Rebuilding a waterway, for fish and for people

Some stretches of Whychus Creek near Sisters have such outstanding scenery, clear waters and unique rock formations, they are protected under the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

Some stretches of the creek, however, need work. In some places, people have dammed it, straightened out its meanders or built on top of its floodplain — all of which can make things tricky for fish swimming in the waterway.

“There’s a lot of good habitat, but just not everywhere,” said Mathias Perle, project manager with the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council.

And with a multimillion-dollar effort under way to bring steelhead back to the creek and some Sisters residents concerned about Whychus Creek encroaching on their backyards, the watershed council, other organizations and government agencies are working on a number of projects to return the creek to a more natural setting.

On a stretch of the creek several miles both north and south of Sisters, for example, projects are being planned to allow fish to safely navigate a dam that diverts irrigation water, to reduce erosion through Sisters and to create a more naturally flowing creek.

“We’re looking at the creek overall,” Perle said. “The idea is that each project kind of works with all the others.”

One of the restoration projects focuses on a stretch of Whychus Creek about three miles south of Sisters, where water is diverted from the creek to irrigate about 8,000 acres of farmland.

There, the goals are to screen off an irrigation canal so fish don’t get caught in it and also to alter the streambed so that fish can get around a concrete dam that diverts the irrigation water, said Mike Riehle, fish biologist with the Sisters Ranger District. The U.S. Forest Service is slated to start taking public comments later this month on the proposal.

The goal is to ensure that fish can get upstream, Riehle said.

“Right now, there’s a 5-foot jump that they would have to make,” he said.

While the project would benefit the fish currently swimming the creek, it’s also designed with an eye for the salmon and steelhead that water managers are anticipating will return, possibly as soon as two years from now.

Reintroducing the fish in the Upper Deschutes Basin is a requirement for Portland General Electric and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs to continue operating the dams they co-own in the Pelton Round Butte complex. Doing that involves a retrofit to the Round Butte dam that will cost more than $100 million, as well as habitat projects to make the waterways more fish-friendly.

Currently, the small concrete dam across Whychus Creek has a fish ladder, but it doesn’t work properly, Perle said. And while those involved in the project considered putting up a new and improved fish ladder to help both steelhead and other fish above the obstacle, they instead decided to fill in the creek bed below the dam.

“The dam will still be there, but it will essentially be buried,” Perle said. “We’re filling up the downstream side so fish will be going up right over the top of the lip. ... Instead of a fish ladder, we’re creating a natural-like channel.”

Another part of the project calls for installing a fish screen at the dam, where water is diverted to an irrigation canal for the Three Sisters Irrigation District.

It’s something the irrigation district has had on its radar for a while, said Marc Thalacker, the district manager, so that the fish swimming the creek now, and the ones that are scheduled to start arriving, won’t be funneled into the canal and killed.

“It’s important for the district to have (its) diversion screened, so that when passage is eventually achieved for the steelhead and salmon, we won’t have mortality,” said Thalacker,

The district is going with a style of fish screen just developed by people in the Mount Hood area, he said. The screen is designed to keep fish in the creek, prevent them from getting stuck and keep debris from clogging the apparatus.

The tricky thing about work-ing on Whychus Creek, said Ryan Houston, executive director of the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council, is that the volume of water flowing through can go from a trickle to a deluge quickly when the snow starts to melt.

“The entire system needs to be designed in the context of extremely high flows and extremely low flows, and everything in the middle,” Houston said.

It’s part of what makes the restoration project a complex one, he said, adding that the project will also address some of the erosion issues along the stretch of creek below the irrigation dam.

Planning and designs for this project cost about $275,000, Houston said, and organizers are expecting the work itself to cost between $1 million and $2 million.

And there are other parts of the waterway the organization hopes to restore over the coming decade, he said.

The watershed council is working with the Deschutes Basin Land Trust to return 1.7 miles of Whychus to its naturally meandering ways in the Camp Polk area, north of Sisters, by digging out new channels and adding vegetation. The work is slated to start this spring, and the watershed council has already ordered 130,000 plants for the restoration project.

“We’ve been working on this for three years, and now we’re ready to break ground and do the work,” Houston said.

A third major project in the works involves developing a plan for the creek as it runs through Sisters and in the areas surrounding the city.

“We had a lot of individual lots that have had erosion problems, and in the past they’ve been treated individually,” said Eric Porter, community development director with Sisters. “Rather than doing it piecemeal, we wanted to look at the entire system.”

So project participants — including the city and the watershed council — will go stretch by stretch, trying to figure out what is needed in each section, Porter said.

Perle said some people who live along the creek have had problems with it eroding their backyards. In some cases, it’s creeping up to foundations of houses.

Possible solutions could involve strengthening riverbanks with trees, plants and rocks.

Organizers held a community meeting to discuss the project this fall and plan to hold another one in a month or two to go over the project’s progress.

“It’s meant for the city; it’s meant for the people living along the creek, so it needs to work for them,” Perle said.

Kate Ramsayer can be reached at 541-617-7811 or at kramsayer@bendbulletin.com.