Beaver Pond Creek

Background: A coho salmon will try to spend its first year of life in a wetland or beaver pond near where it hatched. If it can find suitable rearing habitat, it will reside there for a little over a year before heading out to sea. The better the salmon's rearing habitat, the faster it will grow. And the bigger it is when it heads out to open water, the better its chance of survival in the open ocean. A couple of years later when it comes time for salmon to return to their natal spawning grounds, the creeks that sent out the fattest and healthiest smolts will see the heaviest adult returns. This is one of the main reasons why one creek in a spawning season may have so many salmon that a person could almost walk across the creek on their backs, while another is almost devoid of returning fish.

The Problem: Because of its drainage basin area's characteristics, Beaver Pond Creek should be prime coho spawning and rearing habitat. Its drainage area has almost three miles of spawning habitat connected to approximately 35 acres of high quality wetland rearing habitat. Fish usage of this habitat has been surveyed by our department for the last several years and we have found consistent under-utilization. While other nearby creeks with similar drainage basins had hundreds of returning spawners, in Beaver Pond Creek we would find only a handful, and in some years none at all.

The problem with Beaver Pond Creek was at its mouth. It empties into Pilchuck Creek over a sandstone dome formation that spreads the creek's water out into a wide, shallow, sheetflow. Depending on rainfall and river stage, this sheetflow could be as shallow as ¾ of an inch in depth, and spread out in a fan as wide as 30 feet. The elevation difference between Beaver Pond Creek's streambed and the surface of its trunk stream could be as much as six feet. Unless Pilchuck Creek is at flood stage, a returning salmon would have a very difficult time swimming or jumping over the sandstone dome from the trunk stream to the tributary creek.

Beaver Pond Creek has not supported a robust native population of coho, due to this unreliable accessibility. Suppose, for example, that a spawning season for particular year enjoys a timely floodstage on Pilchuck Creek that allows spawner access to the creek. These spawners would reproduce, and their offspring would head out to sea to return to their natal stream three years later. This second generation of spawner hopefuls would hold in Pilchuck Creek below Beaver Pond Creek's mouth and wait for a flood event that could help them over the sandstone dome. Without another floodstage event, these spawner hopefuls wouldn't be able to get back into their natal spawning grounds and the run's residence in the creek would be broken with that generation. It's likely that because of the sporadic spawner access over the sandstone dome Beaver Pond Creek has been alternately extirpated and recolonized several times over the past several decades.

The Solution: In February of 2003, a work crew from the Indian Ridge Correctional facility carved fish ladder step-pools into the solid rock of the sandstone dome at the mouth of Beaver Pond Creek. The step-pools' design was taken from Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife standard fish passage structure drawings and adapted to the specific contours of the sandstone dome by the work crew. We are extremely pleased with the results of their efforts and predict that spawners will be able to access the Beaver Pond Creek spawning and rearing habitat in all but the most extremely low-water years.

In 2002 the Natural Resouces department found no coho salmon, but thus far in the 2003 autumn spawning season, we have have documented the return of at least 13 coho in Beaver Pond Creek.