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Skokomish Watershed
Action Team
BY NATALIE HENRY BENNON
NOVEMBER 2006
"I'm really proud of what the group has done in a very short amount of time. Their ability to get up and running and organized has given us a real boost with all of our efforts throughout the Skokomish Watershed. And I could go on and on about the things that they've done, but it's been, I would say, a sea of change in the way the community has been acting and working together, going from argument to action, out in the Skokomish watershed."
—Rich Geiger, Mason Conservation District
Location: Skokomish River. Mason County, Washington. Southeast portion of the Olympic Peninsula.
Objective: The primary objective of the Skokomish Watershed Action Team (SWAT) is to work to restore the health of the watershed. The team emphasizes action — designing, funding and implementing restoration projects. Their work focuses on the South Fork Skokomish, in the upper watershed, where road restoration work is critical and consensus more tenable. The team also advocates for collaboration and support of restoration projects throughout the watershed.
Participants: U.S. Forest Service (ex officio); The Wilderness Society; Green Diamond Resource Company; Skokomish Tribe; Mason Conservation District; Mason County; Olympic Forest Coalition; Conservation Northwest; Washington Native Plant Society; American Forest Resource Council; Washington Department of Ecology; and U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks (D).
History: According to many members of the Skokomish Watershed Action Team, the Skokomish River is the most frequently flooded river in the state of Washington. The Skokomish once hosted throngs of Puget Sound chinook, Hood Canal summer run chum, bull trout, and steelhead — all either endangered or close to it — but migrations are impeded in the north fork by a dam and in the south fork by a de facto dam of sediment and gravel that plugs the river and blocks it to salmon migration. The river bottom rises a little every day, increasing the damage caused by frequent flooding. Three years ago, flooding caused part of the river to change course permanently so that now the river passes through a cattle farm. According to one member of the action team, it is common for some residents of the lower valley to have watermarks up to five feet high in their homes.
The sediment has also greatly degraded water quality, so much so that native shellfish have been eliminated because they cannot survive amid the fine sediment currently in the watershed, according to Rich Geiger of the Mason Conservation District.
Many factors contributed to this situation, including years of clearcut logging in the upper watershed, road building, two dams, farming, development, and natural causes. The primary focus of restoration in the upper watershed is to fix or remove old logging roads, which have, in many cases, impeded fish passage and caused great amounts of sediment to wash into streams. "There is a major flooding problem, with the river bottom being increasingly filled with sediment coming from the roads in the national forest lands," said Mike Anderson of The Wilderness Society.
The upper watershed was logged heavily, providing timber for local mills through the Shelton Sustained Yield Unit, which was established by Congress to give local timber companies' exclusive bidding rights to public forests. Cutting dropped dramatically in the late 1980s due largely to the presence of endangered species, but the sediment problem remains.
"If you live in the Skokomish Valley, you've been dealing with greater and greater problems for years. It's a river valley, and it's at the base of the Olympics (Mountains). Gravity is doing its job very well, because the Olympics are slowly but surely coming down and filling up the valley," said Patti Case of the Green Diamond Resource Company, which owns and manages 23,000 acres of timberland in the Skokomish watershed, below the national forest lands.
Photo courtesy of The Wilderness Society
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Several organizations in the Skokomish watershed have long recognized these problems and worked to control the erosion. Green Diamond has completed some $750,000 in road upgrades and decommissioning in the watershed since the mid-1990s. The Forest Service also contributed significantly to restoration in the 1990s, spending about $10 million on the South Fork of the Skokomish.
But few organizations worked collaboratively on a consistent basis until the Skokomish Watershed Action Team formed. It started as a group of people simply trying to help the Forest Service determine if it was wise to use a stewardship contract to help pay to remove one part of one logging road known as LeBar Creek Road. The Forest Service was about to finalize the Flat Timber Sale, when it received a comment from Conservation Northwest suggesting that it turn the sale into a stewardship contract. A stewardship contract allows local forest managers to keep the receipts of a sale, if the receipts go toward restoration.
"We met (with Conservation Northwest) on the forest and recognized it would delay the project by probably at least a year to do that, but we thought well, all right, we'll give it a shot and see how it goes," said Kathy O'Halloran, natural resources staff officer at Olympic National Forest.
Conservation Northwest gathered a wide spectrum of people for that first meeting in 2004. At that time, the service's budget was getting lean, so while the service had plans to decommission LeBar, it had no money. Everyone agreed a stewardship contract was a wise way to fund removal of the road. The Flat Timber Sale became the Flat Stewardship Project.
After planning for the project was complete, the Forest Service got started. The team was at a crossroads: its members had to decide whether to stay together, or disband. They decided to stay together under the new name Skokomish Watershed Action Team.
Photo courtesy of USDA Forest Service
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Accomplishments: The group's biggest accomplishment so far is decommissioning LeBar Creek Road, a huge undertaking that is nearly complete. Decommissioning roads is very expensive — about $50,000 per mile — but decommissioning the LeBar Creek Road costs even more because of the massive amounts of material that must be removed. When the area was originally logged, a road was needed across a steep valley with a stream — a tributary to LeBar — running through the bottom. Instead of building a bridge, the Forest Service filled the valley with dirt, creating a culvert at the bottom that the stream runs through. The road rises high above the valley floor. Approximately 33,000 cubic yards of fill has to be removed to restore the creek. "That's just huge. That's kind of mind-boggling," O'Halloran said.
"It's a major hazard to the watershed," Anderson said. "If that culvert plugged, a lot of the road could wash out," causing thousands of cubic yards of sediment to wash down the river.
The team has raised more than $500,000 to restore LeBar and decommission parts of other roads in the last year and a half. About $250,000 of that money came from the Flat Stewardship Project. Additional funds came from the Forest Service's northwest regional office and other sources.
Work at LeBar will be complete in summer 2007.
Other accomplishments:
- In addition to helping fund the LeBar Road work, the Flat Stewardship Project will thin 244 acres of overly dense second-growth forest. The project also integrates volunteer monitoring of invasive species, elk forage enhancement, and erosion control.
- The team is working on another, smaller stewardship contract for fiscal year 2007 at Pine Creek. Less than 70 acres will be cut, and receipts are estimated at $30,000 to $50,000, which will pay for more road decommissioning.
- The team has raised $250,000 to decommission Brown Creek Road, which is the Forest Service's top priority for restoration after LeBar.
- Other projects have been jumpstarted by the team's support, including projects on the Skokomish Tribal Reservation and on private lands via the Mason Conservation District. The projects include water quality testing, organic farming, pasture rotation, cattle fencing, waste management, and more. "I've been doing this work for 12 years and I've never seen such a watershed effort. There's effort from the head of the watershed to the mouth of the watershed," Geiger said
- And finally, merely getting such a diverse group of people to work together has been an accomplishment. "It was an accomplishment to all get to the table, but also to have conversations and come up with a project and actually have it implemented," said Jack Turner of the Skokomish Tribe.
Challenges/constraints: While getting a diverse group of people to work together has been one of the group's greatest accomplishments, it has also been a challenge. "There's been a history of conflict and acrimony in the Skokomish watershed, I would guess because of the flooding that has occurred over the last few decades. And a lot of finger-pointing has gone on about why, who's to blame for the flooding," Anderson said. "Some people blame the Forest Service, some Green Diamond Resource Company, or the dams." Several other issues, including dikes, dredging and other infrastructure in the valley, are also blamed. Several years ago, the county angered landowners by placing a moratorium on building because of the flooding. The Forest Service and Green Diamond were in court to dissolve the sustained yield unit. "So, it's probably been a bit of a challenge for the members of the collaboration to be working together after so many years and decades of being in conflict, but that seems to be working very well so far," Anderson said.
Another challenge is time, especially when the members are volunteers. Most members credit The Wilderness Society and Anderson for keeping the group together and moving forward.
As with all collaborative conservation efforts, money is a significant challenge as well. The Forest Service restoration budget is being suffocated, and while stewardship contracts help fill the void, those funds cannot be used to design projects or do the analyses required by the National Environmental Policy Act. "We're funded for the timber side of it but not for the other stuff. So it's frustrating," O'Halloran said. Also, there is little grant money available for upper watershed restoration work, and what is available is very competitive, according to Turner and Geiger.
"We have been successful with the stewardship contracting, but as of yet we haven't identified other significant pockets of funding, although it is coming," Case said.
Finally, members of the team have found it hard to get support from local residents and farmers. "The tribe and its neighbors have differing opinions as to why the watershed is in the condition that it's in, and yet both look favorably toward any activity that's going to restore the watershed," Turner said. "The challenge I think for SWAT is to involve residents."
Involving residents is one of the team's future goals, which Case thinks can be done by showing residents the team isn't just studying and meeting and talking about things — it's acting. "If you've got watermarks five feet up on your living room walls, it has to be frustrating to hear about continuous studies and no action. We want to tell them someone is acting. It's small, but we're acting," Case said.
"It's important that everyone who is a stakeholder in the Skokomish be involved [with the team] because it's one thing we can do instead of just watching the sediment fill up the valley," Case said.
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