ENHS Nature Trails January 2003 Article 5

Catkins, Mushrooms and Water
by Reida Kimmel

This has been such a warm winter. We have been seeing the male catkins on the wild filbert bushes "blooming" since mid December, and yesterday I noticed that our Osoberry bush and our red flowering currant bush are opening their flower buds. Catkins are emerging on the alders too. After a fall when mushrooms were practically nonexistent, we have enjoyed a glory of mushrooms, lichens and mosses in the shady woods above our house. We even gathered half a cauliflower mushroom (very carefully cutting the mushroom well above the ground so as not to injure the fungus in hopes of its fruiting again in the future years). What a New Years Day feast that was, stir fried in olive oil with onions and spinach!

It certainly is wonderful to have the rains back again. Here on the farm we are enjoying the sight of the full pond and the sounds of the water rushing along the creek beds. Even big Fox Hollow Creek had been completely dry since mid July and there were only small pools in our little creek until the rains started in earnest during the second week of December. Of course, the creek had hardly been flowing a week when it was flooded, over the bridge, and silt everywhere. In the 1980's it rained seventeen inches in three days and the creek did not flood. Now anytime it rains an inch or more in a day, the creek is guaranteed to flood. I imagine you can guess the reason why. Logging is the culprit of course. A series of clearcuts in our neighborhood, none very close to us, has increased the runoff which eventually reaches the "headwaters" of our little creek on our immediate neighbor's land. Because of the greater volume and power of the flow, the little creek has been eating its way down to bedrock, adding silt from its own banks to the silt already coming from the clearcuts. Now both we and our neighbor have a furious creek flowing in a huge gully. Where the land levels out behind our garage, I have been able to place logs and debris in the creek to slow its flow and prevent further erosion. We have gained a lot of soil near our bridge, effectively "lowering" it so it goes underwater more frequently. A plus for us from all this creek bank destruction is that the silt that flows into our pasture is creating a flat and fertile flood plain. Old erosion scars and gullies in the pasture are now gone. Closer to town on Fox Hollow Road there is a newly "thinned" section of land, a fine example of modern forestry at its most blatant. Perhaps 30 skinny trees to the acre remain standing and everywhere amidst the stumps and slash are rivulets and small gullies. Water formerly retained by the mosses, duff and shrubs to nourish the vegetation in the summer is racing downhill to swell the tributaries of the Coast Fork of the Willamette.

With all this runoff on my mind you can imagine the hoot and then sense of horror I got from the December 23, 2002 article in the High Country News, "'Logging For Water' Creates a Buzz." The Colorado Department of Natural Resources' assistant director for water, Kent Holsinger, proposed that cutting trees in a patchwork of clearcuts on state and national forest lands could create up to 500,000 acre feet of new water for the drought and sprawl stricken state to use. What will they think of next! Here's the science behind this proposal according to Chuck Troendle, a retired Forest Service hydrologist. Live tree branches collect snow which evaporates in the dry atmosphere. On bare ground the snow packs and does not evaporate, hence it can run off to reservoirs in the spring. We will not reconsider the erosional aspects of runoff or the fact that forest lands might need to hold on to as much precipitation as possible to nourish vegetation. What more can one say? Andy Stahl of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics says "you have to do it over an enormous landscape." In other words, to actually gather a half million acre feet of water, one would have to clear cut millions of acres. Besides, the runoff occurs in spring, at a time when reservoirs are usually already full or even overflowing. The water garnered from the dead forests might well be wasted. The idea of logging for water created a negative stir when it was reported by the Denver Post, but there are signs that the state is serious about the idea and eager to press for a more aggressive logging policy on public lands aimed at "restoring water yields." You can call the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, 1-303-866-3311 if you want to add your voice to the protest.

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