Way, way off topic ! Stream restoration.

[GunnyMack]

Nothing gun related here except the fact that my hunting &fishing club has begun our stream restoration project! Each spring the heavy rains have eroded the banks, moved structure.
We have about a mile of a river, it's always been a beautiful stream, well off the beaten path- NO CELL SERVICE!
Anyhow we have been 9 years waiting on funding, permitting etc and finally the planets aligned and they started Tuesday. Man oh man it's amazing how the stream is changing for the better!

This pool used to be at most 12' wide and maybe 20' long and about 24" deep. Now it is about 20' wide, 60 foot long and close to 4foot deep with EXTREMELY low flows!
They are reworking 10 or 12 holes plus digging a few more.

20250904_140127.jpg

[geobru]

Gunny,
That looks really nice and I hope it lasts. I have seen several examples of attempts at stream restoration on the west side of the Cascades here in Washington. The runoff in the spring has a tendency to move rocks and level the streambed, or blow out whatever was added to create pools to slow down the flow.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I hope the structure changes hold up! It'll be very interesting to see how this hold up next spring.
Keep us posted over time on how this works out!

[Bill in Oregon]

Great project, Will! Not quite stream restoration, but I am signed up to help remove invasive vegetation on the Gila River later this month. This is Apache country, where Geronimo was born.

[Ysabel Kid]

Looks like a slice of heaven!

[jeepnik]

I'm suspicious when folks try to "improve" on mother natures water features. As a kid we had a cabin in Big Bear Ca. A fellow about a mile or so away wanted to build a cabin but decided he wanted it where a small stream (most years) was running. He hired a company to reroute it. The cabin was built and in due course we had a more snow than usual. Well mother nature being mother nature just put her, now no stream right back where she wanted it. The cabin was a total loss. The owner tried suing everyone involved. But that was the sixties and courts still thought folks should have enough sense not to build in a stream bed.

[GunnyMack]

Goebru, yes we are aware of that. We are fortunate that our stream is all rock- to the point of the excavator operator has been getting the snot beat out of him! Our problem has been the rare extra heavy rain falls but we don't have anywhere near the rain you have in the Cascades. Although I know of a restoration that was partially undone by a hurricane.

Bill, that could be fun, stomping around in Geronimo's footsteps!

It is indeed Y K ! I'm very fortunate to have the club membership.

Oh and as I was watching the excavator work I noticed an odd something fall out of the bucket. I didn't think much about it but finally staring at it my curiosity won and it was a rather large wrought iron horse shoe! I rinsed it off, the grain of the iron is quite clear. It's now soaking in alcohol to dehydrate it to stop rusting. I have a call into a guy that knows a preservation expert for better info. This river had a mill both up and down stream so it obviously fell off a draft horse. I want to go snoop around with a metal detector!

Jeep, this has been an issue for years and you are correct in Mother Nature reclaiming her own. We aren't moving the water course, just cleaning out millennium of her work. These restorations are not a long term 'fix' , a maintenance program every 5-10 years to clean out silt, remove/ replace key features is required or ol Mom will take it back.

Our stream is also part of the state's heritage Brook Trout watershed and this will greatly help the wild trout thrive. We also have one of the healthiest bug life streams in the state.

[Twodot]

nice looking crick!
I'll bet the funding was easier to get than the permitting
..

[GunnyMack]

Well not really. Originally we were to get NRCS grant money, then the state was going to fund it. We ran in circles for 9 years. At one point the states head fish biologist was ready to sign off then once he was on site, looked at a area map he said NO and left. We never knew why he decided against it.
We had to have rare plant surveys, dragon fly study( which we have every species known for the area) , macro invertebrates study( one of the best bug rivers in the state) , the hurdles have gone on and on.
In the end the club decided to reach deep into our bank account and pay for it ourselves.

Being it's mostly "flat water" ( shallow and fast moving) the trout we stock each spring would be highly stressed come summer, most fall victim to the Great Blue Herons. Now with a bit of luck we can stock more fish, get higher retention, more brook trout breeding too.

A stipulation for the job is an independent observer, he is to point out potentially sensitive areas for salamanders, wood turtles that are on the endangered list. We have the Longtailed Salamander in high populations and the work is going to benefit them. The observer also found and caught an albino Pickerel Frog. Not endangered but being an albino it caused a little documentation for final report.

The company doing the work is TroutScapes, the owner I've known for a while and he and his crew have done work all over the country. It's a really fun, educational and eye opening project.

We had a good rain last night. Over an inch- haven't had that much since late July. The flow is up from 6.28 CFS yesterday to 27+CFS this morning. As long as it's not really muddy upstream I'm going to go fish this morning!

[AJMD429]

.
I can only imagine the regulatory stuff you have to deal with.

We've been able to do restoration on minor things on private property discretely but anything that involves 'regulatory agencies' always seems to get crazy.

[GunnyMack]

Yes Doc, it's crazy how many people have to sign off on this stuff!

[GunnyMack]

So the guys doing the work use a rented excavator. It showed up with brand new teeth on the bucket. 4 days into the job and the teeth are worn halfway down! It's all rock they are moving. They are happy that they aren't dealing with silt like a lot of jobs they do. Sometimes they need to truck rocks in but here they have so much rock they have the ability to pack them into eroded spots to save the banks. All that rock also creates habitat for salamanders, frsalamander, and bugs. It's a win-win situation.

[jeepnik]

Neighbor's kid was studying environmental science at USC. Got hooked into a project to remove all the non native species from a wetland area in Irvine California. Worked on it his entire time in college. The money ran out at some point, and the work stopped. It took about one good wet spring for many of the non native plants to start popping up. I have no idea what these "smart" folks were thinking. It's a wetland. As lone as the water flow, the winds blow and the birds land seeds from non native plants are going to end up right back in the area.

As an aside, the FDA built a new facility on a rise above that same wetland. I did the water treatment during and post construction. The design had placed the cooling tower near the edge of the rise. Great expense was gone to to make everything esthetically pleasing and environmentally friendly. To prevent any waste water from the cooling tower getting into the marsh it was piped to a drain in the basement. Then of course one night the the sump pump sucked up a rag and tripped. By the time anyone got in to check thinks the mechanical area was about half full of water. To solve that problem they ran a drain out to the cooling tower.

Then summer came and the waste water rate increased exponentially. No one could understand why a 2" drain wasn't big enough. Yep, overflowed and went into the marsh.

[GunnyMack]

The project is completed, they reworked 7 holes, added a few more. I was there yesterday to fish. Caught 2 rainbows before I slipped and fell. I'm fine but I realized rubber soles with cleats do not play well with all that granite rubbed smooth from eons of water polishing it . I need to get felt soles!