SITKA, ALASKA
The Sitkoh River has been on the Forest Service’s radar for a long time. It is about forty air miles from Sitka, a little farther by water, incredibly rich – perfect for logging.
The people who harvested timber in the Sitkoh drainage in the early seventies thought they were improving fish habitat by removing logs and debris from the river bottom. They would probably be surprised to learn what has become of the valley.
Forest Service engineering geologist Bob Gubernik surveyed the Sitkoh in the early summer of 2010.
“There’s not the big trees there anymore to stabilize the form (a fluvial fan). So the river just goes back-and-forth like a lawn mower taking down the alder. It becomes a problem for fish that go up there during the freshets to get out of the river, because it’s really honkin’. Once it goes down, they’re trapped, and it winds up killing them. So it becomes a killing field.”
Perry Edwards says thats going to change.
“So the intention of this project is that we’re going to go back in there and reconstruct the channel in the original location.”
Edwards is the ecosystem manager for the Sitka Ranger District. He says part of the Sitkoh River now flows down the old logging road.
“We’re going to block the connection to that road, which is currently very wide and very shallow, insofar as the water running through there. And it does strand fish… They're going to create pool habitat, they’re going to create spawning habitat, they’re going to be using some of the large wood that’s already in there. The whole idea is that this is going to be a self-maintaining channel that we won’t have to be going back year after year to touch up.”
The Forest Service is putting up $140,000 to put the Sitkoh back in its place. The Alaska Department of Fish & Game is contributing $108,000 from the Sustainable Salmon Fund. Trout Unlimited is throwing in a $25,000 grant from the Wilburforce Foundation, and the Sitka Conservation Society is contributing $15,000. Find more information on the Sitka Collaborative Stewardship.
The Sitkoh River system and its tributaries impaired by logging total fifty-one miles, twenty-eight of which are habitat for coho, steelhead, chum, and pinks. Besides stream restoration, the project will also include thinning on the valley floor, to stimulate the growth of the big trees that will one day fall into the stream and perpetuate the restoration.
In the world of land management on the Tongass, $290,000 is a relatively small amount, far less than the almost $700,000 spent on restoration of deer habitat on Ocean Boulevard last summer. That project was funded with federal stimulus funding, at a cost of several thousand dollars per acre to thin trees and – unlike previous practice – remove the debris. Critics subsequently lampooned the high price per deer.
Edwards accepts the price of Ocean Boulevard as the cost of learning an important new management tool.
“We knew it was going to be expensive because it was doing stuff that really hadn’t been done. Groundbreaking ideas for Southeast Alaska, and not a lot of people who had done the kind of work that we were proposing (in Ocean Boulevard). And anytime you do anything that’s new and outside the box you expect it to be more expensive. And the idea is that if you can get people to gain expertise – and you get competition – you can drive those costs down.”
And unlike similar stream rehabilitation efforts in Sitka’s Starrigavan Valley, the Sitkoh River is designated Timber Management. The Sitkoh drainage will remain in the Tongass’s timber inventory. But Edwards says post-TLMP practices no longer allow harvest in riparian areas, and he’s expecting the Sitkoh to remain on course for productivity for the indefinite future.
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