Quartz Creek, Lane County, Oregon – When restoration workers soak a metal cane in the water – Zap! – The fish in this area of the stream were a little surprised by the electric current. Make the net easier and scoop it into a bucket.
Rainbow trout, skullpin, major Pacific salamanders, and cutthroat trout. Everyone, out!
These workers were part of a vast restoration project on the Mackenzie River, bringing these fish and other aquatic lives to life, moving from Triburee Creek to the main system.
The idea here is to rebuild this stream as before, to help native species, revive the river health, and to improve water quality as the work progresses to rebuild the river as it was before.
This method, known as “stage 0” or valley reset, is one of the more extreme versions of the so-called slowwater movement in river recovery. With these approaches, the goal is to reset rivers that have been changed by agriculture, dams, logging and other developments. Simplified into a single channel running beneath the natural flood plain grade, the damaged river quickly shrinks the water stream.
Heavy equipment is used to cover the entire valley floor again, cut down river banks and raise water, reconnecting the river with the flood plains and reconnecting the relic side channels. Suddenly, the dry bank is wet again. Lots of logs, rootwads – all kinds of dead and fallen wood are also added to the flow.
After that, the river spreads out. It’ll be late. Dig into the pool and stack gravel bars. It snakes into the rill, ripples on the rocks, creating hidden holes under the logs. In other words, it does what rivers naturally do.
Here, the local utility district, Eugene Water and Electric Board, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Forest Service and a suite of partners, a local nonprofit organization, are all collaborative.
This is a recovery on a large, bold scale. “Our salmon biologists don’t know what a functional reverse scape will look like, as everything is gone,” said Chris Jordan, a research fish biologist at NOAA, based in Newport, Oregon, who toured the restoration day on a recent spring day. That’s because today many rivers are basically ditching water, Jordan said.
“When I say that, people don’t like it,” Jordan said. “But raw nature has suffered from all the illnesses we have imposed on it for the last 150 years.” But it returns its flood plains to the river, which we once again wets the land. “I remember the water,” Jordan said. Words to fight the river, for those who want the river to be placed, and their land remains dry.
But the way Jordan sees it involves that the land was stolen from the river for our purposes, and true recovery can return it and allow the river to resume its natural process of flooding, retreating, winding, and wandering in the treatment area.
Low and slow
Mackenzie’s South Fork has the results of the “Stage 0” repair completed in 2019. The cold, clear waterways eased, and spread out widely and slowly. Water dodging people etched the surface of the quiet pool. Kingfishers were scattered on the logs. The duck swirled and swirled into the vortex on its back, and the baby fish were at school and darts. It was a dream world, and it was a simple flow with all the napples and riffles.
Everywhere there was a level forest of fallen logs and dead trees. The shrubs were rotten and the banks were crowded with willows and cottonwoods, which had the river wet with flood plains.
This was the idea of creating complexity in all directions, by meandering, pools, side channels, timber piles, and creating it vertically and horizontally across the channel. We didn’t smash this river. It was too full of trees, vegetation, gravel bars, pools, holes and snakes. The connected river views included lils, pools and ponds. This was not a single flow of one channel.
Cadiz made a toronded flight in their case with a soft bottom, and Sandpiper worked at the bank. There was so much greenery, even the rocks lived with Periphytons. This is the nutritious fur of algae that feeds small things at the bottom of the river that feeds everything else.
It’s not perfect. Where managers try this method, there was a plan to deal with bank vegetation after getting wet. Invasive Lead Canary Grass It is deeply rooted throughout the channel and effectively steals opportunities for native plants to grow.
It is also difficult to monitor processed reach. Unlike a single channel that is loaned out to fish traps and sonar fish counts, where should we start in such a complex system?
However, so far, it appears that fish are voting in their tummy. 2025 Scientific Papers Mackenzie, whose project was discovered in South Fork, brings fat from the flood plains. A lovely long-standing Chinook taking advantage of high quality boy habitat conditions with low speed and depth.
And Jordan noted that in this section of Mackenzie there is a concentration of Chinook red counted by the Oregon Fish Wildlife Department in this section of Mackenzie than elsewhere in the river.
“They vote on their stomachs and eggs,” Jordan said of the fish. It’s a survival-enhancing change, and it can turn salmon populations towards recovery, Jordan said.
Skeptics and converts
The lack of published science regarding the impact of these types of projects in still relatively new ways is one of the controversies regarding the valley reset as a restoration technique. “I don’t think science really is there, that’s a big problem.” Tim Abbe, a geomorphologist The work included the construction of a logjam at the bottom of the Elfa River, which helped to further revive the natural reconnection between the river and its forest plains.
“It’s impressive, I like what I saw,” said Abbe, who toured all of the Mackenzie River projects. He hopes that the valley reset is not just a trend, and that surveillance and scientific rigor can prove the promise of this method. “It needs to be kept vetted. It’s happening faster than our science appreciates.”
One question is the durability of the repair, he pointed out. Where are the big trees, forested islands, and forested areas, growing in rivers, falling in rivers, and where are they to maintain complexity? The wood placed in the channel is stable so it doesn’t just wash away in large floods. If logs are mobilized, will they crash by hitting human structures such as bridges?
Sheri Johnson, a retired stream ecologist at the Pacific Northwest Institute of Research in the US Forest Service in Corvallis for 25 years, said she also wanted to see more scientific rigor.
“It will take some time before you know how effective it is,” she added. “Is it interesting to see this and see what happens in 10 years, what happens in 15 years, what happens in 100 years, what happens in 100 years of flood?”
Quartz Creek has all of its project partners. The valley floor was rebuilt, causing trucks to be thrown away, which had been dumped.
John Trimble, Repair Project Manager Mackenzie River Trustthe Eugene-based nonprofit protection group said the stream could attack the bank again, as it would be to raise the creek’s elevation by 6 to 9 feet. He spoke of the stream. “But it will happen by August.”
Repairs are intended to help the stream recover. The stream was channelized, and the fork above the stream was largely clear and burning. It causes flash flooding, muddy, muddy mess that moved most of the logs the river needs from the basin, with little deposition in the channel, Trimble said.
“We are trying to give it that jump start to reset the river across the valley.” He is invested in the success of the project, not only on behalf of the land trust, but also as he and other Eugene’s Water and Electrical Commission clients drink water from this river.
Reconnecting the river with the flood plain and slowing it down will help cleanse and recharge it and boost the health of the fork.
“It’s all interconnected,” he said.
