Community groups planted riparian vegetation along Brender Creek near Cashmere, Washington.The Brender Creek site is behind the old Cashmere mill site on Mill Road. This was a multi-year joint effort between WDFW and the Icicle Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited to help recover endangered chinook salmon and steelhead trout. The site was planted with cuttings of black cottonwood, red osier dogwood, scours, coyote and pacific willow, water birch, woods and nootka rose, and snowberry. Last fall this site was hydro-seeded with native sedges, rushes, wetland grasses and upland plants. This week 's plantings put the final touch on the projects.

Brender Creek was chosen because it had a long history of alteration and abuse and because it still holds small numbers of both juvenile spring Chinook salmon and summer steelhead trout. About $55,000 in state Regional Fishery Enhancement Group (RFEG) and Salmon Recovery Funding Board (SRFB) grants were secured to re-establish unhindered fish passage to the lower creek, reduce stream erosion and sedimentation, clean up old mill wastes and other man-made spoils, provide new in-stream spawning and rearing areas, and restore previously damaged shoreline through planting.

Trout Unlimited local members were on hand, as well as volunteers from the Mission-Brender-Yaksum Creek Watershed Group, Cascadia Conservation District, Department of Transportation, Bureau of Land Management, Natural Resource Conservation Service, and the Yakama Nation. Past efforts at this sites have also included help from Longview Fiber, Cashmere Mill, and other local businesses, groups, and individuals.