MKWC Celebrates 12 Years of Restoration Work

Local youth tug loose a massive Scotch broom shrub along the banks of the Klamath. They took part in the 2011 Klamath Siskiyou Outdoor School, a free, week-long camp that the Mid Klamath Watershed Council runs every summer to connect young people with their surroundings and with MKWC’s ongoing restoration work. / Photo courtesy of MKWC..

Community Building With a Side of Sustainability

By Malcolm Terence, Two Rivers Tribune Contributing Writer

This year’s buzz word is “sustainability.” No surprise in this era of oil shortage and job shrinkage, of climate change and street heat from Cairo to Wall Street.

When Will Harling looks at the Klamath Basin and uses the word. He says it’s been a long time since anything has been sustainable.

Harling, who is director of the Mid Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC), says that the economies of gold mining, fishing and logging have all wound down. Even agriculture, so renewable on the face of it, is running low on water in the drier years.

The last sustainable economies in these parts, he says, were those of the traditional tribal societies that thrived for millennia before the invasion of miners 160 years ago.

MKWC, a little over 10 years old, will hold its annual dinner at its Orleans building (the old Panamnik General Store) on Saturday, January 14, with a menu of prime rib and salmon cooked traditional-style on sticks around a pit of coals.
The fundraiser begins with a silent auction at 5 pm and dinner will be served starting at 6 pm. Music for the night is still up in the air, but it’s guaranteed to be something lively and danceable.

MKWC got its start in 2000 when some locals started looking at balancing the conflicting needs of land management. They started hatching plans and their first project, as the Orleans/Somes Bar Fire Safe Council, was to organize volunteer workdays brushing and burning hazardous fuels around the homes of elderly and disabled community members.

In the summer of 2002, volunteers converged on the junction of Sandy Bar Creek and the Klamath River. Cold water from the creek would spread across a sun-baked boulder bar and end up hotter than river water by the time it got there.

Working with rock bars and muscle, the crew spent a half day concentrating the flow into a single-thread channel that gave juvenile salmon access to  large cold-water refugia pools formed by Sandy Bar Creek filling a Klamath River flood channel.

This was especially important for coho, the threatened salmon species most sensitive to water temperature in the mainstem Klamath.

Harling grew up on Salmon River and recalled that he and two friends—Toz Soto and Slate Boykin—would spend the summer days of their youth moving boulders to create channels so salmon could get upstream. Soto and Boykin both now work for the Karuk Tribe Fisheries Department.

Eventually the stream mouth projects were recognized by funders, so today crews from MKWC and the Karuk Fisheries survey 60 creeks every year and work on enhancement projects.

Slowly, support for this grassroots fish restoration work has come from many state and federal agencies, from non-profits and even from PacifiCorp, the owner of the hydroelectric dams further upriver. The dam owner has to pony up $500,000 a year for salmon habitat restoration in the interim until the lower four dams are decommissioned.

Over the years MKWC has slowly grown and now has nine programs and an operating budget of $650,000 a year. Besides fisheries and fuels, MKWC has programs in native plants, invasive species management, riparian planting, monitoring, roads, water conservation and watershed education.

The core work force includes eight people who approach full time, more than 20 others who are part time and 20-30 contractors, mostly local to the mid-Klamath region.

Whenever there is a chance, MKWC workers coattail on to the training sessions of their partner organizations. Mitzi Rants and Jillienne Bishop, for example, just attended a GIS workshop (Geographic Information System) in Yreka sponsored by the Klamath National Forest.

Similarly, Charles Wickman, co-director of the MKWC fisheries program, traveled to Washington state to review coho rearing habitat projects there with Larry Lestelle. Harling describes Lestelle, currently a contractor with the Karuk and Yurok tribes, as “the guru of coho ecology and coho habitat restoration.”

Since then, MKWC has worked with partners to develop projects that employ both tribal and non-tribal community members. Overall, Harling has hopes that the restoration economy will continue to grow and provide more jobs as well as better habitat.

In one new grant from the Humboldt County Title II Resource Advisory Committee, there is funding for MKWC crews to survey private roads in the Orleans and Weitchpec communities, looking for places where restoration work could reduce chances for sediment delivery into the streams and river.

Harling explained, “Our role is not to compete with tribes and resource agencies for restoration work, but to build the restoration economy by finding common ground on resource issues and developing new projects based on the best science, both tribal and Western.”

Harling hopes that an eventual adoption of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement (KBRA) would help fund work in the region.

MKWC is facilitating the creation of the Mid Klamath Restoration Implementation Plan with the support of the Karuk Tribe, state and federal agencies, and Siskiyou County. It will collaboratively identify and prioritize projects to restore in-stream and up-slope habitats and likely set the direction for even more local jobs.

Restoration work has a payback besides immediate jobs, he said, and he cited fuels reduction studies which show that every dollar spent on prevention, brushing, and prescribed burning saves $7 dollars in suppression costs during wildfires.
This restoration economy might not be any more sustainable, to use the buzz word again, than was mining or logging, but unlike them, it might leave in its wake a landscape resilient enough to support healthy local communities for a long time.