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Restoring a River in America's Tongass Forest
Along a Harris River tributary, at points where old landslides filled the streambed, a contractor named Jim O’Brien maneuvered a giant excavator into place and began to dig as delicately as possible. When he found the buried cobbles, he knew he’d found the lost river. By uncovering it, he invited the river back to its native course. The Harris is a relatively healthy river. It drains a 19,000-acre basin of lush rainforest on Prince of Wales Island, where the land is steep and rugged. More than 100 inches of annual precipitation spill over the rain gauge, continually recharging its fast-flowing tributaries. Cutthroat and steelhead, coho and chum lurk in its eddies. Yet the river’s mixed history left its mark. In places, logging road culverts blocked a salmon’s safe passage. The natural variety of its tangled banks was gone. The cluttered woody debris that gives structure to the river, providing habitat for fish, had disappeared – management practices of past decades cleared even in the sensitive streamside corridor. Despite its past, the watershed ranks high in the Conservancy’s list of Core Areas of Biological Value. “The Harris River and its tributaries offer us the best chance of restoring an entire watershed successfully. The streams in this watershed still offer good habitat, but we’re helping to create a natural world-class fishery once again,” says Rob Bosworth, who directs Southeast Alaska programs for the Conservancy. The results are visible. Some roads are now gone, others are reduced to single-track hiking trails, and a dozen culverts have been pulled out for good. Where the river had no natural impediments to churn up essential eddies, crews dropped in boulders, bulky root balls and stout cedar logs. Young salmon have appeared where for years there were none. “This creates the holes that allow a fish to winter over. It’s an important component of a healthy river,” Bosworth says. So today, the same tools that once built the logging roads in the Tongass National Forest are undoing the work of the past. It’s a step toward a restoration economy: one that helps rebuild nature’s infrastructure, creates jobs you can raise a family on, and restores the fish that feed people and nature.
The Harris River restoration project began in 2006, following the results of the Conservancy’s Coastal Forest and Mountains Ecoregional Assessment. This evaluation showed that Harris River and its tributaries ranked high among the region’s Core Areas of Biological Value.
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