The Elwha river, on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, was imprisoned by an invader’s greed over a century ago. The dams that were blocked the river ran electricity at the expense of a legendary salmon, destroying without compunction the food source of the Elwha Klallam people.
The river is being freed of the dams, and the Elwha look forward to the day when the salmon people return.
Salmon have a chance with another river, smaller, less well-known, often choked off in the low-water summer months. In 2011 the little Clallam River stayed open for the entire year. Even a small success can offer hope for the creatures that depended upon it.
The history of the river is spotty. Local Memory is partial or contradictory. Army maps and surveys going back more than a century describe the filling of an estuary of debatable dimensions below the town, and building and development that changed the route of the river; but there are gaps even in the official history.
According to variable local memory, the tiny, obscure town of Clallam Bay was built alongside the Clallam River, as towns often begin. The river is supposed to have flowed where Highway 112 now comes into town from the south. When automobiles replaced horses and river traffic, the river seems to have been set aside. It is said to have been later rerouted a mile to the east, to flow out just west of Slip Point.
Clallam Bay resident Bill Bowlby said he remembered when the river entered the bay at that point, “forty years ago.” Residents say they remember when houses stood where the campground in the downtown Clallam Bay Park stands today.
For the last eight years, beach cleanups have extracted long lines and joints of rusty housing plumbing from the same area. Before the cleanups began, the beach and bank sands were clotted with the usual scattering of filth and garbage left by a careless humanity, but residents seem to have become more aware of what a treasure they still access in the form of a small, clean river.
Over time, most man-made structures, including docks and Hemlock tannin extraction facilities, have rotted away, leaving nothing behind but rusted chunks of unidentifiable metal, and, outside the campground, the low snag remains of a wooden-post bridge that is visible or buried, depending on how deeply the churning waves have piled the sand over them.
T he Clallam River now flows inside a mile-long barrier beach that has been formed by processes of deposit of coastal and fluvial sediment of pebbles and sand, as well as heavier overwash during storms.
For a number of years, during summers the river would be choked closed by high buildup of the sediments heaped up by summer waves. Its outlet in early 2010 was above the old campground, drying slowly closed in the sun.
State Park Employee Bill Drath said, “There was one time, probably about 5 years ago that thousands of smolts that couldn’t get out to sea and were getting trapped in small pools that then drained or predators were getting them.”
To allow smolts to escape into the bay, the Elwha Klallam tribe opened the mouth of the river. The Department of Fish and Wildlife allowed this practice only when the river prevented the escape of smolts. Otherwise, the waterflow of summer had been too low to allow the river to rise past or cut through the sand bar above the campground.
Occasionally, one guy with a shovel would cut through the narrow remaining barrier and let the young fish flow out with the water.
Otherwise, in late summer, as the seagull and shorebird population gathered after breeding season to feed and bathe in the river and bay, there was no outflow that would have kept the river clean. In the hot sun, the slowly drying and increasingly stagnant river mouth pools became so foetid that most beach-walkers passed by the pools as quickly as possible, trying to avoid the reek, or simply turning back on their tracks.
But forces were at work in the river. In 2010, the stream burst through at the grass-grown barrier beach of the lagoon below the campground — it is said, with the assistance of the heel of a boot. With access to a beach area where the sediment drift was lower, the river began to flush itself clean with the first tide.
The rushing water tore out the lower grass field, revealing ancient debris – from old cans to hobnailed logging boots to flivver tires and the remains of wagon wheels – that were dragged away to the park dumpster by residents, or retrieved for souvenirs. After only a few weeks, the river sorted the sediments into an stretch of fine sand that made for pleasant walking. The channel remained open, and is open today.
The flow seemed to immediately attract fish. As Coho salmon began to leap and flash in the bay outside the mouth, a few folks lined up to see if they could bring in a catch on the barbless hook required by fishing regulations. Most hits just led to a good fight, but at least one fisherman pulled in a nice hatchery Coho hen last weekend, and had plans for smoked salmon.
The river flows out into a kelp bed. The combination of underwater salt habitat and free-flowing fresh water brought in feeding gulls, loons and hopeful harbor seals, as the big silver fish continued to dance along the beach. River paddlers in canoes could enjoy access to the bay at high tide.
The mouth stream is easy to wade at low tide, but too swift and deep for any but bathers to cross at high tide. Swimming the lagoon below the old campground, however, is not recommended, especially for children. While the “quicksand” in the lower stream is just one to two feet deep, offering no more to the wader than a challenge and good exercise, the soft deposits under the lagoon can be up to three feet deep. Wading chin-deep in the cold water, even an adult can be sucked down over her head. A muck of rotting leaves, branches and twigs can lethally catch limbs.
To the west of Clallam Bay, just beyond the bend on the road leaving town, a pull-off past the Spring Tavern lookout allows a clear view at low tide of two aboriginal fish-traps, one of them in almost complete working order. These stone fish-traps were traditionally built at river mouths. The river is continuing to cut along the beach toward the traps.
Karolyn Burdick, a contact for this article with Water Resource Inventory Assessment area 19, said that the mouth of the river has moved many times, and that it’s too simplistic to say the river, as a complicated natural system, simply manages things itself. But who knows how long human manipulation of the river has interfered with its natural dynamic?
Regardless of what effect human action may have had on the river in the far and near past, a small West End community may be lucky enough in this situation to regain its river, at least partially in its original condition, and at least for now. Time will tell.