Wetlands witchery: project works to steady meandering river

Likening it to an out-of-control firehose, the Satsop River has spent the last hundred years unanchored by old-growth trees and firm banks, allowing it to whip all over the valley south of Satsop, undercutting banks and threatening farms and buildings.

A long-planned Grays Harbor Conservation District project to reinforce those banks and, using the tools nature herself uses, firm up the course of the river is underway right now, aiming for completion by August, said Anthony Waldrop, the watershed restoration program manager.

“There’s been planning and collaboration since 2018 with a whole bunch of different stakeholders,” Waldrop said in an interview at the work site. “This project design started in 2020.”

Sitting on a log on the gravelly riverbank, the fruition of that project is clearly visible now: heavy machinery is industriously engaged digging and emplacing hundreds of logs and heavy rocks into chained earthworks meant to imitate the result of natural processes and stabilize the river.

“The goal is to get the functions back to where this river moves and create habitat on its own without destroying farmland and businesses,” Waldrop said. “We’re creating this corridor that the Satsop River is allowed to be wild, essentially, and do its things.”

By de-streamlining the river and slowing its firehose velocity, the Satsop River will be able to be a better habitat for indigenous species, Waldrop said.

Michael S. Lockett / The Daily World Grays Harbor Conservation District watershed restoration program manager Anthony Waldrop walks a river conservation project on the Satsop River.

“These rivers have been simplified. We’re trying to make them complex,” Waldrop said. “The more complex they are, the more habitat, the less erosion, the better the habitat is. That’s why such a big part of this is vegetation establishment.”

Salmon are high on the list of species who benefit from a more complex river course, Waldrop said.

“The main one is salmon,” Waldrop said. “As salmon, coho, Chinook are rearing in this area, having the deeper holes, the cover the logjam creates, the shade the trees create during the hottest part of the summer.”

Reintroducing many native tree species and giving them a chance to grow rather than being wiped out by a single season is also a goal, Waldrop said. Pioneer species such as willow and cottonwood and alder, followed by Sitka spruce, Western red cedar, big leaf maple, Western hemlock, Douglas fir will help stabilize the landscape how it used to be, Waldrop said, with tree falls creating natural logjams.

“We want to have those big conifers in this flood plain again so a hundred years from now we have the shade, the soil cohesion,” Waldrop said. “When those fall in, they’ll create the logjam then.”

Waldrop likened the process to taking a town whose only businesses were on a single Main Street, and creating more opportunities for growth on the side streets, spreading out the options and making an overall better atmosphere.

“We’re trying to create all those side streets,” Waldrop said. “It raises all boats.”

Doing the work

The project’s most visible elements should last about two months, Waldrop said.

“They started mobilizing in June. They really got going late June, early July. The in-water work window is July 1 when they were able to get down to the gravel bar,” Waldrop said. “The wrap up is in August. It’s going to wrap up pretty quick.”

Progress has been relatively smooth, though the contractors have had to stay nimble, Waldrop said.

“The design engineers from Natural Systems Design and the contractor, Brumfield, did a lot of good troubleshooting for this project, which is what we have to do,” Waldrop said. “We’ve been hitting really dense hard material. We had to bring in a drill to help get through that.”

Even since 2020, just a few years ago, the course of the river has deviated from the original plan, requiring the project personnel to adjust the plan to keep moving toward the goal.

Michael S. Lockett / The Daily World A worker sprays water on machinery at a river conservation project on the Satsop River.

“We started design in 2020. The river has changed since then. A lot of these projects have to be field-fit,” Waldrop said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty in these projects. That’s why it takes a lot of cooperation between the contractor, engineers, sponsors and landowners.”

The current project cost $3 million, grant funded as part of the Chehalis Basin Strategy Aquatic Species Restoration Plan, Waldrop said. This portion of the project, reaching from the junction with the Chehalis River to 0.7 miles up the river, is the first step; a follow-on project, costing $6 million in federal funding, will hopefully go next summer if everything is approved, Waldrop said.

“A good five years and you’re going to have a nice looking forest,” Waldrop said. “You’re not going to see any of these structures. It’s gonna look pretty natural.”

An open house about the project is scheduled for Aug. 20 from 4-7 p.m. at the Olympic View Grange in Brady.

Contact Senior Reporter Michael S. Lockett at 757-621-1197 or michael.lockett@thedailyworld.com.