The Colony Creek Re-Plant project is located in Bow near Colony Road on the far north end of the Samish flats to the east of SR-11. The project was implemented over an 8 acre area including 1.9 acres of wetlands and 6 acres of drier soils that was part of a CREP planting project that was installed in 1999 which was overrun with reed canary grass (RCG) in the following years after projects completion. The objective of this project was to restore riparian habitat adjacent to Colony Creek with the removal of invasive species and the planting of new native ones.

This project included the planting of over 2,000 new native plants in various densities on the project site. The roughly 2 acres of wetland area was densely planted with a mixture of willow stakes, bare-root red-oiser dogwood, bare-root sweetgale, and spirea. Two of the remaining six acres of drier soils were experiencing low planting density and thus were planted to density of 435 plants per acre. At least 30% of those plantings (130 stems per acre) were conifers in the areas deemed to support trees.

The southern 480 feet of channel (0.5 acres total) along the old CREP restoration project were bordered by a dense thicket of red alder that became established on the disturbed soils adjacent to the creek. The red alder trees were thus thinned to an approximate spacing of 15x15 feet, and the area was under-planted with approximately 75 western red cedar and spruce.

Beaver are very active at the Thelen site, and thus protective measures including chicken-wire cages were used to prevent the conifer plantings. Other plants would be protected with Miricle tubes and stakes provided by the County. Site maintenance will continue through 2014.

Final designs and permit documents were developed for this project as part a Department of Ecology grant (WA120317-2-4). The Friday Creek Road Stability design project was lead by Skagit County Public Works (SCPW) in partnership with Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group (SFEG) with the goal of design and permitting restoration actions to improve riparian habitat.