A major project to restore the environment along the East Fork Lewis River has received the largest grant in its history.
The funds will be used to bring the old Ridgefield Pits gravel mine back to its pre-mining state.
On Sept. 26, the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office announced the state’s Salmon Recovery Funding Board approved nearly $76 million in funds across the state. In Clark County, the Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership received more than $7.7 million for four projects, three of which specifically focus on the East Fork.
Of those projects, the largest award was for more than $7 million for the restoration of the Ridgefield Pits. The project intends to restore 150 acres of habitat along the river to “remedy the impacts of historic mining,” according to a project description.
In 1996, the river changed course as it flowed into nine abandoned gravel pits and impacted salmonid and lamprey species in the river, the description stated. The project intends to improve the habitat in the area, located a few miles upstream from La Center.
The more than $7 million was the largest award the partnership has gotten from the recreation and conservation office, Elaine Placido, executive director of the partnership said. The latest round of funding is the most the office has ever provided at one time.
“We were excited,” Placido said about receiving the funding, which she said “really helps move the needle” on the partnership’s efforts to restore the East Fork Lewis River. In recent years, the East Fork has been a focus for the partnership and other entities like the Washington State Department of Ecology.
Alongside the more than $7 million for the Ridgefield Pits project, the partnership also received about $381,000 for other improvements to the East Fork, including nearly $200,000 for designing improvements in the area where Mason Creek feeds into the river.
Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership Principal Restoration Ecologist Paul Kolp said the Department of Natural Resources came out with information that documented the gravel pits across the state in 1998 that required restoration work.
“It’s been double decades that there’s been a recognized issue out there,” Kolp said.
The partnership has spent the last seven years working with the Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board to try to find a solution, Kolp said.
The funding awarded will allow work to take place to reverse decades of inaction on that section of the river.
“This latest award gives us a real distinct opportunity to try to reset the river, to improve habitat for fish,” Kolp said.
Kolp noted the current award can leverage more funding for erosion and flood protection concerns. Partnership officials said the approval of the requested funding from the Washington State Department of Ecology by the state Legislature would allow for more work to be done.
The ultimate goal for the restoration aims to bring the environment where the pits exist back to the environment it was before mining operations, Kolp said.
“Before that mine was there, that river was this cool, multi-threaded, braided, very dynamic section … that was very rich for critters,” Kolp said.
The restored habitat would also be good for boating, fishing, and the expansion of a trail network by Clark County.
“Our ultimate goal is to return that to the pre-disturbance level and have the public really be able to benefit from that,” Kolp said.
Clark County has also been involved with the partnership’s development of the reclamation project. The Ridgefield Pits are identified as a “high-value” project for conservation in the county’s own planning, Clark County Public Works Lands Coordinator Denielle Cowley said.
“This project presents a significant opportunity to improve, protect, and restore county lands along the East Fork of the Lewis River, which supports five endangered salmonid species,” Cowley said in a statement. “After investments by local, state, and federal partners and a decade-long planning effort by dozens of partners, it is very exciting to see this project move forward.”
Placido compared the project timeline to the partnership’s recently-completed restoration project at the Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge. While that project took three years of construction, she expected the work at the Ridgefield Pits to take “a year or two” of periodic groundwork.
Though the project may take time, she noted it would be a “significantly shorter timespan than that hundred-year-plus time that we would expect it would take for the river to recover naturally.”
“Obviously time that we don’t want to wait (on),” Placido said.
The funds can lead to a monumental change in the nature of the East Fork more akin to territorial days than the population boom Clark County currently sees.
“We have all the pieces ready, we think, to get it back to maybe not what it was in 1860, but as close as possible as we can,” Kolp said.
