Redwood Reader

115. Legacy Damage
When I step back and look at what originally drove me to this point, I see I have answered many of my questions as to what happened to create such a disaster on the landscape. To get there you drive through the Humboldt Redwoods, probably one of the worlds greatest accumulations of fungal residue, out past Albee Creek. Here we see the results of flooding and development when the creek jumped its banks and swept the town and riparian forest remnants away. As we learned from the tsunami, debris filled rushing water has far more momentum than clean water and is therefore more destructive. Further along we see the HRSP restoration project tree planting because recruitment has been poor after all these years. This is a result of the soil in the root zone being swept away or buried forccing the glomalin cycle to start from scratch.
Another exciting aspect of this program is the digging new pools in the stream bed. I hope it is a model we can repeat in lots of places once the upslope threats are recognized and or ameliorated. These would include roads, houses, old jobsites such as landings and clearcuts, any other open ground causing runoff rather than absorbtion, active faults, artificially steep terrain, even individual stumps alll play a role in the cumulative and continuing injury to the forest system.
Moving up the hill we see the Cuneo Creek slide from the aptly named Devils Elbow. It is rather bare still after all these years, a little bit of growth creeping down a few gullies. Again, the ground is not going through the usual regenerative cycle because the entire system had disappeared down the hill. DIrect seeding by air or artillery is one suggestion. ANother is filling helicopter nets with seeding coyote brush and dump it on the lide to distribute its seed. A better one would be to experimentally plants sections with different mixtures of mycorhizzia innoculuent found in the Park in succession so workers are working on ground somewhat stabilized by previous planting. THis course would take small jobs over many years. As I have repeated, bare ground is unacceptable in high rainfall areas. THis is the problem with preservation, at times it prevents the very work that would stablize it. HRSP's current general plan contains lots of restoration activities, and we hope vegetating Cuneo is high on the agenda. The Park can really incorporate the glomalin issue into their practices and outreach.
At the top of the switchbacks we find the top of Cuneo, and we can say with certainty that it is doing exactly as predicted when the vegetation is removed from the top of marine sediment-formed mountains like Hispaola. It is failing and continuing to fail. It is so massive there is no fix. More slides are inevitable as nature seeks its own angle of repose through peak rain events. We do not see the massive live oaks here we see over the hill, I bet they were cut for tool parts and firewood, additionally destabilizing the local area before the big event. I see no effort to absorb a higher percentage of rainfall above this slide, a possibly helpful activity above any disturbed ground or watercourse. The Redwwods to the Sea could as easily be the Cuneo th Honeydew Slide Trail.
Just up the road a rock outcrop loses some rock every year. These vertiacal rocks walls of rock of low integrity are continuous problems in the region. Spoils and rock piles along the road indicate road crews contribute to the overall sediment load in the watershed. The large concrete water tanks are a great example of public works and water capture providing a high level of service to the people with minimal landscape impacts. This program should be renewed, and we have supported the new large tanks now available for private parties, and cistern projects THere are also power line trails that show that hardwoods lean into canopy openings reaching for sunlight possibly influenced by the sudden loss of side pressure and competition. These sites rarely slide because low growing brush fills the ground area and remains largely undisturbed. Right around here we are leaving the rain shadow, and rainfall average almost doubles from 65" in the park to 110" on the wet side.
Coupled with road closures in the upper watershed area it was stupifying to see the Mazzone Re-Route, apparently an administrative access road, cut along the upper headwall of the watershed. I have not walked it but multiple massive slides on Middle and Dry Creeks suggest this is a very bad idea. It is said a minimum number of trees were cut but roads building has cut soil loose which now has to travel through the watershed. The area where the road rejoins the access road by the beginning of Rim Road is too close to be parallel the existing roads. There will be too much water in that swale in a peak event. It seems like a particularly poor example of informed land management.
On the way in to the Thought Preserve we pass through shaded fuel breaks, a legacy impact of restoration and firefighting issues merging. I think this should be a big employer but we need some funding sources from business activity, rather than being grant driven. Carbon credits fill this need There are other areas of young tanoak that have somehow spaced themselves reasonably and have complete canopy and duff layers. I see this in Gilham Butte and other Humboldt landscapes. Fire is suggested as a reason for even aged stands but my own burnt parcel has coppiced into multiple stems rather than the few well spaced stems I see. Then we come to the old tree planted area the old man cut his firewood out of. It was fully stocked and well kept until he died. THis is an old issue for treemen. The estate cut most of the timber. Continuing issues had them cut the rest a couple of years later. A few seed trees, some seddlings, stump sprouts fromm madrone and brush now cover the area. The road is very dusty here, it used to benefit from fog drip when there were Douglas fir here.
Now at the creek side spur road, we walk up to the old Middle Creek bridge. The surviving landscape is full of majestic live oaks, and the creek canyon seemed to be lined wiwth cliffs topped by these trees. The reality is more sinister. They are the survivors of horrific landscape events caused by human activity nad peak rain events. Looking up at any one of these slides they are all topped by these trees, and the roots are not bare, and they are not exposed when the hillside slides. They are rooted tooo well to be moved, and their massive root zone maintains its own storage system too greater depth than other types. Over and over you can find trees of every other species in slides. Of the four I know of that have gone down, one was excavated, one intercepted a slide from above it and a 24"+ trunk sheared off, and the other two had fire burn the uphill roots. After twenty years the growth on the downhill side, where it was the only item left in the canopy, eventually weighed them down. Their turned up roots burnt clear to the trunk, the other side still firmly rooted in the ground. These critical trees need protection in fragile landscapes because of the excellence of their firewood.
The road we are on is a typical old style road, originally a ranch road, later a circular subdivision road and now a remnant of the old cut and fill type. Glomalin isn't sufficient to hold the fills in heavy weather because it takes a lot of time to grow the landscape back together. Cuts are a problem because they starve the glomalin. The road is first cleared of trees and vegetation. Glomalin is then starved above thecut up to the point of stabilityi which is the live oaks. Starved glomalin below the road fails when saturated. An interesting note here is how often abandonded roads fail after a hole is dug in the surface or inboard ditch. It seems liketly that they allow water to penetrate a compacted surface, and find the subsoil root zone devoid of soil glue. WIth its long life span glomalin remains in the soil if buried slowly aging as no new material is added. After a while the soil has reverted to sediments ready to liquify in the next peak event. Fills and surfacing material across Douglas fir bridges and Humboldt crossings and around culverts have the same problem, the material is not easily reincorporated back into the landscape, and quickly gets into the stream as the landsccape and timbers fail. Besides that many Humboldts were for seasonal work, material left in swales were carried away by each major rain event. These events get smaller and more frequent as continuing and cumulative damages affect the watersheds ability to absorb strorm water. The cutting force of running water on the landscape is well known. It is well illustrated at and above the old bridge. To the right, the old road wound up the canyon wall. It was denuded by logging with many stumps and only some brushy remnants. After big rain in 1982 a whole section of lands surface slid down the hill and disappeared. We can say that glomalin was decaying and was the resulting silt liquified upon saturation, resulting in mass wasting. To the right, up the hill a large piece of cleared land was begining to slip, partly because it is on aa fault line and partly because the stability at the bottom of the hill had long before been compromised. In the December 1992 storm, uncaptured runoff rushed down that crack cutting a flat bottom gully about four foot by three foot all the way to the bridge There it cut all the soil for eight feet back into the bank leaving the protruding boulder as an island far from the bank.
Turning West again we approach the Thought Preserve, heading down a well rocked raod to- a hairpin turn overlooking a sixty foot vertical soil bank with a creek at the bottom, Six feet to your left is a secondary creek, and there used to be a bunch of land between Middle Creek way down there and this little stream six feet away and about 15 feet below you. We have been here long enough to see dozens of feet of this landscape disappear as continual vertiacl slides caused by undercutting, caused by sediment daelivery from feeder stream son the other side of the canyon. Probably a couple hundred yards of it. The creek to my left has punctured the wall that was a roadbed of the third kind- creekside roads cut supposedly for fire access in the fifties and sixties. These roads fail because of glomalin starvation one way or another, cut or fill. The old creek bed wanders off as an empty gully in the brush and a gushing waterfall appears after rain which has created its own ongoing project of erosion and movement since. Meanwhile, a huge chunk of land, some cutover lies above the steadily advancing vertical slide. It will take some massive events to restabilize this situation. THis is our only access and a property corner. Looking across the creek we see alders and some young fir creating aomething of a canopy below us, and lots of brush up the hill with only a couple of remnants of live oak left over twenty feet tall. Mass wasting sites on the wall of a side creek are visible, only a hint of the incredible number of insults the landscape has suffered here, all from removal of the trees and eventual glomalin decay exacerbated by runoff creation and drainage disruption. The brush is mostly stump sprouted tanoak and ceanothus grown back since the fire of 1981.
We turn right and head down into the shade creekside. Bear scarred alders stand like carved sentinels on either side of the rock armored ford. A pool with a couple eight inch steelhead and a few younger ones is surrounded by six to eight inch dbh redwoods. Several hudred of them go up the creek. Downstream is a curious avenue effect of alders on either side of a boulder stream bed packed with sediment. The redwoods have done a magnificent job containing the creek and weaving streamside soil into a tight knit mat that is undercut that the fish love. This is a spot for a moment of reflection or meditation. It is shaded and cool with its own breeze. The creek dries up right to this spot every year and no fish can live from here to the upper side creek joins the creek at the bottom of the properety three-eighths of a mile downstream. Slowly streamside vegetation is returning behind the short lived alders, which root on rocks and then have their roots battered by high water. They are in a continuous cycle of shooting up thirty or so feet, seeding annually, and then succumbing. They rot quickly but cause a lot of critical diversions when the water is high. In lesser years they maintain the creekbeds shoulders. When the creek moves away from them they also die. In wetter areas they thrive in open land, probably taking advantage of high soil water content.
Straight ahead is a short piece of road to get out of the creek that turned out to be too steep. Now the road turns left and moves to join the bench road at an anglle like the Mazzoni reroute. At any rate you pass some good sized rotten stumps with cable railroad spiked to them from past logging and come out at the bottom of our fourth type of road-fire roads.
The fire roads went straight up the hill at a very steep angle, then cut across the top of the land across drainages and the fault line trying to contain the fire. This first one did surprisingly little damage and the hardwood forest thers has survived and is maturing nicely. It also exhibits this natural spacing without a cluttered understory. Trouble starts where the bulldozer turned left and cut a road from the edge of that swale across the top of the properety tro get around the fire. From one end of this road on out, every swale has blown out, mystery gullies have been cut due to drainage changes above us, filled spots have failed and the stream crossings are now more than ten feet deep for tiny little creeks. Huge amounts of soil have gone down hill. But a little further out we find something new, scarping. This is the breaking and sinking of the landscape into beches as it begins to move downhill. It is rare in forest but common in the so called meadows on the ridge. It is the entire landscape on the move. The question of revegetation then becomes whether we can reincorporate enough soil into water storage to handle the rain events before a peak event causes cutting runoff or saturates the soil below the fungally stabilized region. If not, slides and mass wasting occurs. The concentration of runoff was exacerbated by our fith type of road, a skid road or trial remnant from the logging. There is one to every stump, mostly frpm the downhill side. Over on Dry Creek you can see multiple side entries into the slide area, each undercutting the one above and all contributing to ovversaturation in the swale closest to the unaffected side and again in the swale on the other side. This is at least half mile across, and all that land for a hundred feet down is just gone. On our side you can findriparian blowouts where small tributaries get cut. After ten or more years the glomalin starved soil is saturated and the bank or the headwall fail creating a bowl. This happens when the swale above them are overloaded as described above. All the fir stumps eventually rot out and here we mostly have replaced it with ceanothus, a nitrogen fixer than sprouts freely after fire and does an amazing job growing baked clay back into soil. It forms dense canopies and emits flammable gases in hot weather, a very dangerous combination en masse. THe stuff is tough and wiry and I have battled it to open the overgrown road in order to get tree planters out beyond there. It has a short life span and a shallow root system and sometimes provides shade for Douglas fir seedlings. None here because the few seed trees left burned. The tanoak sprouts are residual coppicing that probably goes back to the tanbarkers removing the tanbark the INdians cherished allowing the Douglas fir to grow unsuppressed and without competition. Douglas fir took full advantage of its opportunity until it was found there in the forties for the new plywood industry and a cut began. As we continue out the road we see King Peak one ridge ahead of us and Gilham butte one ridge to our left and the Headwaters of Middle Creek parcel purchased by Save the Redwoods behind us. This parcel protected whatever work we would be able to accomplish in the creek below it. We hoped to includee it in an overall plan but was inexplicably given to State Parks rather than BLM.Only one parcel stands between it and the Thought Preserve and it has mature forest, and the THPs had been filed. We thank all parties involved, and hope ERS can find a sustainable business plan that can keep them as knowledgeable land owners into the future.
Gilham Butte was fought over for years and finally saved, which now means we saved the glomalin. King Peak was severly backlit in the Honeydew Creek fire and will probably have problems for years in light of our new knowledge, the high rainfall in Honeydew (200+ inches fairly often,) and King Range Conservation Area mandate not to replant burned areas. And so the race is on for the landscape to restabilize itself before the glomalin layer liquifies before new vegetation can reach it and resume feeding it, molecule by molecule. This reallyputs the old seven seedling for every cut tree rap to the shame it always felt like it had. How could that be good? It isn't. But if you do have to plant in mineral soil as Douglas fir are reported to prefer, dense stocking allows quicker regeneration of the subsoil system by pumping more carbon down there quickly. The trees then thin themselves continually until there are a dozen or so per acre in the fully functioning late seral forest.
Tree planting efforts are also revealing. Ponderosa pine is surprisingly tough when established in thick stands on slide faces in full sun Some seem to have hit location jackpots and taken off. We find this with individual trees scattered around, like they found residual working fungi pockets. Bears have eaten all my tree species. Douglas fir thickets of new growth often form dense canopy and shade at a very young age, propelling the soil conditioning. Redwoods seem to exhibit this too in some dense plantings away from soil moisture. Redwoods also create their own microenvironment early in life in favorable aspects.
Now checking out the creek bottom can best be shown by the KRIS coho report, which includes the results of three years of streambed surveys by the Mattole Salmon Group, including myself. Conducted to gather baseline data for a number of parameters for salmonid habitat, Middle Creek ranked very poor for shade, embeddedness, depth, temperature, large woody debris sediment load and presence absence. We profiled the thalweg and three cross channel locations, and put monuments in to return for coompaarative surveys in the future. This was done in the first pools in the creek, a hundred yards or so from its perched mouth at the river junction. This streambed is lined with willows and runs like a line through a huge cobble beach area, remnants of massive earth moving through the system propelled by heavy rain fall and debris laden torrents. It is beginning to trap sediment in high water and this is the brgining of vegetation moving back into the riparian zone after repeated scouring. In the work area the creek has been sedimented in a wandered back and forth around the area, but found itself trapped between a boulder and a logjam, backing up and scouring an area 3-+by 50 by 15 feet deep. Lines of old alders show the old channels.This area was logged previously but the uphill side on the north wasn't. Douglas fir was planted here irecently but redwood should be added to absorb sediment and survive root crown burial in the highly mobile sediment environment. This huge delta and overlooking meadows caused by logging was also recently planted- a tough job in a difficult location worth every bit of effort. Put that land back to work, tie up the sedi,emt. store some water, secure some CO2. I woukd recommend denser stocking on these difficult sites so that multiple trees contribute to common water storage more quickly. The more efficient pumps will outcompete the othrs and the resulting tree death will feed a differnt class of fungal soil explorers, the decayers. It is now evident mycorhizzia are but a portion of the soil conditioning fungi at work in the functional forest but being associated with roots are probably among the deepest penetrating and thus control depth of the storage zone, while decayers and others infill the prescribed drip zone filling it with their own glomalin and mycelium increasing storage capacity in the immediate area of the tree.
Westlund Creek, right between Middle Creek and Gilham Butte is in much better shape. There is lees residual cutting and all creel parameters are better than Middle Creek. Slippery brown algae make crossing the river difficult in the summer. Westlund may be a good candidate for a pool program since Gilham Butte is protected and sediment surveys are already in hand for the Patrick Ridge side. Across the river ranch parcels in excellant shape after 70 years of using cats sparingly, cutting selectively and reasonable grazing shows old style agriculture understands the need to maintain sustainability. Beyond him are other timber and Save the Redwood parcels for a short distance to King Peak. We are returning or preserving a pretty good sized swath of high rainfall landscape and should help with the water quality. But we are in danger of losing our benefit from the BLM fire and the cutting on Rainbow. We have exposed past problems, showed how and why they occurred and can predict with certainty some events following particular actions I this light it is heartbreaking for these two actions to be allowed to occur while the knowledge was becoming clear. With MRC and BLM unwilling to defend the estuary, we ate a bullet and will deal with the consequences. We can only hope these two events are the last ignoranance driven land management decisions so we can expect our restoration successes to grow into a stable and profitable landscape.