Projects in Oregon’s McKenzie River, a tributary of the Willamette River, are restoring the river from its recent channelized state to a healthy river with connected flood plains and natural flows, a river that is much more conducive to salmon and steelhead rearing, according to a recent presentation at a Northwest Power and Conservation Council meeting.

The Finn Rock and Quartz Creek restoration projects in the mid-McKenzie River have been made possible by a partnership of non-profits, utilities and local, state, and federal agencies, according to a Sept. 3 Council Memorandum (2025_09_2.pdf). The partners had “aligned behind shared goals for restoring river complexity for the mix of habitat, flood retention, drinking water protection and other public values that connected floodplains and natural flows can provide.”

Similar to other watersheds in the Pacific Northwest, regional development had simplified or channelized the McKenzie River, reducing its habitat diversity and diminishing its ecosystem processes, according to a Sept. 19 Council blog.
Efforts to restore the river began in 2001 when the Willamette River Basin Planning Atlas was published by Stan Gregory, currently a Professor Emeritus of Fisheries at Oregon State University and former chair of both the Independent Science Advisory Board and Independent Scientific Review Panel, and others.

“And this became a road map for us,” Joe Moll, Executive Director of the McKenzie River Trust, said at the Sept. 9 Council meeting in Eugene. “It said, look, we have some choices in the Willamette Basin. We can keep going as we are, and we will continue to lose access to clean water, fish and wildlife habitat, all of the other benefits. Or we can do some really strategic conservation, give the river back its floodplain in some really strategic areas, and it’s not going to have to be a really big sacrifice to have some really strong gains.”

That was the beginning of the over two decade history of McKenzie River restoration.

In 2001, the Eugene Water and Electric Board created its own drinking water protection plan. The McKenzie River is the sole source of drinking water for the city of Eugene and much of neighboring Springfield. This led to an interest by EWEB in natural solutions, such as river restoration, to maintain clean drinking water, according to Susan Fricke, Water Resources Supervisor at EWEB.

In 2010, the Willamette Wildlife Mitigation Program was established through a memorandum of understanding between the State of Oregon and Bonneville Power Administration. The Program was managed by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and guided by the Council’s 2009 Fish and Wildlife Program, the Council blog says. A variety of habitat restoration projects have been implemented both before and under the MOU.

Also about ten years ago the US Forest Service began looking at large scale intervention in the river that the Service called “stage zero.” That’s where a heavily channelized river is returned to a more natural depositional valley model, according to the blog.

“This approach adds value in terms of fish and wildlife habitat, clean water, water retention, and reducing flood impacts used for the Finn Rock and Quartz Creek projects, with the collaboration of multiple agencies, partners and funders, including the Council,” the blog says.

One of those funders is NOAA Fisheries, which in 2022 provided the McKenzie River Trust with $1.7 million for the project from congressionally-directed community project funds to restore 150 acres of floodplain habitat at Finn Rock Reach. According to NOAA, adult Chinook spawned in the restored habitat in 2023, laying eggs in 65 “redds”—gravel nests they scour out of the river bottom.

And, last year NOAA’s Office of Habitat Conservation awarded the McKenzie Watershed Alliance $7.6 million through the Infrastructure Law to help restore lower Quartz Creek. Historical accounts document the presence of Chinook salmon and bull trout in Quartz Creek, but neither species has been seen there for decades.

EWEB added $1 million for project funding and grants added $17 million more.

The McKenzie River is a primary tributary of the Willamette River, flowing west about 90 miles from the crest of the Cascade Mountains to where it joins the Willamette near Eugene, OR.

At the Council meeting, Moll noted the significance of a member of a land trust co-presenting with a utility, attributing it in part to the Council’s “vision for what it means to have collaborative power production, power use, and fish and wildlife conservation.”

The projects came together with the McKenzie River Trust acquiring 278 acres of bottom land in lower Quartz Creek in 2014 and 2015, the blog says. On Upper Quartz Creek, EWEB worked with Campbell Global, land manager for the landowner Franklin-Clarkson Timber Co. LLC, to do conservation through a 50-year stewardship easement on 82 acres. The project also incorporates some Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management property.

“Limited human infrastructure in the area meant that large-scale restoration efforts could take place with minimal disruption to surrounding communities,” the blog says.

Margi Hoffmann, Oregon Council member, said that these projects had the “rare ability to work at scale,” asking if other opportunities for similar, large-scale projects existed.

These projects began on federal land and there are examples happening now on federal, private, and state lands, both in Oregon and across the West, Moll said. He also said there are risks with these types of projects, such as impacts to recreation and the possibility of flooding, but he concluded that the benefits are worth it.

Fricke said that finding locations for this kind of restoration work is strategic, and wouldn’t be undertaken in heavily urbanized areas where there might be negative impacts to infrastructure or transit. It can also be expensive.
Fricke also said it is challenging to work with a “patchwork” of landowners to create large-scale projects, but she also appreciates the willingness of many landowners to contribute to river restoration.

Large river restoration projects can help promote wildfire resiliency, the blog said. During the Holiday Farm Fire that burned over 170,000 acres in 2020, restoration partners discovered that restored areas, which were wider, wetter and more humid, acted as natural fire breaks as well as providing a base for firefighting operations and refugia for fish and wildlife.

After the Holiday Farm Fire, EWEB found that in addition to working directly with landowners on restoration projects to improve erosion control and protect drinking water, the public company’s electric ratepayers were willing to pay a surcharge to acquire, restore and protect land along the river, Fricke said. This raised $11.5M over 5 years, which EWEB was able to leverage into an additional $17M in grants.

“One of the things that is really beautiful about Oregon is it doesn’t matter where you are in this state, everybody cares about the outdoors,” said Fricke.

Additional benefits of these projects include moderating water temperatures, providing habitat for fish and wildlife, protecting drinking water by removing sediment and filtering toxins, and reducing flooding. Long-term monitoring and evaluation will be needed to more fully understand the impacts of these projects over time, the blog says.

The McKenzie River Trust is a nonprofit land trust formed in 1989 to protect critical habitats and scenic lands in the McKenzie River basin. Its service area today includes the watersheds of the Long Tom, Upper Willamette, Coast and Middle Forks of the Willamette River, the Umpqua, Siuslaw and coastal headlands rivers, streams and lakes from Reedsport to Lincoln City.

For background, see:
— CBB, June 21, 2024, Infrastructure Law Funding Restores Habitat On Section Of Oregon’s McKenzie River, Redds Showing Up, Infrastructure Law Funding Restores Habitat On Section Of Oregon’s McKenzie River, Redds Showing Up – Columbia Basin Bulletin
–CBB, Sept. 15, 2023, AS MEASURES IMPLEMENTED TO AID ESA SALMONIDS AT WILLAMETTE VALLEY DAMS, CORPS STUDYING WHETHER TO END HYDRO PRODUCTION https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/as-measures-implemented-to-aid-esa-salmonids-at-willamette-valley-dams-corps-studying-whether-to-end-hydro-production/

Above photo: A conservation district employee measures groundwater at a monitoring well in Lincoln County, as part of a training and monitoring session in 2021 led by the Department of Ecology. Sasha McLarty, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at WSU, has published new research on the region’s aquifer system based on data from such wells. (Photo by Sasha McClarty)

Groundwater is declining across Eastern Washington’s complex, interconnected aquifer system, as people draw on it for irrigation, drinking and other uses at a pace that threatens its sustainability, according to a new study by a Washington State University researcher.

In certain “hot spots” — such as the Odessa region and the Yakima Basin — the rates of decline are particularly significant, with groundwater levels dropping two to three feet a year or more.

The data is built upon a new metric of water vulnerability; rather than simply calculating how much groundwater there is, it measures how much is actually accessible with current wells.

“With these numbers we can say, ‘Hey, this is a problem now,’” said Sasha McLarty, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at WSU and the corresponding author of the new study. “It’s not a problem in the future, it’s a problem now.”

The research, published in the journal Groundwater for Sustainable Development, provides a detailed new picture of the Columbia Plateau Regional Aquifer System. Although not all areas in the system showed declines, the study lends urgency to the need for increased water supplies, for example through water conservation, additional use of surface water, and aquifer-recharging projects.

The paper focuses on a little-studied element of the aquifer system — its variability in both geographic location and depth below the surface. The system underlies the Columbia River Basin in Washington, Idaho and Oregon, providing a quarter to a third of irrigation water across the region.

It is comprised of four main geological layers — three basalt layers formed at different periods in history, and a top layer of sedimentary materials.

“Imagine a layer cake, where you have these chunks of actual cake, which is mostly fractured basalt in this case, and then there’s frosting in between, the parts where water moves more easily,” McLarty said. “That’s our aquifer.”

Unlike a layer cake, however, the layers don’t sit atop each other in a neat, orderly pattern.

“From location to location, that layering looks different,” she said. “Our paper is the first to really quantify that variability, based on observations, in both trends in water level and vulnerability across the entire aquifer.”

Previous groundwater studies have compared the rate of water usage with the volume of water in the aquifer layers, a metric known as saturated thickness. But a lot of that water lies below the depth of current wells. McLarty’s paper measures the water accessible to the current well infrastructure, which they define as available drawdown (ADD), and is a more useful metric to assess how vulnerable groundwater users may be to declines.

“If you have groundwater 15,000 feet deep, that doesn’t help anybody,” McLarty said.

Using state Department of Ecology data collected from nearly 3,000 wells drawing water from the aquifers, researchers calculated trends in the four aquifer layers. The thickest basalt layer — known as the Grand Ronde — had the steepest declines in groundwater, at 1.86 feet per year on average and up to about 7 feet per year. The top layer of sedimentary materials, known as the Overburden layer, had the smallest annual decreases, at 0.22 feet per year.

But the Overburden layer is still vulnerable because it has less available drawdown, the study shows.

McLarty focused on 15 geographic subareas within the state, which highlighted the points of greatest concern. One of these is the Odessa area in Eastern Washington, which is on a pace to consume 10% of available drawdown by 2040 — and half within 70 years.

Wells in the Yakima Basin showed a similar trend to those in Odessa, and most subareas showed a pattern of declining groundwater. However, not every area did. The Spokane Aquifer is gaining water, one of three subareas with a positive trend. McLarty said that this is thanks to very active management and monitoring efforts, including a designated Aquifer Protection Area. Other areas are more complex with some layers declining and some increasing even in the same area, like in the Rock Glade Water Resources Inventory Area. The study shows that you can’t just view groundwater as a single bucket.

McLarty hopes that the new research will encourage efforts to improve groundwater sustainability.

“What I care about most is will people and ecosystems have groundwater in the future to the extent that they need it?” she said. “I hope these data can be used to help prioritize investments in improving water security, by showing where that effort is needed.”

McLarty partners with conservation districts in the aquifer area for groundwater monitoring. If you are interested in having your groundwater monitored, please reach out to McLarty (sasha.richey@wsu.edu) to learn more.