Dated: May 23, 1999
Walla Walla Union Bulletin
By Brodie Farquhar
For more than 30 years, large sections of the Tucannon River have been inhospitable to chinook salmon and steelhead. Narrowly channeled sections have scoured away gravel beds needed for spawning, while denuded stream banks have allowed the water to get too warm. Log jams and root wads providing cool cover and shelter were few and far between. As a result, salmon and steelhead could occupy only a fraction of the river if they made it upstream at all. In June of low-water years, the Tucannon River's mouth with the Snake River has been so warm that spring chinook wouldn't even enter the river,'' said Steve Martin, a Dayton-based steelhead biologist with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
While all of the above was true for many spots on private land along the Tucannon, it was especially true for the Hartsock Unit, 2,300-acres within the 14,000-plus-acre Wooten Wildlife Area. Acquired by the state in the early 1990s, the Hartsock land was as fish-unfriendly a stretch of river as you could find on the Tucannon. The banks were largely devoid of trees and willows and shade. The stream offered no gravel beds for spawning. Then the 1996 floods ripped through a hard-scrabble pasture, leaving stony banks and six braided channels of shallow water wandering through the rocky waste. The Hartsock grounds and the river near an old Quonset hut were bad to start with, Martin said, but the '96 flood had turned the area into a giant water heater, cooked by the sun and the rocks. Something had to be done. Plans, funding and volunteers came together last year. By August and September, a D-8 Caterpillar bulldozer and a couple of tractor-hoes were hard at work. The Hartsock project increased the stream's meander and length, slowing the rush of water so it wouldn't scour out stream bed gravel bars. Heavy equipment operators Dick Rubenser and Dan Culley, both of Dayton, were landowners and contractors who volunteered some 100 hours and $30,000 in labor and equipment. The project also increased pool habitat by installing a series of five, bio-engineered logjams along the side of the stream. Large trees were anchored by cable to large boulders, lying in the bottom of 8-foot holes dug out of the stream bed. The logjams extended from 8 feet below to 8 feet above the stream surface. The design of the logjams is such that they'll tend to ``recruit,'' or collect, logs and gravel heading downstream, Martin said.
By 2009, field visits to the project site revels a drastically recovering river and floodplain. Log jams placed as part of this project have maintained channel stability allowing for riparian recovery and in the 2008-2009 high water events large log jams formed creating pools and new side channels. Habitat condition in the project site is greatly improved.