No Nature Walk Today

Day 118: See those little orange flags? They mark one possible route for a nature walk in Ohop Valley, but maybe not today. I thought I'd run down to check my site-steward "beat" since Ohop is notorious for flooding. In fact, that was what farmers were trying to combat when they got the bright idea to straighten out its bends and curves back when settlers first settled in the valley. Much to their chagrin, it wound up having the opposite effect: by ditching the creek, they sped up its flow, and the water didn't have a chance to sink into the soil (which, it must be said, is very clayey here). Flooding increased, cattle got hoof rot from being pastured on boggy land, and the farmers finally just gave up. The Nisqually Land Trust acquired this particular piece of Ohop Valley in 2001. In 2009, they partnered with several other area conservation organizations and together, began a major project to "re-meander" the creek into something approximating its original channel. Roughly a mile and a half of new habitat was created in the process and today, although flooding occurs in times of heavy rainfall, Ohop Valley is a much better home for critters and plants. I'll be guiding a group through the valley some time this summer when I don't need to load them into canoes.

Really Big Snakes

Day 139: Serving as a Site Steward for a property accessed via an out-of-the-way rural road is always an adventure. In the years I've been patrolling Ohop Valley, I've come up with a number of unusual finds: a hardhat, two pickup loads of hydroton pellets (used in hydroponic agriculture), rolls of carpet padding, a sodden blanket, several elk carcases, an entire car bumper, and of course a selection of the more commonly dumped items like old lumber, television sets, a child's car seat, clothing and the ever-popular assortment of dead tires. Today's score included two short lengths of plastic pipe and two which were about twenty feet long...a pair of really big "snakes" I had a hard time wrestling into the little building where we store trash for later pickup.