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Improving fish passage in Williams Creek, Oregon
Headwaters Heritage Initiative
Restoring Freeways For Fish
Project: Bryan-Elder push-up dam and Glade Fork dam removal
Williams Creek Watershed
Williams, Oregon
Miles of habitat now more accessible to fish - 9.25
Project Completion - September 2007
Williams Creek is a calm, gently flowing stream with many twists and turns and expansive gravel bars. These traits make Williams Creek an important spawning and nursery area for coho salmon, a species that is protected by the Endangered Species Act.
Further up the watershed from the gentle, twisty-turny sections of Williams Creek are the East and West Forks, streams that are steep, straight, and fast flowing - full of cold, clean water. These sections of the Williams Creek watershed are excellent for cutthroat and steelhead trout.
Despite all these inviting habitats for salmon and trout, however, Williams Creek is chock-full of cuverts, seasonally constructed diversions, and permanent dams. Fifty-five of these structures act as fish passage barriers. All of these structures limit upstream migrating fishes from reaching the full extent of their spawning areas in the Williams Creek watershed. Some of them also interfere with downstream migrating juvenile salmon and steelhead from reaching the Pacific Ocean by diverting them away from the stream and into canals.
The Glade Fork dam (also known as Johnson Ditch) was a pile of boulders and sand bags held in place with fence posts. The dam routed water to two landwoners several miles away, under a road and over the top of East Fork Williams Creek in a wooden flume. The water rights holders spent a lot of energy, elbow grease, and money to keep the water diversion going and in good repair. Now, they receive their irrigation water from a small pump on their property, more efficiently using their water rights and eliminating the need for the dam.
Glade Fork's consistent summer water flow and cool water temperature suggest suggest that it is a spring-fed stream. Numerous cutthroat trout were swimming over our boot tops while we worked with Williams Creek Watershed Coucnil to disassemble the dam. We expect steelhead to make good use of the two miles of Glade Fork habitat made accessible with the removal of this dam.
On the West Fork of Williams Creek, we helped the Williams Creek Watershed Council construct a series of rock weirs that are used to divert water during the summer without hindering fish passage during any period of the year. This permanent structure, built to look like a small "river rapids", replaces a gravel "push-up" dam, amound of rocks and gravel piled up using heavy equipment each spring. These "push-up" dams block summer and fall fish movement, destroy the insects and other small animals living along the stream bottom that are food for young salmon and trout, and disturb the gravel bars that 
salmon use for spawning.
With the construction of this weir, the water rights holder no longer has to build the "push-up" dam each year, and salmon can safely and more easily swim to the 7.25 miles of habitat in the West Fork of Williams Creek upstream of this site. Because the weir uses the natural scouring effect of flowing water to keep itself clean, maintenance by the landowner is nimial and the irrigation water is very dependable.
The National Center's commitment to these two projects was funded with generous support from the Bullitt Foundation, the Burning Foundation, the Laird Norton Family Foundation, and the World Wildlife Fund.
Photos by Chas Rogers and Brian Barr.
