Protecting from the Headwaters: Keeping our Rivers Healthy and Flowing

BY ALISHIA ORLOFF, COORDINATOR, COLVILLE FOREST

Every month, I travel up to the Colville National Forest and examine the landscape. I see birch trees looming crookedly above me and I hear the birds alarming neighbors as I walk by. On these days, I stay with my auntie who lives in Colville. In her culture they have a protocol in which elders gather water from the rivers and pass it around, each taking a sip. Fundamentally, water is lifegiving and yet many of us wouldn’t drink directly from our rivers. When I recently went down to the Spokane River, hundreds of fish were floating at the surface. The city has not reported why, but some tribal members are suspicious of contaminants from the paper mill that they saw weeks back floating in the water. I would not drink from my rivers. 

Our rivers start in the mountains, feed the forests, flow down to incubate salmon, and fill our floodplains for agriculture. They are the foundation of our ecosystems, but too often we straighten, pave, and fill them with rocks. Straight rivers increase the speed of water flowing over the landscape. This happens on pavement and forest roads too. When water moves quickly across the landscape, it becomes violent and digs scars into the land. You can see this happen under roads where culverts jet water downstream, often creating waterfall-like barriers to fish swimming upstream. On the road above, fast moving water can pick up nearby sediment and transport it to the creeks. Small amounts of sediment are natural, but when large loads of dirt and rocks are deposited into the stream, fish eggs can be destroyed or buried. 

Nonetheless, roads are crucial for providing access to public lands. At Conservation Northwest we promote our inherent socio-ecological connection to land. The Forest Field Team partners with the Forest Service to identify areas for stabilizing or decommissioning roads, reconstructing rivers, and installing aquatic organism passages. This provides more stability and vitality to the habitat for many creatures and plants. 

Returning a road to a natural state is a slow and arduous process. The Forest Field team inspects unauthorized roads for impacts and makes on-site assessments of what work needs to be done to protect the ecosystem. Our work to decommission roads includes removing road architecture and create a more natural contour, decompacting soil and adding rough terrain, re-vegetating to make sure soil doesn’t erode and the pathway becomes inaccessible for people, and sometimes digging trenches to make vehicle access impossible. The Forest Field Team also investigates fish barriers and works with biologists to ensure that these are replaced with structures that provide greater room for fish and even animals to pass through. 

But restoration does not just occur at the intersection of roads and streams. We help implement restoration at all levels of the watershed scale to ensure that our rivers have the best chance at providing drinkable water for everyone along its banks.