10A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2016
Giants: ‘This the template. You are among titans out here’
The Nature Conservancy
has removed more than 20
miles of roads in the Ellsworth
Creek watershed.
Continued from Page 1A
up parcels in Ellsworth Creek
and is actively restoring more
than 8,000 acres of contiguous
former industrial forestland,
some of which contains old-
growth stands of cedar, spruce
and the occasional Douglas ir.
Dave Ryan is The Nature
Conservancy’s boots-on-the
ground forester. As a commer-
cial forester, Ryan had man-
aged clearcuts, replantings,
thinnings and cases of blight.
He’s seen harvest cycles shrink
from 80 to 30 years. He’s seen
plenty of change in forest man-
agement over the years, most
for the better, he says, such as
stream buffers that help protect
salmon runs.
“Back in the day, the stream
was your skid trail,” Ryan said,
pointing toward a meandering
stretch of creek he’s dubbed
“Ellsworth Beach.”
“They would just run
machinery in the stream,” he
said. “They’d run logs through
and down it.”
Hydraulic luid would end
up in the water, stream beds
would be gashed, and the
scouring of log jams and wood
from the creek eliminated
much of the prime salmon hab-
itat. But the land is resilient as it
is productive.
Gardens in the sky
“There’s nothing wrong
with a clearcut in and of itself,”
Ryan said. “A clearcut is a tool
in a land manager’s toolbox,
but for some owners it’s the
only tool. So if the one ham-
mer they’ve got isn’t working,
the answer is to get a bigger
hammer.”
If the goal of clearcut log-
ging is to get as much wood out
of the forest as possible, Ryan is
in some ways now working in
reverse. He hopes most of the
trees he manages in Ellsworth
will outlast him by at least a
few lifetimes. Dozens of the
giants somehow eluded the sol-
diers’ saws, and Ryan estimates
the age of some at more than
800 years. Those trees are inte-
gral for endangered species like
marbled murrelets, and Ells-
worth is now the epicenter of
those recovery efforts.
Bounding from log to log
like some kind of tac-booted
Spiderman, Ryan casually
describes a clearcut as having
been “slicked off.” But then
he’s just as likely to throw out
a term like “vertical heteroge-
neity” when describing The
Nature Conservancy’s aspira-
tions to return diversity to the
forest; from the mycelium in
Among titans
David Plechl/EO Media Group
Dave Ryan surveys a recently decommissioned road in the Ellsworth Creek preserve. Roads often have negative impacts on
water quality, wildlife migrations and habitat. The Nature Conservancy has removed over 20 miles of road in the watershed.
the soil, all the way up though
the towering canopy, a world
scientists are still exploring.
Ryan says just a few years
ago, an entirely new species
of earthworm was discovered
crawling in the arboreal soils on
ancient limbs of Ellsworth old
growth. “It was living in these
gardens in the sky,” he said.
Restoration is not just about
keeping the chainsaws out and
leaving things as they are. The
patchwork of forests that make
up the preserve are all at differ-
ent stages of growth, and most
relect the unnaturally dense
monoculture plantings of the
industrial timber model.
“We sort of took the water-
shed out of its natural trajectory
in terms of historic succession,”
Ryan said. As a result, species
like Sitka spruce, that were
once plentiful in the Ellsworth
Creek watershed are now mere
“remnants.”
Overabundant trees will be
thinned out, and new plantings
will add species diversity.
“I’m optimistic,” Ryan said.
He credits The Nature Conser-
vancy’s director of forest con-
servation and management,
Dave Rolph, with dreaming up
the ambitious Ellsworth resto-
ration project.
“I’m sure he cringes when
I say this, but in many ways I
consider Dave the godfather of
Ellsworth,” Ryan said. “He’s
kind of the reason this thing
came together.”
Godfather of Ellsworth
In the late 1990s, Rolph ini-
tiated a relatively modest pur-
chase of land at Teal Slough
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near the Naselle River Bridge
after the Paul Allen Founda-
tion gave money speciically
for the purpose of old-growth
restoration.
While surveying that pur-
chase, Rolph learned of another
stand of big trees along Ells-
worth Creek and decided it was
worth a look. “What we essen-
tially discovered was that there
was a lot more than just an old-
growth stand there,” Rolph
said.
The stream already boasted
a booming chum salmon run.
There was a stable marbled
murrelet population, and the
highest known diversity of
amphibians anywhere in Wash-
ington state.
“If you really want to pro-
tect those things,” Rolph said,
“just protecting that one stand
of old growth wouldn’t do it.”
He said that’s when the
greater vision for the long-
term restoration project started
to come together. The Nature
Conservancy would patch
together multiple parcels, and
bring the entire watershed
under its management.
Additional parcels were
added between 2001 and
2005 as The Nature Conser-
vancy worked primarily with
two major land owners — the
Campbell Group and John Han-
cock, both major lumber con-
sortiums. A handful of smaller
landowners also sold parcels to
the conservancy.
Rolph said for the most part,
old-growth ecosystems make
up less than 1 percent of for-
ests in southwest Washing-
ton. He said the majority of old
growth lives in national parks
or national forests, and there
aren’t a lot of either in this cor-
ner of the state.
“You can’t go out and buy
it,” Rolph said. “If you really
want an old-growth ecosystem,
you have to restore it.”
Roads and toads
But even before biologists
and preservationists could get
their boots muddy, The Nature
Conservancy irst had to come
up with a plan. They formed a
scientiic panel of top North-
west scientists.
“We went through all
potential alternatives,” Rolph
explained, “what science
could tell us, and what science
couldn’t.”
After much deliberation,
The Nature Conservancy set-
tled on a slightly experimental
route — the restoration would
be managed in three distinct
treatment areas with the long-
run goal of inding the best
mode of restoration and then
adapting the overall approach.
Rolph said a series of
streams that roll down from
Bear River Ridge naturally split
the basin into three smaller trib-
utary basins. One basin will be
“actively” managed, another
“passively” managed, and the
third will be a “control.”
The restoration activi-
ties are much more intense in
the actively managed section,
Rolph said, where thinning of
smaller trees should encourage
the development of old growth.
Roads are also removed alto-
gether or rerouted away from
slide-prone areas.
In the passively managed
section, there is no timber har-
vest, but roads are removed,
then Mother Nature is left to
her own devices. The control
area is more or less left com-
pletely “as is,” and that data will
be used to compare the impacts
being made in the active and
passive areas of restoration.
When managing forest and
stream health, a lot of people
think about trees and salmon,
says Ryan, but the impact of
roads on the ecosystem can’t
be underestimated. They have
huge effects on water quality,
wildlife migrations and habitat.
As Ryan, the forester,
checks in on some recent road
decommissions in Ellsworth,
he says there is more to road
removal than just letting nature
run its course. Building roads is
heavy-duty work and removing
them is equally intense. Roads
that cut across slopes create
slide hazards, channel sediment
into streams and dam up sub-
surface water lows.
The watershed is a web
of perennial streams, sea-
sonal streams and culverts,
and, “there’s a lot of water that
comes down,” Ryan said, “and
it doesn’t just relegate itself to
those channels.”
Roads also create for-
est edges, where the effects of
wind and sun are magniied.
Microclimates produced may
be counterproductive. Amphib-
ians may be discouraged from
crossing a dry rocky road,
and the continuous clearings
expose hidden murrelet nests to
crows that eat the eggs before
they hatch.
LISTINGS
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The restoration project
comes down to three basic
components — selective thin-
ning and planting, moving or
removing roads, and intensive
in-stream restoration.
Most of the land in the con-
servation area has been logged
repeatedly. And after a typi-
cal clearcut, Rolph said, “the
forest comes back incredibly
dense.”
Under the guidance of
Ryan’s work on the ground,
The Nature Conservancy con-
tract crews harvest some of
the more plentiful Douglas
ir and hemlock to encour-
age more space for spruce and
cedar to succeed. Rather than
a few dominant species, the
balance should be struck by
complexity.
In the active basin, Ryan
said the conservancy is “work-
ing the land with restoration in
mind.” That means taking out
smaller trees that crowd strong
trees that aid diversity. The har-
vested trees are sold to mar-
ket and the proceeds are cycled
back into more restoration
efforts.
“We pay for our operating
costs with our timber revenue,”
Ryan said.
Thinning requires just the
right touch to get the most out
of recovering forest ecosys-
tems. Trees support each other.
Where roots intertwine stands
are more resilient to the effects
of wind. “If you hit it too hard,
it becomes a little more sus-
ceptible to wind throw,” Ryan
said. “So we’re saying you
can thin it, you just have to
be more thoughtful with your
approach.”
Part of Ryan’s job is to
share what The Nature Con-
servancy is doing with others.
Forest managers have come
from as far as Chile to study
the project. He often leads vis-
itors down a rough-hewn trail
that descends from one of the
old logging roads into a gully
of giant spruce; their gnarled
trunks twisting high above any-
thing else in the forest.
“I call those the guardians,”
Ryan mused.
He doesn’t know how they
escaped the ax, but said a few
hundred acres of Ellsworth
are spiked with the towering
beauties.
“This the template,” Ryan
said, gazing upward. “You are
among titans out here.”
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