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Third Issue Fish
Play in the Clackamas
I went out, had a baby girl, and now I’m back. Tired, tardy, but here I am, returned to the ol’ PC to tap out another installment of Eco-Pages---YEEHAW!! First, an Update on the Biscuit Fire: It’s probably good I had a new babe to keep me laughing, because my last story about the Biscuit fire (ecoPages #2) only hinted at what was to come. As of this week, the plan to begin timber sales in the roadless areas of the Biscuit fire area/ Siskiyou mountain region is now official Bush policy. Potential BAD news for watersheds! But count on messy appeals by eco-heads and timber folks to tie up the courts. No need to say more than that—it’s time for some good news! John Deer is coming to a river near you……. Ok, so the Barton to Carver run on the Clackamas isn’t exactly Playboating country, but it is where a lot of Portland kayakers first get their feet wet. We all crawl before we walk, right? Well I don’t know whether it was meant to freak out the newbies or what, but at the point on the Barton to Carver run where you hear some riffles and the stream splits in two, there’s a new riverside sign saying “Warning!! Get the hell away” or something like that. Well, here’s the Top Secret skinny I got from my moles back at Agency X: Big time construction is set to begin on the Clackamas starting the last week of July—and it’s all for the good of the salmon. A 3500 foot long channel (about 2/3rds of a mile for the math deficient) is being dug west of Barton Park and south of the main channel. When it’s done, it’ll be one of the largest rearing channels in Western Oregon built solely with the intent of getting the salmon back to their healthy old selves. I wish good projects could get done solely because people are groovy and want to do the right thing, but in this case, it’s being funded because, as you might recall, PGE has a few little dams up on the upper reaches of the Clackamas. Those dams are up for relicensing, and dams aren’t good for salmon, and you know the rest. Anyway, PGE is trying to make up for their past digressions in other ways, in this case by inundating our local government agencies with money in order to get some salmon rearing channels back to the lower Clackamas. As cynical as I am, I say this is a good thing. A fairly good population of salmon still exists down there, but could be doing better, and a big long shallow salmon rearing channel is, my biologist friends tell me, supposed to do the trick. So newbie boaters beware! There’s gonna be some John Deer tractors, front end loaders and gravel trucks tearing up the lower river for a while. It’s a project that will probably be ongoing for at least the next several summers. I hear tell there’s even going to be a convoy of trucks bringing in massive old cedar and douglas fir trees with limbs and rootwads still attached, which will be dumped into the new channel. The idea is to create a friendly habitat replete with calm, meandering shallow waters protected from raging floods, with lots of rocks, trees, roots and shade to give shelter to the little fingernail sized fishies. That’s how I translate the biologist talk I heard about ‘structure and complexity variables creating seasonal/diurnal temperature and peak flow fluctuation mitigation’…or something like that. It’s a salmon rearing channel, and salmon rearing channels are good for salmon, and so I say yeehaw--it’s good to get some good news!
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