In the summer of 2005 fish passage was restored to the upper watershed of Moose Creek! Now adult salmon can migrate above the large waterfall, which had been a complete fish barrier for more than 35 years! This channel re-alignment provides an additional 5 miles of salmon spawning and rearing habitat. For this summer’s progress please read on.
For the history of the project please click on the link at the bottom of the page. For project photos see our Photo Gallery.
The aim of the restoration project was to restore fish passage to upper Moose Creek; fish passage that had been blocked by a large waterfall, a result of stream straightening by railroad engineers in the 1920’s. After years of planning and grant writing, groundwork on the Moose Creek project began in early May 2005 with the construction of a 1⁄2 mile access road to the project site. The access road was built on the historic railroad bed and was a rough, but very beautiful trail through the woods. Once access was established, the project site had to be cleared of brush and trees, some of which were quite large and may have been 80 years old. The largest of the cleared trees were stockpiled for later use.
Moose Creek Work
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After the project site was cleared, the track hoe and bulldozer constructed the new channel and floodplain. (The floodplain is the normally dry, flat land area on either side of the high-water stream channel that is susceptible to being inundated by flood water.) The process of constructing the channel and floodplain took several weeks. As ground material was removed to the desired elevation, the soils changed from fines to gravel and boulders, showing us that our reconstructed alignment clearly was a historic stream channel location!
