Squaw Creek committee explores

Maret Pajutee, center, led a Stewardship Commitee field trip along Squaw Creek. Photo provided

The Squaw Creek Stewardship Committee held its third meeting last week and looks to be gaining momentum in its bid to become a factor in the region's watershed planning process.

The group is a subcommittee formed under the auspices of the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council and meets in Sisters on the fourth Wednesday of each month.

According to Council Director Ryan Houston, its purpose is to "raise community interest in the watershed."

Houston has been in the post of director for over a year now and says that the Council is making an active effort to reach out into the community.

"We try to promote committees like this in each watershed to create little groups that can work with us," he said.

Last week's meeting was the committee's first foray as a group to Squaw Creek itself and took on the flavor of a field trip. Tour guide for the event was Maret Pajutee, Forest Service ecologist for the Sisters Ranger District.

The first stop was at the footbridge in the city park, followed by another viewing a little farther upstream near the edge of town. The final stop was about four miles north of town, where the stream still runs free in its natural state.

Pajutee referred to the streambed in and around Sisters as the "bad and the ugly." She reserved the label of "good" for the wild portions upstream from Sisters.

In summer, most of Squaw Creek's water is diverted out of the stream for local irrigation projects, leaving only a trickle to run through Sisters.

In the 1960s and earlier, Squaw Creek was the victim of massive channelization projects designed to create more usable land by keeping seasonal water flow off the historic floodplain.

The result is an unnatural, deeper and narrower channel through Sisters that is more like a drainage ditch than a natural river.

However, the untouched stretches above Sisters -- and above the irrigation diversions -- are completely different and have been designated a "Wild and Scenic River" under the Congressional Act of the same name.

At the city park, Houston explained how the original stream would have spread itself all around the park area where the present channel is now constrained by the artificial banks.

"The river is out of balance, because of the way it's been tampered with," said Houston.

Pajutee also talked about the damage to the stream system caused by human tampering. Still, she conceded that the reasoning behind the man-made changes is fairly obvious.

"From a human standpoint," she said, "it's awkward when suddenly there's a river where your house used to be."

The Watershed Council is working with the Tribes at Warm Springs, Portland General Electric, the Forest Service, state agencies and others in an effort to improve the health of stream systems in the Deschutes Basin.

One of the long-term goals of the various projects is to restore spawning runs of anadromous salmon and steelhead to the region's rivers.

At the tour's second stop, Pajutee pointed out the huge quantities of sand and gravel being generated by the river's action.

She referred to Squaw Creek as a principal "gravel producer" for the whole Deschutes system and said that the resulting sand and gravel is an important factor in sustaining the stream system as spawning grounds for native fish.

Another of the committee's goals is to restore some of the river's water volume that is diminished by irrigation.

A dedicated water right of 1.6 cubic feet per second (cfs) was recently returned to the stream, and Houston said that current projects already in the works will increase that figure.

On the whole, Houston said that the trend was in the right direction.

"Over the last 10 years or so," he said, "the minimum flow of the stream is up to about eight cfs or so, compared to zero not long ago."

Joanne Richter is President of the Deschutes Watershed Council and attended the meeting in Sisters.

"The whole idea of a stewardship committee," she said, "is that it's community based. The community decides what the priority areas are and what we need to tackle first."

For more information and for details of the next meeting, call Len Knott, at 923-6438.