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About Applegater. (Jacksonville, OR) 2008-current | View Entire Issue (July 1, 2017)
Applegater Summer 2017 APWC’s Butcherknife Creek project, a cut above Update on the Upper Applegate Watershed Restoration Project BY BARBARA SUMMERHAWK BY DON BOUCHER Fifteen miles west of Grants Pass, Butcherknife Creek slices through the northwesternmost section of the Applegate watershed, feeding into Slate Creek right below Hayes Hill, the highest point on Highway 199 between here and the coast. The Applegate Partnership and The dilapidated Butcherknife Creek culvert will be Watershed Council replaced with a bridge this summer. (APWC) has been working to replace this creek’s rusting and dilapidated and funding were complicated, time- culvert, which is a serious barrier to fish consuming, and expensive. Removed passage and makes passable the only road from Josephine County Public Works providing ingress and egress to residents management, Butcherknife Creek Road of Butcherknife Creek Road and Onion is now maintained by local residents, Mountain Road. The culvert will be who don’t have the resources to replace replaced with a bridge this summer when the culvert. The APWC worked with all streamflows recede. In keeping with the the stakeholders: landowners along the APWC mission to maintain and restore private road, permitting agencies, design ecological health to the valley, this project reviewers, contractors, engineers, fisheries will provide access to the creek for coho biologists, funders, and so on. Soon the Butcherknife Creek Project salmon, a threatened species listed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric will be completed, providing safe passage for salmon to upstream habitat and safe Administration (NOAA) Fisheries. Butcherknife Creek is a tributary of passage across the creek for emergency Slate Creek, which is one of our watershed’s vehicles that currently could collapse most important streams due to its potential the culvert. This is an example of the for highly productive habitat for coho collaborative work the APWC provides in and chinook salmon and steelhead. bringing landowners and agencies together Butcherknife Creek flows year-round in the to improve the health of the Applegate upper reaches of the Slate Creek watershed watershed. All of our projects can benefit from and provides adult and juvenile salmon and steelhead crucial cold water refugia efforts by volunteers willing to work on activities in their realm of interest and and rearing habitat. Coho, it should be noted, were once as ability. If you would like to support and prevalent as chinook salmon, but are now join in the APWC’s mission “to promote at five percent of historical levels because ecosystem health across the Applegate of human impact on aquatic habitat. watershed through stewardship, education, Historically, coho, chinook and steelhead and restoration carried out in partnership provided food for Native Americans and with landowners, agencies, and other settlers and for bears and other wildlife, interested parties while contributing to besides supplying nutrients for small fish local economic and community well- being,” visit apwc.info, our Facebook page after the adults have spawned and died. Replacement of the culvert has been a or Instagram site, or email us at contact@ five-year project. The APWC and Oregon apwc.info. The watershed needs you! Barbara Summerhawk Department of Fish and Wildlife fisheries Applegate Partnership and Watershed biologists began developing this project Council Board Member in 2013 based on fish passage and habitat barbara@apwc.info needs in the watershed, but the design The Upper Applegate Watershed Restoration Project (UAWRP) is designed to implement actions to restore structure and processes in the Upper Applegate watershed and provide for landscape conditions resilient to disturbances and climate change. The project aims to protect the following important community- identified values: recreation (motorized and nonmotorized), late-successional forests (northern spotted owl habitat), biodiversity (both plant and animal), important connectivity corridors, roadless and unmanaged areas, sustainable flow of goods and services, and human life and property. This proposal is a result of over a year and a half of meetings and workshops with the US Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and community members. The most recent meeting was held on April 19. In addition to building relationships with local communities, this planning process helps us to move toward the vision and goals in the Applegate Adaptive Management Area (AMA) Guide by engaging the community early and often in the process. The “benefits from nature” concept of this planning process underscores relationships between ecological, social, and economic conditions in and around the AMA. This concept aligns well with goals in the Applegate AMA Guide and the Applegate Fire Plan, i.e., to manage the land adaptively to achieve social and ecological sustainability. Using this approach, we hope to highlight the goods and services provided by forests to communities. To further refine proposed actions, the planning team organized the key community values into three major themes: (1) water and aquatic habitat, (2) terrestrial biodiversity, and (3) community and culture. For each of these, the team described objectives to protect, enhance, or maintain important values. The community identified projects to deal with threats to those key values. The following is an example from the list of actions for the UAWRP: Two of the objectives identified by the community are (1) manage forests to increase biodiversity and (2) develop and maintain habitat-connectivity corridors. One of the actions that will address these objectives is to enhance pollinator habitat to benefit monarch butterflies and other native pollinators. To enhance pollinator habitat, UAWRP would plant native pollinator plant species on five sites in the Upper Applegate Valley (Flumet Flat Campground, Jackson Campground, Kanaka Gulch Flat/Kanaka Gulch, and Nick Wright Flat). A low-intensity prescribed fire in the fall to burn grassy fine fuels would improve the site before seeding. In addition to providing butterfly habitat, this action would provide the following benefits: wildlife species diversity, natural pest control, nutrient cycling/soil fertility, recreation opportunities, scientific and educational opportunities, as well as identification of cultural and intrinsic values. This is just one example that you will find in the scoping notice. Additionally, this planning and implementation effort will utilize adaptive management principles. Adaptive management is a process that bases management actions on clearly defined outcomes and monitoring to determine if actions are meeting desired goals. If not, the process facilitates changes in management that will best ensure those outcomes are met. The most critical and challenging component of adaptive management is to monitor the work that we do. As we move through the planning process, we will engage with the community to provide input as we develop a monitoring strategy for the Upper Applegate project. By now many of you will likely have seen the scoping letter or notice asking for comments on the proposed Upper Applegate Watershed Restoration Project. We are in the process of seeking comments and concerns related to the proposed implementation actions to determine if there are issues or other aspects that we did not consider, and whether there are any alternative ways to achieve the project’s purpose. Proposed project descriptions and maps are available by stopping by the Star Ranger Station at 6941 Upper Applegate Road, Jacksonville, Oregon, or calling 541-899-3800. For those who have been involved through the lengthy series of meetings and workshops, we sincerely want to say thank you. If you have questions or comments, please feel free to contact me. Don Boucher • 541-899-3840 Applegate AMA Team Leader Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest dboucher@fs.fed.us Back in Time Applegate School history BY EVELYN BYRNE WILLIAMS WITH JANEEN SATHRE Applegate School was built in 1879-1880 on land donated by Rial Benedict. This school was on the west side of Humbug Creek near where the Applegate School stands today. My grandparents were living on Humbug Creek, where my dad, John Byrne, was born in 1887. His oldest sister and brother were already going to Applegate School. The family moved from there to Forest Creek and then to Watkins in the Upper Applegate area. However, an Applegate School card (see photo) lists my dad in attendance while he was staying with the family’s good friends, the John O’Briens, who lived a few miles from the school. Evelyn Byrne Williams with Janeen Sathre • 541-899-1443 13
