Meet our Guests: Alexa Whipple

Alexa Whipple

Executive Director, Methow Beaver Project

Methow Valley, WA

9/5/2021

         Along the Methow River’s Silver Side Channel, Alexa Whipple, Project Director for the Methow Beaver Project, emphasizes that diversity is key to the stream health. The river channel here weaves through riparian vegetation, side pools, debris, rapids, and two beaver ponds. At the end of the second pond, a large section of plastic tube allows for fish to pass through an existing beaver dam. It is one of many on-the-ground restoration projects that Alexa manages.

Today, beavers have largely been removed from the Methow River watershed by human trapping and their habitat replaced by houses built next to streams. This means that reintroducing the mammal to these parts hinges on landowner cooperation. To Alexa, the short-term goal is to protect current beaver habitat and introduce them in key, manageable locations. The long-term goal is to move people out of the floodplain and allow streams to flood and meander again. Restoration projects like the one on Silver Side Channel are proactive steps toward a beaver-filled watershed, but Alexa recognizes they will not accomplish this goal on their own, saying, “solutions don’t have to be the final option.”

Efforts to restore beaver to the Methow River are slow-moving and face a variety of challenges. Perhaps most severe: the species is not protected in the U.S., so trappers may kill the beaver that Alexa and her organization have invested so much in. Still, Alexa often carries a forward-looking beam on her face as she works.

By Fielding Schaefer

Photo credit: Haley Post

Meet our Guests: Kristen Kirkby

Kristen Kirkby

Fisheries Biologist, Cascade Fisheries

Twisp, WA

8/31/2021

There are nine dams on the Columbia River between the ocean and the spawning grounds for salmon and steelhead in the Methow River Basin. During migration their chances of survival exponentially decrease with each obstacle. For Kristen Kirkby, Fisheries Biologist with Cascade Fisheries and 2004 Westie, protecting this migration route is key. Spring Chinook salmon, steelhead, bull trout, and Pacific lamprey (Kristen’s favorite water dwellers) are all listed under the Endangered Species Act as either threatened or endangered. The populations of these species have been plummeting over the past century due to a variety of factors Kristen says can be summarized as the four “H’s”: habitat, hatcheries, harvest, and hydroelectric dams. Overconsumption, habitat degradation, disease from hatcheries, and dams create a nearly impossible path to sea for these fish.

In an effort to ameliorate the dire situation, Kirkby utilizes mitigation funds from the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the organization that manages Columbia River hydroelectricity, to restore and rehabilitate rivers and tributaries that can help safely house and transport fish on their journey through the Columbia River. These funds stem BPA, which promised to pay out $900 million from their revenue for fish habitat restoration projects over a period of ten years.

Kristen has been working on projects with Cascade Fisheries for more than a decade, one of which located at Wolf Creek in the Methow Valley. Westies were fortunate enough to suit up and snorkel with some of the many fish that inhabit and thrive within the restored riparian area. The work that Kirkby is doing is limited in its ability to drastically alter the survival chances of salmonids trapped in a dammed river system once they leave protected habitats upriver. And yet, her confidence remains reassuring despite the unpredictable flow of fish politics in the Pacific Northwest.

By Elio Van Gorden