Project protects Sisters stream

Deschutes National Forest fishery biologists plan next week to complete the final phase of a two-year stream restoration project that high school students, an irrigation district and an environmental group worked on to benefit native fish.

Fishery biologists began the Whychus Creek Riparian Project in spring 2005 at the Three Sisters Wilderness boundary and worked downstream to within a half mile of the Sisters city limits. Much of the work involved placing barriers at 60 sites along the stream to protect it from recreation impacts, primarily off-road vehicles that are routinely driven across and even up the creek.

On May 9, heavy equipment will place barriers at three more sites to stop the illegal practice, which caves in stream banks, tramples vegetation, and crushes young fish and eggs.

Sisters High School students involved in an integrated environmental science, social studies and outdoor recreation curriculum called Interdisciplinary Environmental Expedition assisted by replanting willow, alder and cottonwood trees that will stabilize stream banks and provide shade.

The Three Sisters Irrigation District donated trees from a canal project that is expected to restore stream flows to Whychus Creek.

Wolftree Inc., a nonprofit science education corporation, helped to facilitate the environmental education components of the project. Additional support came from the Deschutes River Conservancy and Healthy Waters Institute.

Whychus Creek once had more steelhead spawning in it than any other Upper Deschutes River tributary, according to Deschutes National Forest fishery biologist Mike Riehle. In 1953, biologists estimated as many as 1,000 steelhead spawned in the creek, which flows out of the Three Sisters Wilderness Area, through Sisters and into the Deschutes River.