By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews
FIVE RIVERS – The first warning of impending danger arrives with the distant thrum of slapping blades that quickly gives way to the rhythmic thumping of the incoming Chinook helicopter’s twin rotors.
Fishery biologists and the helicopter’s ground crew have placed small flags to show where the helicopter will need to set the trees it carries to East Fork Lobster Creek to restore salmon habitat.
The crews have already identified their emergency escape routes.
“The first pass for each site is the most dangerous because that rotor downwash will dislodge any loose branches and rotting old trees,” said Brent Priz, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fish habitat biologist based in Newport. “It’s like working in the forest in a tornado. Every once in a while, we have some close calls because the rotor wash hits with hurricane-force winds that blow down, blow over and snap whatever isn’t strong enough to withstand it.”
Trees begin to thrash and twist, releasing a flurry of leaves as the helicopter descends in a thunderous roar that reverberates between the tightly-spaced ridges that confine the small creek deep in the Coast Range east of Five Rivers.
Columbia Helicopters’ ground crewman Ramon Gamez signals it’s time move, heading toward the safety of a nearby logging road at a jog, his orange helmet bobbing with each stride.
“It’s pretty dangerous because you have to watch out for all the alders and you have to find ways to run if something happens,” said Gamez, who has 21 years on the job. “You have to always look everywhere. I’ve seen a lot of trees come down close to us.”
Only Columbia’s Gilberto Camacho stays behind to direct the helicopter pilot where to lay the first Douglas fir with its intact root wad.
The big tree will act as the anchor for a man-made log jam intended to hold back seasonal runoff to help create secure spawning grounds for fall Chinook, coho salmon, winter steelhead and cutthroat trout.
“If we can’t slow the river velocities down it can blow a lot of the juvenile salmonids out,” Priz said. “And a high mortality rate leads to poor recruitment the following season. That’s why we focus on putting these large wood structures back in the streams.”
The Five Rivers large wood placement project in the southern Alsea River basin is a collaboration between the state’s fish and wildlife department, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Oregon Wildlife Foundation.
The $1.5 million project is funded primarily by a grant from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board. The Forest Service and BLM met its 25 percent match by supplying the large trees and $340,000 came from the federal 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act.
Spanning eight days in mid-October, the project placed nearly 700 trees within just five miles along stretches of the Alsea basin’s Green River, Five Rivers, East Fork Lobster Creek and the Siuslaw River basin’s West Fork Deadwood Creek.
It is the first of a two-phase habit restoration planned by Priz, who divided the initial plan in half in order to meet grant requirements. Because of budget issues, he said, the second phase will likely be delayed until 2026.
Helicopter work
As the helicopter pilot jockeys into position above the creek, clouds of dirt are knocked loose when the root wad of the tree that dangles from a 250-foot cable attached to the bird’s underbelly slams into a couple of standing trees. With Camacho signaling, the tree is then positioned and released from the talon-like log grapple attached to the end of the cable.
The forest falls quiet when the helicopter retreats to a nearby ridge to collect another tree from a stockpile that ranges in diameter from 18 to 32 inches.
Priz and Gamez move in to confer with Camacho. A second team is just downstream being monitored by Waldport-based Forest Service fish biologist Chris Mayes and BLM fisheries biologist Tony Spitzack. The helicopter will alternate placing trees at each site to give the crews time to assess the shape of the structures they are building.
“The crews operate as a pretty well-oiled machine,” Priz said. “Especially with the experience provided by the other biologists. I think this is Chris’ fifth helicopter project in the last five years.”
There is little time to spare. The Chinook helicopter has a mobilization fee of $25,000 and once in the air increases the job’s hourly cost to $17,000. It can carry a maximum weight of 12 tons and in good weather can place about 15 trees an hour.
The benefit and often necessity of contracting with Columbia Helicopters, which is based in Aurora, is to lessen the impact on the environment by precise tree placement as well as its ability to access difficult-to-reach locations.
The trees are being placed in the streams to slow down winter and spring flows to create a more complex habitat and provide refuge for juvenile fish, Priz said.
“Back in the 1950s there was a period that started where federal and state government agencies thought that large wood in streams was bad for fish migration, that it would block fish migration, and so they engaged in activities called stream cleaning where they went out and actively removed all the wood from these streams,” Priz said. “And a lot of those areas have been heavily impacted by past logging practices.”
While nature will eventually improve habitat through trees dying and falling into streams, Priz said, it would take hundreds of years.
In the last 30 to 40 years stream restoration projects have become commonplace throughout Oregon, the Northwest and British Columbia. Techniques have also evolved with lessons learned from placing wood not big enough to hold back the deluge from big rainstorms that washed trees downstream.
“Streams of these sizes have large catchments and are flashy and have high volumes of waters which creates high velocity and stream power, which require large trees to maintain the structures,” Priz said.
Big effect on fish
While the total numbers of smolts or juvenile fish supplied by individual streams and rivers across the basin are not tracked, Priz estimates tens of thousands will come from streams affected by the Five Rivers project.
“These creeks and rivers have been identified as some of our best producers within the Alsea River basin for all salmonids, Chinook, coho and winter steelhead,” Priz said. “A lot of them also have Pacific lamprey. This southern part of the Alsea basin is one of our strongholds.”
John Spangler, ODFW’s Newport-based fish biologist, explained how randomly selected surveys determine overall juvenile populations.
“We’ve got a smolt trap on Cascade Creek and up in East Fork Lobster Creek, but that’s just for those specific creeks,” Spangler said. “So we don’t know how many are going out of Green River or upper Five Rivers.”
He did provide some basin-wide numbers for returning coho, which are listed as threatened on the federal Endangered Species list, as well as numbers for fall Chinook.
“Looking at coho, Alsea River is running somewhere between 5,000 to 30,000 a year,” Spangler said, but are highly variable depending on ocean survival. “In most recent years there were 13,000 to 19,000 in 2021 and 2022. And in 2023 we had about 7,700.”
Fall Chinook numbered about 11,600 in 2023.
Priz said these streams and rivers can accommodate the numbers of fish that return from the sea and sometimes swim upwards of 50 miles to spawn, because they arrive at different times.
“Coho come back like clockwork every three years where as Chinook can come back anywhere between two and five years,” Priz said. “That’s how a stream system can support multiple salmonid species in the same reach, because they’re timing is staggered.
“Seasonally, Chinook show up first, once the water is deep enough that they can swim up from the bay,” he said. “Coho come a little bit later, around Thanksgiving to Christmas, or even past New Year these days. We’re noticing a little bit of a timing shift.”
There was tremendous support for the Five Rivers project, Priz said as the trees around him again began to quake and swirl in the roiling air created by the rotor wash of the arriving helicopter with the next tree. The largest trees are added last to serve as ballast atop those with root wads that create more complex habitat and somewhere for juvenile fish to hide from predators.
“These are pretty complex projects,” Priz concluded. “We had to have a contractor to tip the trees over on the ridge tops for staging the various log (caches) and another to build the service landing for the helicopter. And then there was felling the trees that we’re putting in … and all the permitting required through the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of State Lands.
“That’s why it took two years to plan this,” he concluded. “It’s a big ‘tah-da!’ and it really highlights the strength of our partnerships with the Wildlife Foundation and the BLM and Forest Service.”
- Garret Jaros is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com
Hire a few beaver, an plant more fish.
Reestablish the beavers. They’ll do the dam work for you.
About 10 years ago a similar project had Chinooks dropping trees in the channels of marshes around Yaquina Bay, particularly McCaffrey and Poole Sloughs and their small tributaries. Wood floats, as everyone knows but as some planners forgot. In the first king tides that year and in subsequent years, many of the large logs floated up and off the marshes, smashing into docks and gangways and traveling up and down the Bay. I hope that the “wood floats” lesson guides this new project.