Whychus Creek’s restoration

Whychus Creek got 400,000 new residents Wednesday, as biologists placed bucketfuls of steelhead fry into the creek’s shallow reaches.

But the creek — which once boasted one of the biggest runs of steelhead in the Deschutes River Basin — needs help if it’s going to be a fish-friendly waterway and healthy ecosystem.

About half of Whychus Creek’s 40-mile span was bulldozed decades ago, straightening channels and wiping out the pools and meanders where fish thrive. Irrigators divert as much as 90 percent of the creek’s water. Small dams and other obstacles block fish from upstream sites. And a city — Sisters — is built along the creek’s banks.

To tackle these problems and others, more than a half-dozen organizations and agencies have designed restoration projects along Whychus Creek, including one $1.7 million effort that will break ground next week.

“Each one of these is a piece of the puzzle, and they’re all happening simultaneously,” said Ryan Houston, executive director of the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council.

One reason for the flurry of activity is that steelhead are returning to Whychus Creek, said Maret Pajutee, an ecologist with the Sisters Ranger District.

The migration route between the Upper Deschutes and the Pacific Ocean was cut off when the Pelton Round Butte dam complex was built at the base of Lake Billy Chinook in the 1950s and ’60s. But now, a multimillion-dollar effort is under way to engineer a fix that will shuttle migrating fish around the dams and allow steelhead to spawn in Whychus Creek again.

“That’s the big excitement that really is driving a lot of restoration, is people getting ready for the fish,” Pajutee said.

Any one project, on its own, wouldn’t be sufficient to get Whychus Creek in shape for returning steelhead, Houston said.

But the goal, he said, is for all the efforts to mesh together to restore a more natural ecosystem.

For example, fish need a certain amount of water flowing down the creek. So the Deschutes River Conservancy is working with irrigators on ways to keep higher flows in Whychus, Houston said.

But even with more water, fish need to be able to get safely past obstacles, so the watershed council is working with irrigation districts to ensure fish don’t get caught in irrigation equipment or stuck below dams.

The watershed council and the city of Sisters also are developing a plan for how to naturally shore up the creek’s banks through Sisters, where it cuts through about 200 backyards.

And starting next week, the watershed council and the Deschutes Land Trust are breaking ground on a project to completely reconstruct 1.7 miles of Whychus Creek through Camp Polk, just north of Sisters.

“What we want to do is restore the channel to its historic condition,” said Amanda Egertson, stewardship director with the land trust, which owns the property.

The creek previously meandered through the Camp Polk meadow, she said, dipping into pools and providing places for young fish to grow, and for returning steelhead to spawn.

But in the 1900s, people started confining the creek to a constructed channel, getting rid of those features that fish need.

So now, crews will dig a new creek bed into the meadow, designed to return the stretch to a more natural state. Project planners looked at historic photos of the area to see where the creek wandered before it was confined, and also studied features of other creeks to come up with a design.

“We’re trying to mimic Mother Nature,” Houston said.

On Wednesday, Houston and Egertson led a community tour of the site, pointing out indentations where the historic channel ran.

“If you squint and make your eyes fuzzy, you can imagine a creek meandering,” Houston said.

Excavators will carve out the new creek path this summer, and in the fall crews will put in 110,000 plants along the banks.

As dried-out cheatgrass crunched underfoot, Houston and Egertson talked about the cottonwoods, willows, sedges and other wetland plants that they hope will take its place.

While the native vegetation takes root, only a trickle of water will flow down the new creek bed, to make sure it doesn’t all wash away with the first big rush of water.

“We basically watch it for a couple of years,” Houston said. “We want to let that vegetation begin to be established — it’s what will hold that channel together, it’s what will prevent erosion.”

Then, in 2012, if all has gone well, they’ll redirect all of Whychus Creek along its new route.

For Sisters resident Sally Hockin, who joined the tour to learn more about the area, the effort is a step in the right direction.

“I think it’s magnificent,” she said. “It’s wonderful if they can undo that damage and get it back to natural.”

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