A few 2010 accomplishments

.HRT’s activity on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and in the Hoh River watershed is directed toward protecting and restoring a habitat corridor for listed species along the Hoh River outside of the Olympic National Park. The Hoh River Trust owns lands purchased by the Western Rivers Conservancy and managed in accordance with our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved Land and Forest Management Plan. Our land base is composed of the river, its floodplain and a young upland industrial forest. With work and time, it will mature to a mixed species, late seral stage forest with healthy, functional riparian stands along the Hoh River, side channels and tributary streams. Benefitting from the same management are the watershed‘s strong salmon and char populations. In Washington, salmon restoration can access public funding, while there is very little available for ESA species.

We’ve been active on several fronts: we’re involved in local salmon recovery planning via the North Peninsula Coastal Lead Entity (NPCLE) and the WRIA 20 Watershed Planning group. Involvement at the grass roots level enables us to propose better projects for the Washington State Salmon Recovery Funding Board (SRFB). We are active with professional forestry and ecological restoration organizations. We reach out to local colleges and high schools and have been hosting paid student internships since we began. Intern’s can be real assets to our organization. To broaden their West End experience and to cross train, we often share our interns with partner organizations such as the Pacific Coastal Salmon Coalition and the Hoh Tribe’s Natural Resources Department. Interns often bring project ideas they can do for credit and further HRT’s goals at the same time.

This summer we finished several major projects which rewarded years of planning, field work and partnering. According to state law, every forest landowner must deal with its “orphaned” forest roads. They must be either brought back up to standard or decommissioned by 2014. We’ve acquired miles of these along with quite a few stream crossings which block or limit fish passage. Our goal of habitat restoration allows us many opportunities for creative road decommissioning. And as a legal Small Forest Landowner, we are eligible to compete for state funding to repair or remove problem forest roads.

In the case of our Pole Creek sub basin, we had an excellent chance to deal with an aging mid-slope road system and consolidate a major wildlife corridor. This followed parallel tributaries up the slope connecting a remnant old growth patch on the floodplain via several 55 to 65 year old forest stands beginning to develop good structure, toward the crest of Willoughby ridge including all likely salmonid habitat. The corridor will benefit forest dependant birds, amphibians and mammals, with elk and bear currently strong. The lowest portions have known Marbled Murrelet and Bald eagle use.

Making the restoration issue more challenging, the old five foot culvert where Pole Cr. crossed the Upper Hoh County road failed twice within the planning period, buried under debris torrents. The problem site cut off tourist traffic to the Hoh Rainforest campground in the National Park. Years of accumulated damage had decimated anadromous fish usage of the upper system. Although Jefferson County owned the pipe and the road right of way, it had no funds to do more than band-aid repairs, making salmon recovery funding (the SRFB in particular) the only likely source of repair money. The crossing was surrounded by HRT land. As a non-profit, we were eligible to apply for state funding.

We and the NPCLE technical committee suggested building a concrete bridge to replace the old culvert. Much wider space was needed to pass the 100 year flow and salmon. Luckily, our Forest Service friends had records of Pole Creek’s smolt production in the early 1990’s, before the culvert was damaged. It showed that many hundreds of young King, Coho, Cutthroat and steelhead had once used Pole Cr. as rearing and high flow/off channel habitat. Without solid baseline on fish usage this project would have gone nowhere. Our interns spent three summers doing stream inventory and trapping smolts to document the extent of the problem.

We applied to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA, and the Washington state WWRP program without success. By 2007 we broke our proposal into two phases: a road decommissioning plan for upper Pole Cr. and a concrete bridge project for the County road. The bridge project was rated #1 for that year by NPCLE. The SRFB approved $350K, with $50K matches from both the U.S. Forest Service and Jefferson County Public Works Dept. In addition we supplied rock for the bypass road and then reused it to decommission an old gravel pit (another $56K match). Co-management was with the Pacific Coastal Salmon Coalition. Quigg Brothers of Hoquiam did the work.

The Upper Pole Cr. Road Decommissioning Project had to wait another year but since phase 2 was funded, phase 1 was small potatoes. We again had the #1 rated project for the year. Upper Pole was awarded $70K with an additional $20K match from the Hoh Tribe for reforestation and erosion control. Ten stream crossings were excavated to the original stream banks, with gravel and wood added for stability. The unneeded portion of the SP-1100 road was scarified, water barred and mulched under slash. A Forks contractor, J&D Enterprises, did this quickly and economically. This winter the Hoh Tribe’s Natural Resources crew will plant the old road bed with trees.

Since we were cutting off access to our young forest plantation (temporarily- for about 25 years), we pre-commercially thinned 150 acres to accelerate tree growth and to improve species diversity. Thinning was paid for by the USDA WHIP program and done by local Olympic Camp crews during spring of 2010. We (and our interns) had already done the boundary marking and set up the prescriptions.

This summer was only exceptional in that several years of shared effort focused on one watershed. We now have nearly 7500 acres of less dramatic but real forest and stream restoration to do. Each bad culvert repaired or removed adds a new reach of stream open to fish or high flows. We have a chance to escape the major weed infestations that have affected other Peninsula rivers. We’ve been part of the 10,000 Year Foundation’s campaign on Knotweed for five years and each year, they find a little more. The majority of our forest stands are young and in need of non-commercial thinning. Our waters are cold, but not as cold as they used to be, since we have many streams listed on Ecology’s 303D list for warmth during summer low flows.

I can’t over emphasize the importance of having operating funds to cover outreach and our presence in the Hoh watershed. These allow us to take the lead in setting up good projects and to follow through with monitoring and fulfilling our greater mission. Competitive funding requires match by the proponent, often as much as 100%. And, contributing our field work to a partner’s grant proposal has just as much potential to do good work in the Hoh basin.

Competition for SRFB money is intense because it’s one of a very small number of grants that apply to HRT’s unique situation. We are not eligible for many programs because we aren’t located in a focus watershed (grants by Ecotrust) or Puget Sound (the Puget Sound Partnership). We have no dams to remove (NOAA-Open Rivers and the Elwha River mega project) and do not have a damaged estuary (NOAA-Coastal). As a recognized salmon refugia (The Nature Conservancy), we have fairly good Coho runs but others are well below historic levels. Except for Bull Trout in the main channel, we score no points for “endangered” stocks. So, its pretty much up to us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.