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”The story that I heard from Doug McCauley was that in about 1965, or thereabouts, a D-8 Cat was over there logging the last of the old growth and got stuck and apparently made a big mess,” Eastwood says. “They brought another D-8 in to pull the first one out and that made a bigger mess and disturbed the drainage pattern. Water started running down the mountainside and formed a gully-slide complex. This is essentially a gully-slide complex. Over the years, it got bigger and bigger. I figured one time that about 300,000 cubic yards has been washed away here from this hillside into Redwood Creek and then into the Eel River.”
The hillside in question is located just a few hundred yards west of Shop Road on Briceland Road. Since 1986, Eastwood and Vaughn have been trying to undo the damage done so long ago.
”The Eel River Salmon Restoration Project had been formed about that time and this was one of our first restoration projects,” Eastwood says. “We got a Fish and Game grant and we essentially diked off the lower part of the slide. It was a very fortunate location because the stream was extra wide here. There were a lot of boulders on site and we could actually dike off the area next to the slide as a depositional basin where the material washing off the slide can be deposited rather than going into the creek.”
”The fish need clean gravel and deep pools to survive,” Vaughn adds. “The slide was dumping all kinds of mud on them. We had an egg taking station down by Wally’s Westside Repair and it was endangering our station. The water quality wasn’t good because of all the sediment, and besides the fish, it threatened the amphibians, the giant salamanders, the yellow-legged frogs. “There’s a lot of different species other than the fish that need clean gravel to exist. So it’s more than just fish - it’s everything. The lamprey need clean gravel and there’s a lot more interest these days in lamprey - the eel that Eel River is named after. It’s more than salmon but the salmon have economic importance and gets the money. The money actually came out of the salmon stamp program started by the fishermen. They were trying to get a better salmon season for the fishermen by putting a lot of work into salmon restoration. They sunk a lot of money into Redwood Creek.”
The first berm was constructed in 1986 and over that winter the rain came and the basin filled up. And over the years since, they have paid attention to the slide and continued to work at adding berms and stabilizing the hillside.
This has included a lot of tree planting, Vaughn says.
”We got money from the Sirius Fund to plant trees - redwood trees, alder and willow. We’ve got money from Working Assets - the telephone company. That money went for the redwoods you’re going to see sprouting up here.”
Vaughn says the alder is already seeding itself.
”We have white alder,” he says, “and in the interior climate, it’s really resistant to sunshine because it has a smaller leaf and a smaller tongue. It’s different from the red alder which has that coastal fog influence. When you bring a red alder into this interior, it just gets sunburned and dies. Another good tree for the interior is the Oregon ash. And we are planting redwoods, thanks to Working Assets and the Sirius Fund through the Trees Foundation.”
The before and after pictures that Eastwood has taken over the years demonstrate the positive effect the plantings have had on the slide area.
Eastwood doesn’t go so far as to call the hillside stable, but it’s more stable than it was 22 years ago when they started working on it.
”You can never completely stabilize steep hillsides like this one from sliding,” Eastwood says. “What we’ve done, we stabilized the slide and kept the stream off the slope, which is important. When we started it was gouging into the hillside at the base of the slide making it worse and worse. Now we’ve moved it over so it’s not actively eroding the base of the slide. And we’ve buttressed the base of the slide with material that we’ve built up there. Over time it’s trapped more material, but this time it’s our last time doing this and what we’re doing now is that we’re deepening the basins and have raised the berm slightly to make a channel that will go into an overflow when it’s full. Eventually, in who knows how many years, the stream that drains the slide will go out of our overflow. We’re essentially done with that now and we will plant more trees this winter - redwoods and willows - and then we’ve pretty much done what we can do.”
Throughout this process, Eastwood says, they have benefited from the heavy equipment expertise of contractor John Neill. They say he has a feel for the delicacy required of a big cat building berms in a streambed.
And over the years of working, Eastwood says that there has been a change in the way the permits for such work are issued.
”It used to be that you would call up the local game warden,” Eastwood says, “and he would come out and look at it and then get out his little book of permits and write you out one, and that was it. Now, you fill out a lot of paperwork and they do it in Redding and nobody actually comes and looks at it, except that Fish and Game looked at it earlier. It takes a while longer now and they charge you money. This permit here cost us 500 bucks, but it’s really their own money that they’re sort of taking back. They give you the grant and $500 of it goes back into Fish and Game in Redding. But the idea of being careful what people do in creeks is sound. The major impact here to the stream is the one crossing. We needed to get over to the other side and that’s why we needed the permit. We had to cross the creek and that triggered the permit.”
Eastwood says that while Redwood Creek is not in as dire a state as the Mattole, it suffers from the same kinds of problems that trouble the Mattole.
”The water level is really low and a lot of people are drawing water out of the creek, which is our big problem. This area was essentially dry when we started work here earlier in the fall, and that little rain we had a week or so back is the only reason there’s water at this crossing. A month ago it was completely dry right here. So the fish that are living in this watershed, the steelhead and Coho, are making it only in pools that are still there.”
Vaughn is upbeat about the future of fish runs in Redwood Creek. He says there are a lot of the nice cretaceous marine and non-marine sediments that fish like to spawn in around the Briceland area.
”I hear that the ocean conditions are turning around,” he says. “There’s an upwelling and a bloom off the coast right now which means that in the next couple of years we might start seeing more salmon in the creeks.”
Even though the major work is done and the plan now is to let nature takes it course, Eastwood says he will continue his decades-long habit of stopping at the slide on his way home to see how things are going.
”This is our best, our most exciting and our most significant restoration project,” he says.
Will there be a Redwood Creek Restoration Council to mirror the Mattole River Restoration Council?
”In some ways we are a restoration council,” Eastwood says, “but we’ve specialized in specific restoration projects and we’re not really advocates. But the Eel could definitely use more groups like the Mattole has. The Mattole is the model in a lot of ways. They have some very effective organizations and do their own monitoring and keep track of things. It’s worked out very well. There are people talking about a watershed group for this creek and it will probably happen.
”The main thing is that it’s kind of sad that we have these legacy problems that we have to spend a lot of money on to patch our watersheds back together. Very often, if very minor things done on site had been done properly way, way back, the problem wouldn’t have happened anyway. We spend a lot of our time dealing with problems that never should have happened in the first place.”
