Wednesday, August 11, 2021 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon RESTORATION: Riparian and wetland species will be planted Continued from page 3 The site is a beehive of activity with heavy equip- ment not usually seen on a restoration site plying up and down the valley. Three 35,000-pound, large off-road dump trucks carry dirt from place to place. The trucks are loaded by three 75,000- pound excavators whose huge jaws remove earthen berms that have been hold- ing the stream in an artifi- cial, straight alignment. A bulldozer pushes dirt into large piles and created the temporary dirt roads used by the equipment. This effort will help promote the natu- ral movement of meander- ing creek channels across the historic floodplain, a process called braiding. A skidder is used to move trees for place- ment in the eventual restored creek bed. At the same time, soil is being removed in some places and built up in oth- ers to even the floodplain and raise the water table, while leaving islands of mature vegetation to help provide mixed topography and maintain the healthy cot- tonwood, willow, and dog- wood that currently grow there. Throughout the entire area there is ample gravel deposited by long-ago gla- ciers, which helps filter the water and provide scrum for spawning fish. In order to use heavy equipment in the vicinity of the water while safeguarding the creek and its surrounds, the equipment must run with biodegradable transmission oil. Salvaged whole trees are being added where the creek will eventually flow, to cre- ate complex, layered habitat for fish and wildlife while slowing down the flow of the water and creating quiet spots for fish to rest. When all three zones of the restoration are complete, there will be 1,000 salvaged trees in place in the creek. Those trees are coming from a USFS thinning project and 300 of them from an ODFW thinning project on Pole Creek Ranch. Those thin- ning projects promote forest- stand health while providing salvage trees for a healthier creek. While this work is being completed, the fish are being held out of the area with a picket weir and fine-mesh block nets. It took 30 days to capture and move all the fish that were in the restoration area of the creek. Mathias Perle, restoration program manager with the UDWC, indicated there are now Chinook salmon upstream of Camp Polk Meadow and steelhead are making it upstream beyond Sisters. Because of the appear- ance of the Chinook, ODFW has shortened the period for permitted work in the stream from July 1 3 October 15 to July 1 3 August 15. With the one-week delay due to the fire, work will be right up against the August 15 deadline. Once all the excavation work is complete and the trees are in place, the flow of the creek will be acti- vated slowly, with only a 20 percent flow to allow the water to seep in and wash the gravel before slowly ramping up the flow. Perle said,