The power of a logjam: A vision of the Northwest’s rivers of old

IN THE LOWER ELWHA RIVER — In their natural state, Puget Sound rivers are a braided mess of forested islands, jammed with downed wood and surging with salmon.

Now work is underway to restore the lower Elwha to a version of its past — in part by building giant logjams.

“We have been trained to see rivers wrong,” said Mike McHenry, biologist for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe.

So far, the tribe has built about 80 logjams here, returning wood obstructions to the river’s life cycle 10 years since two hydroelectric dams were removed from the watershed. The jams further rebuild the resilience of the river, especially in consideration of the effects of climate change, said Jamie Michel, habitat manager for the tribe.

Bigger storms and more intense floods are expected in winter, with more precipitation coming as rain rather than snow. And warmer air and water temperatures and lower summer flows. The jams rebuild the complexity of the river with stacks and heaps and jumbles of wood that slow the water. Slower water has time to soak into the groundwater, where it is retained, buffering lower flows. And slower water during high flows doesn’t scour salmon egg nests; it is allowed to meander across its flood plain — instead of flooding it.

But why build jams, if rivers make them naturally?

Because even on the Elwha, with three quarters of its watershed is protected in Olympic National Park, helping hands are needed in the lower river, to turn back the clock. After a 150-year war on messy, with rivers tidied, straightened, diked and dammed, and big wood removed to make it easier for people to navigate, Puget Sound’s rivers, are in deficit for the food that feeds their mighty appetites: gnarly logs.

Big rivers, big wood, big fish

It took a trip to the undammed, wild Hoh and Queets rivers of the Olympic Peninsula to teach David Montgomery what a river is supposed to look like.

“It blew my mind,” said Montgomery, a 2008 MacArthur Fellow, author of “King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon,” and other books, and professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington. When he first came up here from California to take a job at the university, he knew nothing about how the rivers of the Pacific Northwest work, Montgomery said.

That quickly changed, under the tutelage of the rivers. It started with a log scramble in the Hoh watershed. What looked on paper like a quick easy hike was anything but. “It was full of wood,” Montgomery said. “We figured, ‘Oh we will hike up there and walk down in the stream.’ It turned out to be an epic journey because of all of the wood that was blocking the channel … some of these logs were 10 feet around, we felt like squirrels, walking along fallen trees.”

This glorious mess — heaps of giant logs everywhere, the river channel braiding around them, splitting into quiet side channels, digging pools and sopping the banks — this is what all the rivers here used to look like.

On the Queets, old-growth snags, tumbled into the flow from the river’s banks, had lumbered downriver where they stuck, jammed in piles and dug themselves into the banks and river bottom. There, they had acted like catcher’s mitts, grabbing even more wood from the flow. Eventually, a solid mass stacked and rafted and dug deep into the bottom, and the river cruised around, over and through it.

These stable points became the anchor for the next old-growth forest that would eventually grow and fall into the flow, in an unending cycle of goodness, built on logs big enough to persist for many centuries. Radio carbon dates on logjams in rivers including the Queets revealed logs buried deep in river banks that had persisted anywhere from several hundred to several thousand years.

But how to restart that process, especially in a place where all the big trees have been logged? The logjam projects are applying some human ingenuity to the problem, trucking in lots of logs (even better with root wads still on them) and building the jams the river would normally make on its own, said Tim Abbe, formerly Montgomery’s graduate student, and now a principal at Natural Systems Design of Seattle. Abbe specializes in logjam projects that rebuild the natural function of rivers.

“It takes thousands of years for this process to get going, and when we come in and log things like the Elwha Valley, a lot of damage was done historically,” Abbe said.

The $350 million dam removal project on the Elwha completed in 2014 was the first step in healing this river, unstopping its flow for the migration not only of fish, but sediment and logs coming down from the mountains to the sea.

The jams now are helping to reconnect the river to its flood plain, and boost the river’s ability to recover its natural capacities for nurturing salmon.

Rebuilding a river

The newest logjam project was designed for the tribe by Natural Systems Design, and built by BCI Contracting of Portland. This massive project, with 17 jams built from 13,000 logs, is a look back into the past, to an approximation of how all the major rivers of Puget Sound used to be.

The project will restore natural river processes on 37 acres of the Elwha River and its flood plain, mostly upstream of the earlier work. Part of a flood plain levee was also removed (there is more still to come out). The project cost about $4 million, with funding from multiple partners, including federal and state sources.

Rebuilding the Lower Elwha River

West of Port Angeles, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe is working to restore 37 acres of the Elwha River and its floodplain. To reestablish the benefits of old-growth logjams, the tribe has installed 17 engineered logjams and stabilized 3 natural logjams on this half-mile stretch of river.

Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, Natural Systems Design Inc., Esri (Fiona Martin / The Seattle Times)

Combined with other work since 1999, there are now about 80 engineered logjams in the lower river.

“We just want to keep this momentum going, implementing recovery, and measuring the response,” McHenry said. His only concern now is money has run out for monitoring the river’s recovery. “We need a benefactor.”

On a recent fall afternoon Michel, McHenry and Drew Porter, vice president of BCI, explained the new project, as Chinook splashed and chased in the pools and riffles, putting on quite a show. “We see all the spawning where the wood is,” Michel said. “They tend to like to set up right where these jams are,” he said of the returning salmon. “The gravel is fluffy.”

The tribe counted more than 1,000 Chinook redds, or nests, in the river this spawning season. Steelhead came back some 2,500 strong (compared with 200 to 400 before dam removal), lamprey are squiggling back to the river in record numbers, and even pink and chum salmon are starting to make a comeback, McHenry said.

“They like what they see,” McHenry said, pointing to a big lunker hunkering down in a pool in the lower Elwha on a recent morning. Karl Cleveland, a heavy equipment operator and Quileute tribal member, hopped off his machine and came over to share his joy in the work. “I love this project,” said Cleveland, “It’s good to know there are generations after I’m gone that will benefit, and to actually see the fish that are going to benefit.”

Tribal fishermen like what they are seeing too, in a river that today can once again support a small ceremonial and subsistence fishery for coho.

Fishers’ bounty

Robby Francis IV cast his line in the green slide of the Elwha, hoping for a fish, while his wife, Quinault tribal member Teleshia Marie Francis, prepared the gear for their kids to join in. Aged 12, 11, 7, 6, 5 and 3, they enjoyed this special day last month, the start of only the second tribal fishing season for coho on an undammed Elwha in more than a century.

Robby Francis, 27, said he fills the freezer with fish every year to carry the family through winter, and acts as a provider for the community for ceremonies. Because if it matters, whether it’s a birthday, a funeral, an honoring or a naming, salmon is always on the table.

A week later, salmon that Francis had caught, along with fish brought by friends and family, were on the table for guests from around the region who came to watch their children get the traditional names they would carry throughout their lives. Anthony Fernandes, 46, Lower Elwha Klallam tribal member and head cook for the weekend-long naming ceremony, prepared smoked salmon hash for breakfast to get things off to a good start on the first day.

“We had an agreement with salmon, and that agreement is to keep their habitat clean and healthy so they can return and they would feed us,” Fernandes said.

Damming the river and depleting its salmon runs threatened not only the salmon’s survival but the tribe’s culture. “The relationship with these beings has been disconnected,” he said of salmon. “We are finding our way back to who we are.”

In this way, dam removal on the Elwha and the logjam projects aren’t just engineering feats — they are integral to cultural renewal. “Salmon was our family, our relative, our understanding of salmon is as a relation, not a resource,” Fernandes said.

“We call ourselves salmon people. As the salmon go, we go.”