Bringing salmon back - Oregon

American Forests, Wntr, 1998 by Jon Christensen

To ward off federal intervention, an unlikely coalition is trying to save Oregon's coastal watershed. But it's slow going. And there are no guarantees.

Chuck Matayo swings the steering wheel of his truck like he's at the helm of a boat on the ocean.

"I hope you're not prone to sea sickness," he says.

"Pickup coming up Marlow Creek," his partner, Mike Lester, squawks into a CB radio. The three of us brace ourselves against each other in the crowded cab.

Matayo pilots the truck up a winding narrow dirt road through dark, heavily forested mountain ravines. He wears a beat-up cowboy hat and chain-smokes as he drives, looking like a Marlboro man at 60. Until a few years ago he skippered his own fishing boat out of Coos Bay, Oregon. For 20 years he chased salmon up and down the Pacific Coast.

But salmon populations have plummeted over the past two decades; Many species have been declared threatened or endangered, and the federal government has clamped down hard on fishing.

"We're both displaced American fishermen," says Lester, a talkative 52-year-old with a salt-and-pepper beard and short ponytail. "We were regulated out of a trade."

The two ex-fishermen spend their days driving logging roads through the steeply corrugated mountain drainages of the Coos River watershed in southwestern Oregon, trying to help save the salmon they once fished.

Matayo and Lester work for the Coos Watershed Association, a nonprofit formed two years ago to improve the "environmental integrity and economic stability" of the 600-square-mile Coos River watershed. This is a long-term project. It would take "years" to survey all the logging roads lacing these drainages, says Matayo. But they don't have much time.

Under the Oregon Coastal Salmon Restoration Initiative, a deal brokered by Gov. John Kitzhaber, the National Marine Fisheries Service is giving the watershed association two years to prove that its efforts can save the coho salmon (see page 19). If they can't, the coho will be declared threatened, and mandatory requirements could force major changes throughout the watershed, from logging in the headwaters and farming along the lower reaches of the river, to shipping in the port of Coos Bay and recreational fishing, a mainstay of tourism along the state's southern coast.

So Matayo and Lester and six other ex-fishermen are out scouring the woods using a triage system. They start at the top of drainages and work their way down, surveying streams where coho are known to spawn.

Today they are surveying logging roads in Elliott State Forest, identifying badly placed or damaged culverts that might block coho salmon from reaching the river's headwaters. This winter the salmon will return there to spawn after circling the Pacific Ocean for two or three years.

Matayo points out where the state forestry department has put valuable logs into the creek to slow water, catch sediment and gravel, and build up spawning beds. This is one of the association's quick fixes to increase spawning habitat.

Farther downstream they meet up with other members of their crew who have found a culvert with a four-foot drop that blocks spawning coho from a tributary. The culvert will go to the top of the list for replacement.

"When they first built these roads they didn't give a damn," says Lester. "That was back when the fish were so thick you could walk across them."

Later we stop to visit Lyle Maguire, whose house sits a hundred yards from Glenn Creek, an important spawning area. Last year the watershed association planted trees - cedar, Douglas-fir, and willow - and fenced a 15-foot-wide strip of Maguire's pasture along the creek to stop erosion. The association paid for the fence and labor; the state forestry department donated the trees. In exchange, Maguire, a retired logger, promised to keep his horses off the streamside for five years - long enough, they hope, for the trees to take hold.

When Maguire first heard the association's offer "it sounded too good to be true," he says. "I kept wondering, what's the catch? So far there hasn't been any. A few people think it's a waste of tax-dollar money. But for the guy getting the work done it's a good thing. And it makes the streams look a lot better."

The Maguire place sits in the transition zone between forest and lowlands, where the influences felt from the tide and the river balance out.

From here on down to the town of Coos Bay, the Coos River is largely confined by dikes and pastures. "All that farmland was a nursery for fish," says Lester. "It was all willows and meanders. They ditched it and put fill and cows on it. That's progress, I guess."

The Coos Watershed Association is trying frantically to patch together the strands of a once-rich but now badly strained ecosystem. When members gather for lunch at a trendy brew pub in Coos Bay, they seem to be on their best guarded behavior. It feels somewhat like a shotgun wedding in a small corner of the great Northwest timber and salmon wars.

Before he talks to me, Bob Laport, the Coos County forester and a founder of the association, looks around to see who might be listening.