Fun and fish habitat restoration at Kids Fishing Day last Saturday

Pats Lake was crowded last Saturday as people came out to enjoy the eighth annual Kids Fishing Day. The day is an event hosted by the Forest Service, to encourage interest in fishing and the great outdoors. Plenty of kids came out to fish and spend time around the lake with their families. The Forest Service also had lots of games set up for the kids to enjoy, and booths where they could learn how to make fishing lures or paint their own custom T-shirts.

The Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition was present, as well. They were offering tours of Pat Creek to anybody who was interested. The coalition announced back in May that they would be undertaking fish habitat restoration work along the creek, during the Nolan Center's chautauqua speaking events this past spring. The area around the creek was heavily logged a few decades ago, when the timber industry was thriving in Wrangell. The coalition is looking to restore fish habitats and undo some of the damage done to the area.

The project has several aspects. Rob Cadmus, with the coalition, said that they have uprooted about 31 trees from the nearby area and placed them along the sides of the creek. These trees are varied in size, and have been kept as intact as possible, he said. According to information sheets the coalition had laid out at their booth during the event, having wooded areas and brush along creek beds is very important for a number of reasons. It stabilizes the banks, creates a complex channel structure, stores sediment and nutrients in the area, provides cover and makes deep pools for fish to live in, and helps dissipate energy during floods.

"We're not trying to create something that's new, we're trying to kind of put it back the way it would be if it hadn't been logged in the first place," Cadmus said. "There was no digging into the bank, no wires involved, there's no anchoring. The only thing keeping this wood in place is its weight and the fact that they're piled onto each other, and then some of them you'll see are shooting off into the bank just like this."

The wooded structures the coalition created have been placed along various points on the main portion of Pats Creek, according to a map of the project area, and along the western fork. Another aspect of the project was along a disused logging road, which follows the eastern fork of the creek. John Hudson, with the coalition, said that this road was breached in several areas to allow the creek access to the area on the opposite end of the road. This will allow the creek to flow more freely through the area where it used to do so naturally.

"Alluvial fan streams like the east fork tend to migrate laterally," he said. "So one day they're over here and the next year, because of floods and dams, they're 200 yards in the other direction. They just go back and forth forming this high mound of gravel and rock and boulders. Well with that road there it was constrained, it could no longer go back and forth as much as it used to."

More information about the restoration project can be found at http://www.alaskawatershedcoalition.org.