By Craig McCaa

 

Engineer Rodd Moretz surveys the new stream channel.

On a sunny July afternoon, BLM-Alaska engineer Rodd Moretz stood on a gravel bar beside Harrison Creek holding a survey rod topped by a white, dome-shaped GPS antenna. He peered at the yellow GPS unit in his other hand and moved the rod a few feet, then waited for the GPS to record his new position. Satisfied, he removed a wooden stake with orange flagging from the pile of stakes on the back of his ATV and pounded it into the gravel bar.

 

“I’ve got three different colors of flagging on the stakes,” Moretz said. “One color to mark the stream channel, one for the start of the floodplain, and one for vegetation that will be saved. This helps the equipment operators understand where they need to move dirt.”

 

Not far upstream from Moretz, two D8 bulldozers clanked and lurched through swirling dust as they flattened large gravel piles and shaped them into gentle slopes rising from the creek.

 

Moretz and the bulldozers were part of BLM’s multi-year stream rehabilitation project on Harrison Creek, a major tributary to Birch Creek National Wild River in the Steese National Conservation Area.

 

The project will attempt to restore a stream badly damaged by more than 100 years of placer mining, most of which occurred before mine reclamation was required. A major challenge of the project is fashioning a stable floodplain and stream channel from eroded piles of washed gravel and sand, called tailings, left after mining ended.

 

With his survey stakes Moretz was marking out a future stream section designed by contractor USKH, Inc. It was then the bulldozers’ job to shape the tailings into a proper channel and floodplain.

 

The channel design for a section of Harrison Creek tells the equipment operators where to move dirt.

 

If a stable channel can be established on Harrison Creek, less sediment will be eroded into the stream and vegetation should be able to grow on the stream’s banks and floodplain. This should help what are intended to be the project’s prime beneficiaries: fish. In 1995, 1996 and 2000, agency fisheries biologists found juvenile Chinook salmon rearing in lower Harrison Creek. But the salmon, as well as the Arctic grayling found throughout the drainage, have little productive habitat on Harrison Creek.

 

A bulldozer works pushes dirt to create the new stream channel on Harrison Creek.

“We need to get vegetation, to get some habitat,” said project manager Ingrid McSweeny.  “It’s so sterile now. Once in a while you see an Arctic grayling, but there’s no food for them.”

 

The project, which will last several years, will eventually address problem areas along 11 miles of Harrison Creek. Another similar project has been ongoing for many years on Nome Creek in the White Mountains National Recreation Area.