Mable Kerr Park in Washougal reopens after watershed restoration project

WASHOUGAL — Coho salmon and lamprey can once again take refuge and grow to maturity along Washougal’s Campen Creek at Mable Kerr Park thanks to a recently completed $1 million reconnection project by Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership and the city of Washougal.

Mable Kerr Park reopened on Oct. 8. The park had been closed to visitors since Aug. 12 to allow access to heavy equipment and construction crews.

Chris Collins, restoration program lead for the estuary partnership, said the Campen Creek project came about after the Steigerwald National Wildlife Refuge project was completed.

“We started looking upstream into the watershed, thinking about things that we can do to help protect the investment that we had made at the Steigerwald refuge,” Collins said.

The partnership began planning additional upstream habitat restoration and floodplain reconnection projects in hopes of building on planned stormwater work by the city and school district.

“The site itself was very degraded, and we knew it supported coho salmon and lamprey, at a minimum. There was an issue with hazard trees so we realized that through restoring the park we could address a public safety issue,” Collins said.

Restoring the site creates benefits downstream, all the way to Steigerwald, such as reducing stormwater contaminants, lowering water temperatures and increasing summer water flow, he said.

Years ago, the roughly 12-acre site was home to an orchard. Farmers had pushed Campen Creek into a single channel along the east side of the property, which proved detrimental to salmon and lamprey by creating swift-moving water flows with little to no protection.

“We changed it by essentially regrading sections of the of the floodplain, filling the former creek channel and pushing water out onto the floodplain,” Collins said. “Then … we’ll go through and densely plant native species like willows and cottonwood so that the end product is a system where water velocities are much slower.”

Recent rains and a beaver dam downstream from the pedestrian bridge across the creek have already expanded the floodplain that once held little water.

“The water levels have come up, and the footprint is about double what it was when we finished construction,” Collins said.

Community members are invited to participate in a Dec. 6 planting event. (Details can be found at www.estuarypartnership.org.)

Funding for the project came from a mix of state and federal sources. While some came from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Collins said the majority came from the state Recreation and Conservation Office and Department of Ecology

Lower Columbia Estuary is already looking ahead to what comes next for the Campen Creek area.

“The next phase, I would say, is the work upstream at Washougal High School. There’s around 13 acres of cement or pavement that drains into a pipe that drains into Campen Creek, right above the park,” said Jasmine Zimmer-Stucky, public affairs manager for Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership.

She said the partnership plans to work with the high school on a stormwater project to address the runoff from the parking lot as well as adjacent streets. The project is currently in the design phase.

Shari Phiel: shari.phiel@columbian.com; 360-562-6317; @Shari_Phiel