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Contents on this page were published in the April/May, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1994 WFP Collective, Inc.
What follows is a description by Kurt Beardslee, executive director of Washington Trout Inc., of logging's effects on a western Washington creek. In September of last year, Washington Trout petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect the summer run steelhead on Deer Creek under the Endangered Species Act. The Fisheries Service, which manages salmonid protection and harvesting guidelines, ruled that Washington Trout's concerns are valid. A final determination, however, may not come until 1995.
In 1927, Roderick Haig-Brown caught his first summer steelhead in Deer Creek and wrote: "The river was allot (sic) bigger than the word 'creek' had led me to expect, and it was beautiful, clear and bright and fast, tumbled on rocks and gravel bars."
Some years later, Steve Raymond, author of Year of the Angler, described the Deer Creek run. "The bright summer fish ran to the mouth of Deer Creek and held there in the pools and riffles until it was time to run up the creek itself, back into the trackless wilderness where the loggers had yet to reach. No one knows the original size of the great native run, but there is little doubt that it was one of the finest summer runs in the world, perhaps the finest of them all."
By 1990, however, Tulalip Tribes biologist Geno Lucchetti's description of the watershed was a litany of catastrophic illness: "Deer Creek is suffering from systemic hillslope and channel failure due to extensive deforestation and road building. Recently, stream channels throughout the basin have been radically modified by activation of large sediment sinks and a compressed hydrologic regime... A survey conducted in 1988 found almost all of the larger pools (in the creek) have been drastically reduced in size, depth, and habitat quality. Fish populations of the system have been highly affected by these changes. Juvenile surveys conducted by the Washington Department of Wildlife and the Washington Department of Fisheries for the past seven years indicate declining trends of steelhead and coho salmon. Dolly Varden char (or possibly Bull Trout) may have been totally extirpated from the system owing to their suspected intolerance of water quality impacts.
"The problems of the drainage are both dramatic and insidious," Lucchetti wrote. "It must be recognized that almost every stream reach in the entire basin is exhibiting severe signs of excessive bedload movement and instability."
How did Deer Creek change from a stream "crystal clear, cold as ice" into the mess that Lucchetti describes? Besides recreational sport fishing, the 1920s ushered in the first of many years of logging operations in Deer Creek. Logging continued into the 1930 and 1940s on a small, sustainable scale. Over geologic time and up to the 1960s and 1970s, the movement of the highly erodible soils into Deer Creek and its tributaries - and the health and vitality of the summer steelhead run - were generally in balance.
Beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the mid-1980s, however, timber harvesting intensified both on National Forest and state and private land. This cumulative increase in timber harvesting during this time period tipped the balance, causing much more mass soil movement and erosion into Deer Creek and its tributaries.
From the mid-1970s to the present, the summer-run steelhead population in Deer Creek has declined precipitously. Beginning in 1984, fish population studies by the Department of Wildlife show declines of about 50 percent per generation. The Department estimates that from a historical run size of 1,500 to 2,000 adults, to a 1990 estimate of 80 to 100 adults, this unique run of steelhead could reach extinction by the year 2000.
In response to a large landslide (exacerbated by excessive timber harvest) in the winter of 1983-1984, resource managers, landowners, fishing groups, tribes and conservation organizations formed the Deer Creek Policy Group (DCPG) to preserve and recover the declining summer run steelhead. All groups participated in a comprehensive management plan.
Despite this plan, the steelhead run continued to decline. Seeking more long-range protections, Washington Trout and the Tulalip Tribes remained concerned about continuing steelhead declines and sought more long range protections.
In 1992, they drafted a more restrictive policy statement, which stated, in part: "It is agreed that all land uses in the Deer Creek basin will be consistent with this goal [of protecting the steelhead against extinction] and will not take place if they have the potential to contribute to fish habitat degradation."
The effort to get all participants of the DCPG to sign this statement failed. Without all participants signing on, the basin-wide management approach could not be achieved. Unfortunately, the most significant opposition to this policy statement came from the very agency that should have been its author, Washington's own Department of Natural Resources.
In essence, the statement said these fish can take no more. DNR and others' failure to sign this statement because we should "leave the door open for compromise" was absurd. All fish populations in the drainage have been seriously impacted - some have been driven to extinction and others are on the edge.
Logging and healthy rivers can co-exist with proper management, but Deer Creek is not a healthy river. For Deer Creek, the line must be drawn where there is the potential of further degradation of fish habitat.
Logging-associated activities continue in the drainage today. Even though these practices have been severely curtailed in recent years, the risk to the basin from logging and road building still pose a continual threat to the recovery of these endangered populations. Other persistent, ongoing threats to these stocks include poaching and indiscriminate mixed-stock fishery.
If what happened to Deer Creek was an isolated incident, the loss would be easier to accept. Unfortunately, this is common on Washington's lakes, streams and rivers - from forest-practice regulations that are out of balance and woefully inadequate to protect the public trust, to agencies unable (whether from a lack of funding, or lack of will) to monitor and enforce existing regulations.
Many who work for these agencies are knowledgeable and dedicated to the resource and do their best to make the system work, but the system is flawed. Daily monitoring and enforcement by all resource agencies and by the public is mandatory for keeping the checks and balances in our natural resource dilemma. A conservative policy and early detection of potential problems is essential to protecting the resource.
Will we continue, through our inaction, to ruthlessly rape the public resource year-in and year-out and then, after the plunder, give money for token restoration? No. Options exist outside restoration projects that make us feel good, but do little to help the resource and do nothing to change the state and federal policies that allowed these problems to occur in the first place.
- Kurt Beardslee is executive director of Washington Trout Inc., a statewide fish conservation organization.
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