Stewardship Surprises at Lackamas Flats

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.