WatershedEvents

BEATTY / MCLANE CREEK CONFLUENCE

A long overdue and much needed visit to Mclane Creek Natural Area, and the Mclane/Beatty Creek confluence this afternoon. There wasn't much moving at the beaver pond - if you are familiar with Kitty's landscape paintings you'll recognize the big snag right away. It was fairly quiet along the boardwalks covering sensitive areas (below) as well.

The fall colors this year seem particularly strong to me, given the terrible heat and limited amounts of rain we had in early to mid summer. I'm thrilled with it all, and feel tremendously lucky to be living in such a wonderful area.

The confluence lies on dry ground just outside the extreme southwest boundary of the nature trail itself. A short walk through the woods puts you at the base of a very large, multi-trunk, western red cedar - the confluence lies directly below the group.

In the photo above, Beatty Creek comes in from the lower left and merges (about dead center of the shot) with Mclane, which flows left-to-right through the top half of the photo. There is not much in the way of running water in Mclane Creek right now, and only soggy gravel and soggier leaves in Beatty.

Salmon won't begin plowing upstream until the rain gives both creeks a good first flush. The coho will be first, probably sometime in the first or second week of November. In all likelihood the chum won't be able to venture into Beatty Creek's main channel until sometime just before Thanksgiving, when there will be (hopefully) an inch or two of water passing over the log jam currently blocking most of the channel. Chum can't go airborne like coho, so rapids without side channels create total blockades. Last year's strongest flows though the natural notch shown below were deep enough to allow large numbers of the great beasts to fight their way into the deeper water on the other side. (The viewpoint shown here is roughly 180 from the one above, and looks straight upstream from the confluence itself)

Several solid and potentially productive pulses of Pacific moisture are headed this way in the next few days, and we've had a fair amount of rain already this month. I'm hopeful it will be a good year for the runs in both creeks - a couple years ago Beatty was bone dry until mid-December, well after the chum run had come and gone. Not a single fish made it into the creek in time to spawn. 

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PS - HOW LUCKY AM I?

A hard left turn at the base of this towering mass of second-growth, big-leaf maple takes you back to the pond at the heart of the reserve; but a hard-right puts you on the trail back to my house, about a half-mile away as the crow flies. I am truly blessed, thanks to the foresight and ongoing efforts of a large number of people who, for many years have put their give-a-damn where their mouths are. Thank you, one and all.

The Chum Cycle

A view of Beatty Creek in early fall of 2015. This bent tree caught my attention when I first visited Beatty Creek in the spring of 2014. The creek was full at the time, and  I was blissfully unaware of how intermittent the flow in this reach could be. I've visited this spot a dozen times since. The embankment from where I took this shot was flat and relatively free from salmon berries. I would sometimes sit or squat there for a half hour or more - just listening to the water and admiring the epiphytes and other vegetation. 

Taken a few days later, after a particularly heavy rain. The water was running strong, but not yet at full flood.

I returned once more,two weeks later. The rains had increased steadily from a few hundredths at a time to inches. The stream was running a a nearly full boil and was fully engaged in restructuring its bed. In just a few days the creek had carried my favorite perching place away. But I found a new one just to the left of where the old bench had been, a place where I could once again sit and marvel at the miracle of water. I'm weeks overdue for another visit. 

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POSTSCRIPT: I went back yesterday morning and was a little surprised how close to drying up the stream has become in just a few short days. This is late April, which seems very early in the year. However, the soils around here drain very quickly, and rainfall here in the Olympia/Tumwater area is more than an inch less than "normal" for the month. 

I checked a couple of pools and they both contained small fish, probably similar to the one's Jake and I discovered last summer (see previous post). I never got a positive ID on them, but the best guess is they were coho that made a wrong turn when they came to the Beatty - Mclane Creek confluence. The spot shown here is at roughly 40 feet higher in elevation than that confluence. The reaches upstream from here are are probably close to bone dry already. There's still a great deal of moisture in the stream bed, so fresh water will be entering the pools through seepage for at least a few more days. But if the next round of rain isn't better heavier than its been in some time, the little fish in these isolated pools won't be flushed out and taken further down stream. I'll keep an eye out on the process, and maybe try later to set up a "taxi" service for a few of them.