by Addie Schlussel | September 2020

This summer, we said goodbye to one of our favorite lunch spots, an old farm bridge across Ohop Creek. The bridge was not so good for driving, at least not anymore. It was made out of wooden planks resting on the metal frame of a flatbed railroad car, and as the planks rotted over time, a former landowner seemed to have simply piled on more, creating a layer cake of wood decking in various stages of decay. But it was still walkable and made a great lunch spot with a lovely view of Ohop Creek passing underfoot.

Still, the bridge had to go. Located on the middle reaches of Ohop Creek, the bridge’s footings were causing the creek banks to erode. During the floods this past February, several feet of both banks were swept away. One more flood like that, and the bridge might have been washed away too.
Erosion like this can reduce water quality and clog salmon spawning gravels with fine silt and sand. This reach of Ohop Creek contains important spawning habitat for Chinook, chum, Coho, and pink salmon; and provides important rearing habitat for steelhead trout. Salmon spawn in gravel, where fresh water can easily make its way between the stones and eggs to keep the eggs well-oxygenated and healthy.

So, for the sake of the salmon, we pulled out the bridge. And before the bridge was removed, we partnered with the Nisqually Indian Tribe to get a jump start on restoring floodplain forest on the south side of the creek. The Tribe’s Restoration Crew planted over 10,000 native trees and shrubs; an Eagle Scout built 20 bird boxes, many of which have been installed on the south side of the creek; and a culvert was removed from the south end of the old farm road to eliminate a seasonal fish passage barrier on a tributary channel. These restoration activities have been supported through funding from the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Washington Recreation and Conservation Office.

The Big Day, as we called it, was preceded by months of paperwork and weeks of preparation on the ground by our contractor, but the removal of the bridge itself was pretty fast. Within an hour, the bridge was attached to a very, very large crane, lifted up, and put on one of the longest truck beds I’ve ever seen, and that was that.

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As we head into the rainy season and start to see the salmon returning, it feels good to know that we’ve taken one more small step towards reducing the pressures faced by our watershed’s salmon.

Still, though, I can’t help feeling a little bit sad about losing that lunch spot.

by Courtney Murphy | August 2020

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.

We also urge you to follow boater safety guidelines – like the ones listed on the Nisqually River Water Trail website.

Stay safe, and enjoy the river!

by Courtney Murphy | June 2020

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.

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.

by Addie Schlussel | May 2020

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.

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.

by Sarah McCarthy | April 2020

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.

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.

We’re keeping busy with work at home and Volunteer Coordinator Sarah McCarthy compiled these photos of volunteers and staff to share with you. We look forward to sharing time in the field with you later this year!
Snapshots of Volunteers and Staff Caring for Nisqually Land Trust Properties

by Courtney Murphy | April 2020

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.

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?

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.

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.

 

by Addie Schlussel | February 2019

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.

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.

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.