Wednesday, August 5, 2015 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
WHYCHuS: Project
will restore habitat
and bridge
Continued from page 1
vehicles or folks on foot from
tangling with some of the
massive heavy equipment
rumbling through the forest
hauling and pushing dirt and
gravel and picking up and
emplacing logs.
The closure, which has
been in place since June, will
end as soon as the bridge is
completed, according to fish
biologist Mike Riehle. That
is expected to happen in late
September.
The creek naturally
wants to fan out in this area
upstream of Pine Meadow
Ranch, where a concrete
irrigation diversion was
removed last spring. The
restoration work assists
and enhances a network of
braided channels. Riehle
and Mathias Perle of the
Upper Deschutes Watershed
Council told The Nugget that
the project covers 1-1/4 mile
of “valley length.” With that
comes three miles of peren-
nial creek channel and five to
six miles of seasonal chan-
nels that the water flows into
during the winter.
Some of the heavy work
involves filling in channels
that were scoured many feet
deep when the creek was
confined. That involves some
40,000 cubic yards of gravel
and a whole bunch of fill dirt.
Robinson & Owen Heavy
Construction, who won the
contract for the project, has
eight personnel on site, oper-
ating two excavators, a bull-
dozer, several huge off-high-
way dump trucks and a water
truck.
Marc Rickabaugh, who
was out supervising on the
job last week, said the work
is fun. The operators don’t
have to deal with vehicle
traffic and get to do work that
they don’t ordinarily do.
“These are good opera-
tors,” he said.
They have to be to stay
“light on the land” — to the
degree that’s possible with
multi-ton equipment. And
they are maneuvering around
trees and on very uneven
surfaces.
“It’s definitely not normal
construction work,” Riehle
said. “You have to think
differently.”
One excavator was at
work last week picking up
logs that had been cut during
the initial phase of the proj-
ect and depositing them into
the stream channel, following
hand signals from hydrolo-
gist Cari Press.
Her job is about engineer-
ing good, natural channels.
“I look at it more in (terms
of) channel function,” Press
said. “The purpose of all our
wood structures is to dissi-
pate stream energy; to slow
it down.”
That has a beneficial effect
for fish, Riehle explained, as
the excavator operator swung
the bucket of his rig into the
butt end of a log to seat it
amid a tangle of other logs.
“It splits the flow and cre-
ates gravel disposition,” he
said.
When the creek floods, it
photo by Jim Cornelius
A bulldozer fills in a scoured-out ditch during Whychus Creek restoration.
scours out areas around such
obstructions.
“When the flood recedes,
that’s a nice pool,” Riehle
said.
And all of that cre-
ates good habitat for fish.
The ultimate goal is to see
Whychus become rearing
habitat for young fish. And,
perhaps we will see the return
of steelhead runs.
It took a determined effort
to begin to return the creek
to a more natural state, and
it took partnerships. Those
partnerships include the
Forest Service; Deschutes
River Conservancy; the
Upper Deschutes Watershed
Council; the Confederated
Tribes of Warm Springs;
PGE; the Deschutes Land
Trust; and a variety of pri-
vate landowners, all of whom
have worked separately and
in concert to restore these
waters.
See WhyChus on page 24
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