http://www.heraldandnews.com/articles/2004/10/01/news/top_stories/top1.txt

Logs to slow streams, build new fish habitat

Friday, October 1, 2004 1:51 PM PDT

Published October 1, 2004

By DYLAN DARLING

ROCK CREEK - For a day, the whirr of twin helicopter rotors disturbed the serenity of creeks trickling through the woods near Westside Road.

Using a 200-foot-long cable with a claw-like grapple at the end, the helicopter moved logs into place into and over Rock and Threemile creeks in the Fremont-Winema National Forests.

The work aims to slow the flow of water through the creeks and to create cool pools of water for spawning and rearing of young fish.

"We are building the home for the fish again," said Neil Anderson, fisheries biologist with the U.S. Forest Service.

The fish are trout - redband trout in Rock Creek and bull trout in Threemile Creek. The helicopters are putting 40 logs in a half-mile stretch of Rock Creek and 80 in a mile-long stretch of Threemile Creek

In both creeks populations of fish have been dwindling. Anderson said they are considered "functionally extinct," which means their numbers are so low that the fish population in the creek could die out.

The population problem isn't one for Rock and Threemile creeks alone, he said. Seventy-five percent of the stream habitat on the Westside - the part of the Winema National Forest near Upper Klamath Lake - doesn't support fish.

With the logs, the fish population in the two creeks should rebound.

"All we are doing is putting the key pieces in place," Anderson said.

It will be five to 10 years until the logs become melded into the creeks, he said. Then they should last 100 to 150 years.

By that time, the trees around the streams and nature should be back in order and trees should be falling into the waterways naturally, he said.

The logs, moved by helicopter, came from around Lake of the Woods and were blown down during a windstorm two years ago, Anderson said. Forest Service workers brought the logs in by truck and logging skidder, stacking them up near the creeks.

With last winter's snowpack long gone and only a little groundwater flowing into them, the creeks are at their lowest stages of the year.

Water that is a couple of inches deep now will swell to several feet come spring, rising up, around and sometimes over the logs put into place Thursday.

With the water will come branches, sticks and other debris, slowing the water and making it tumble, instead of rush, down the creek.

"Each one of these logs is like pumping on your brakes when you are headed down a hill in a car," Anderson said.

Behind the logs, cold water will pool in small reservoirs to provide habitat ideal for trout to spawn and rear their young in, Anderson said.

An old logging road that ran beside the creeks was reopened for this week's project.

Anderson said the helicopter was a cost-effective way to get the job done.

The helicopter cost about $3,000 per hour to operate. The job took about six hours Thursday. In contrast, an excavator costs $1,000 per day, but the job would have taken three weeks to complete, and there would have been more damage to streamside vegetation.

The Forest Service covered the cost of the chopper on Rock Creek, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Environmental Restoration office covered it on Threemile Creek.

For the two pilots of the Boeing Vertol 107 helicopter putting trees into and over the creeks was a reversal of their usual role in logging.

"We are used to picking up logs all day," pilot Jon Baxter said.

The helicopter, which was built in the 1960s, can lift loads of up to 10,500 pounds as it burns through 160 gallons of jet fuel per hour. The heaviest logs it was lifting Thursday were about 8,000 pounds, Baxter said.

Pilot Guy Keilman said they used to get penalized for leaving debris in streams.

"Now we are getting paid to put it back," he said.

The Forest Service and other federal officials used to encourage logging crews and others working in the woods to leave "clean creeks," where are the woody debris, branches and other pieces of trees were taken out, Anderson said.

Restoring Rock and Threemile creeks to a shady, woody state is just the first part of restoration of fish habitat in the national forest northwest of Upper Klamath Lake, he said. The next part will be improving passage from the creeks into the lake, Anderson said.

As is, the creeks feed into a larger creek that then goes into a series of irrigation canals and ditches.

"Those ditches are death traps for fish," Anderson said.