Calapooia Riparian Restoration takes place of fishing

I didn’t go fishing this weekend.  Everything has been pretty high and though the fish are acclimated the rivers are pushy.  Instead I headed up to Brownsville with buddies from the Mckenzie-Upper Willamette chapter of Trout Unlimited to assist the Calapooia Watershed Council’s restoration efforts.  We removed blackberries and english ivy hoping to give native plant communities a chance to thrive.  Here Trout Unlimited Vice-President Todd “the Bod” Mullen shows the blackberries whose boss:

TU 678 President Al Avey was on ivy detail:
 

And I was on blackberry mop up until my rake broke.  After lunch and a couple beers we headed up the Calapooia to scout.

The Calapooia is a small river–a west side Cascade tributary that heads near Tidbits mountain and runs parallel to the Mckenzie to the north.  Historically, the river was home to a fair population of spring chinook and was apparently the nothernmost distribution of native winter steelhead in the Willamette basin.  Steelhead populations remain stable but typically the number of returning chinook can be counted on one hand.  Though the upper river is undammed two impoundments on the lower river laid waste to salmon populations.  Brownsville dam was removed last summer.  Here’s the former dam site:

With the removal of Brownsville Dam with its fish slaughtering ladder, Sodom dam on the lower river remains the only barrier to fish passsage.  Check out the old “fish ladder” at the site of the former Brownsville dam.  Chinook and steelhead actually had to try and pass that thing (there probably was some water in it when  the dam was in place).   I’ve never seen anything like it:

With the removal of Brownsville Dam and the inevitable improvements (at the least) to Sodom Dam the future looks better for Calapooia salmon and steelhead than it has for a century.  The goal is to improve the chinook returns to around one thousand fish per year. Weyerhaueser owns the vast majority of the upper watershed and despite being heavily logged the river remains beautiful. The only thing it needs is some large woody debris to give the chinook an assist.  It also looks like it might harbor a fair sized trout or two . . . when it opens I’ll find out.