut away 30 feet of bank at one site, created gravel bars, gathered massive log jams, established new side channels, and put old ones out of commission. But perhaps the most common sign of the flood I’ve run into are large swaths of sand and silt the Nisqually left behind when it receded to lower levels. Two feet deep in many places, these deposits tell the story of the river’s trajectory as it swelled over its banks and flowed over the floodplain, leaving debris and the forms of ripples behind.
These sand deposits have been fun for stewardship staff and volunteers to explore, and have given us insight into the possibilities of the Nisqually’s behavior. But they’ve also given us a chance to learn about our neighbors, both human and animal, and the ways they interact with our properties and with the river.
When I came across one of these deposits at Lackamas Flats, the first thing I noticed were the tracks scattered across the sand.
Evidence of a raccoon crossing a large deposit of sand to access the Nisqually River at our Lackamas Flats Protected Area.
Stewardship staff are used to seeing certain types of tracks—we never pass up the opportunity to follow an elk trail as an alternative to bushwhacking through thick brushy forest, for example. Or maybe we see the stray deer or coyote print where the ground is soft. But the number of species and individuals crossing the flood deposits to access the river was incredible.
On the Lackamas Flats sand deposits, we identified the prints of deer, racoons, squirrels and other small rodents, many types of birds, as well as the tracks of a human neighbor and his dog. A Lackamas Flats site steward saw a paw print that another neighbor identified as a cougar track.
When I see these tracks, I can’t help but imagine scenarios surrounding who put them there. Are the many raccoon tracks a family making their way to the river to take a drink or eat insects in the sand, several unrelated raccoons throughout the night, or one individual who really knows their way around the riverbank? At another sand deposit on the Yelm Shoreline Protected Area, I saw the tracks of raccoons, deer, and an animal with very large paws using the same narrow winding trail, their prints right on top of each other. Was there a pursuit of some sort going on? Or was that somehow the most efficient trail?
Deer, raccoon, and human tracks trail throughout last year’s Nisqually River Education Project planting at Lackamas Flats. The young trees didn’t seem to enjoy the flood changes as well as the animals did.
I was struck by how the animals crossing the sand deposits seemed to ignore and skirt around our white tree protectors. While one of our primary land management goals is restoring riparian forest for fish and wildlife, the resident animals often have differing or even antithetical land management strategies.
Resident beavers love to harvest our young willows and cottonwoods as soon as they get to a healthy, well-established size so that they can create pools and dens. Elk diligently maintain trails throughout supposedly-undeveloped properties, and often don’t mind if their paths need to cross directly through a planted area. As much as it brings me joy to know animals are thriving on Land Trust property, it can be frustrating to these impacts.
However, seeing the tracks on the sand deposits, in addition to just being an interesting field experience, gave me an opportunity to think about the collaborative and ever-changing nature of our work. The recent deposits of sand and sediment preserved the ways wildlife, neighbors, and Land Trust staff interacted with and explored a landscape altered by the river, previous property owners, and our land management.
Deep tracks in dried mud at the Powell Creek Protected Area. I’d like to believe they’re from a bobcat, but it’s probably more realistic that they belong to a neighbor’s dog.
There are a lot of moving pieces when it comes to stewardship and we can’t expect things to always be consistent. As much as we try to plan for the future, sometimes the river floods and dumps two feet of sand on top of our new plantings. And sometimes stewardship staff who usually spend the majority of their time in the field must learn to work from home due to the global situation.
Despite these challenges, Land Trust staff, volunteers, neighbors, and Nisqually Watershed wildlife continue to come together to learn, explore, and grow through new experiences.
One of my favorite aspects of working in stewardship is the newness of everything. Although I’ve been exploring Land Trust protected areas for the last year and a half, there are still so many places that I have yet to visit, and so many more that are always changing in beautiful and unexpected ways. Nature is constantly surprising me—and I love it.
One site that recently surprised me was our Lackamas Flats Protected Area. Lackamas Flats is located on a dynamic stretch of the Nisqually River, where flooding in the 1990s carved a side channel through a shoreline neighborhood and created a 70-acre island. Although I’ve visited the mainland section of Lackamas Flats many times, the island was like a bit of Land Trust lore to me: something that I’d heard of and told many people about, but that I’d never seen for myself.
So when it came time to plan a monitoring visit to Lackamas Flats, getting onto the island was top priority; we just needed a way to bridge the side channel. Although prospects looked bleak at first, we eventually found the fallen log of our dreams and balanced our way across, carefully avoiding the cloudy blue water below.
Nisqually River side-channel at Lackamas Flats
And what wonderful new treasures we found! Unlike the mainland’s brushy and sometimes sparse forest, the island was full of moss-covered maples, lush sword ferns, and towering cedars. Dips in the land were crowded with salmonberry and snowberry, and on the banks of the Nisqually, we found trees several feet in diameter that had been gnawed at by an overly ambitious beaver. Walking around here, I was struck by that special feeling of being in a place so rarely visited by people, yet even on this island, signs of humans weren’t completely absent. On the shoreline, we found a new patch of a non-native vine that had likely floated downriver, and in the forest, we found a padlock embedded deep in the bark of a tree, a reminder that parts of this land were developed just a few decades ago.
Tree padlock
Sometimes, the surprises that we find out in the woods aren’t exactly what we’d like to see. Even in places that we like to imagine as untouched by human hands, we still find weeds and trash and quirky tree padlocks, reminding us that humans have had and will continue to have an impact on all land, urban or remote. But I’m also constantly surprised by evidence of positive change: of healthy forest thriving where a subdivision once loomed, of beavers with grandiose plans for habitat manipulation, or of trees outcompeting all of the weird stuff that people like to attach to them. That’s the kind of newness that I love about working in the woods.
If approved by Washington voters, Initiative 1631 would impose a pollution fee on large emitters of greenhouse gases. The money raised would be used for certain environmental programs and projects. The fee would apply to fossil fuels sold or used within the state and electricity generated within or imported into the state.
Our mission is to acquire and manage critical lands to permanently benefit the water, wildlife, and people of the Nisqually River Watershed. The Land Trust Board of Directors has never before supported or opposed a ballot measure, but climate change seriously threatens our conservation mission and our essential vision and goals. The Initiative is a positive step to address this threat and has the potential to significantly benefit Nisqually River communities and habitat.
In August, the Board passed Resolution 2018-14 in support of the Initiative. You can read the resolution here.
When the rains start falling again, one of the first things I think about is culverts. – specifically, the 100+ culverts that carry water under forest roads on Nisqually Land Trust lands. Granted, culverts might not seem very exciting to most people, but it’s critical to make sure that we keep them clear of debris and functioning properly. Each fall, I spend time at the Land Trust’s Mount Rainier Gateway Forest Reserve, checking the property’s roads and culverts. The property encompasses over 3,000 acres and was historically managed for timber production. Part of the legacy at this site is a network of roads on steep terrain and these require regular maintenance.
While we’re committed to maintaining roads where they are needed for current and future management, we are also decommissioning roads that are no longer needed. Removing roads reduces forest fragmentation and improves stream conditions. The Land Trust is managing the Mount Rainier Gateway property for northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, endangered species that rely on old growth forest habitat and are sensitive to forest fragmentation. With funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we were able to abandon 1.7 miles of roads this year, bringing the total to 7 miles since 2012.
Excavator digging out culvert.
Abandoning these roads involves removing all of the culverts to restore more natural water drainage; roughening the road surface to promote rapid revegetation and improve water infiltration; and blocking the entrance to the abandoned road with a “tank trap” to prevent vehicle access. A tank trap is essentially a mound of earth in front of a ditch – something that even a tank would have trouble with.
We have been working with Tim Surface, an Ashford contractor, on this work since 2012. He’s a wealth of knowledge, and a great resource. Tim has been working in Ashford for 30+ years, and actually built a few of the roads on the property that he is now helping to remove.
It’s very satisfying to visit each stretch of abandoned road, it means that there are fewer culverts to check and maintain; and I have to admit that I’ve always felt that there are too many roads. It makes me happy to help remove a few miles of them. And over time, individual forest stands will merge and there will be greater forest connectivity and resilience.
There’s a lovely stretch of the Mashel River, just a few miles above its confluence with the Nisqually, where several old growth trees still stand along the bank. Land Trust volunteers have helped clear Scotch broom and blackberry, and plant native trees and shrubs along shoreline nearby. This is a great spot for contemplation and once the habitat work is done for the day, we always spend a little time just sitting on the riverbank, watching the water flow by.
Last February, after a morning of planting trees, we started to talk about one particularly huge Douglas-fir on the opposite bank. The sort of tree that would take at least four people to reach all the way around – more than 5 feet in diameter and about 250 feet tall. We noticed that the bank was being rapidly eroded, exposing the roots. We mused about the earth shaking event that was destined to come, and how we’d love to witness it from a safe distance.
Sometime in the past few months, this event has come to pass. This ancient tree fell directly across the river, spanning from the opposite bank to the bluff on the Land Trust side of the river. With little sign of damage to the trunk, I imagine this log will be here for quite some time.
Events like this have the power to change the course of rivers, and I immediately began to fret about all the trees we’d recently planted downstream of this log. I knew that we were planting in a channel migration zone, but the reality of that didn’t sink in until this tree fell. The area that we planted may end up underwater or scoured away, so I will have to rest assured that Scotch broom can’t grow in those conditions.
Although the life of this ancient tree may be over, its role in the ecosystem is far from finished. It will most certainly collect logs and debris and create new and diverse habitat features for years to come. Over time it will continue its journey down the river, adding nutrients to the water and food for insects and other animals. For the short term though, this will definitely be my favorite lunch spot!
The importance of large logs in river systems has been well documented in recent years and in some places it’s necessary to design and install engineered log jams to increase instream habitat complexity where there are few opportunities for natural log jams to develop. In places where large, old trees still grow along the shoreline, sometimes we can just let nature take its course.
by Courtney Murphy | June 2020
by Addie Schlussel | May 2020
by Sarah McCarthy | April 2020
by Courtney Murphy | April 2020
