Are there salmon in Salmon Creek?

But traveling the Salmon Creek Greenway Trail east to west, Klineline Pond to Felida Bridge, also means traveling a hidden history of all the interventions, diversions, degradations, developments — and well-intentioned restoration efforts — that civilization has imposed on the beleaguered waterway.

Today’s greenway neighbors watch the landscape with eagle eyes, and they’re not shy about registering concerns about everything from the possibility of encroaching development to dramatically low water in the creek’s adjacent ponds.

“In 30 years, I’ve never seen the pond like this,” neighbor Peggy McCarthy said. “Something unnatural has got to be going on.”

McCormack, a monitoring scientist for Columbia Land Trust, is also concerned.

“The creek itself … is cloudy and silty,” she said. “The banks are eroding. It doesn’t seem like a healthy creek.”

Everyone wants Salmon Creek and its greenway to be clean, green and serene. But our relationship with it has always been complicated.

Lonely to busy

Salmon Creek once was a meandering waterway in a thick, dark forest, and there doesn’t appear to be evidence of Indigenous settlement along its banks. In 1806, passing nearby on the big river later renamed Columbia, Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery noted a small, possibly seasonal Indigenous village near Vancouver Lake (southwest of Salmon Creek) and the larger settlement called Cathlapotle (to the north, now part of the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge).

“The earliest settlements on Salmon Creek were made about 1852,” according to an 1885 history of “Clarke County – Washington Territory” that can be found in the stacks of the Clark County Historical Museum. The first white settler, Charles Irby, was followed by a trickle of others, including key figure Joseph H. Goddard, who founded the Salmon Creek Methodist Church (still nearby on Highway 99) and settled his family on acreage where today’s Hazel Dell Avenue meets 117th Street and dead-end Bassel Road, bordering the greenway.

“In the fall, there were many salmon. I have seen so many in a deep hole of water that they practically hid the rocks beneath them,” Goddard wrote, as quoted by Ted Van Arsdol in “Feast of the Soul,” a 1996 history of the church and neighborhood.

Meanwhile, to the east near today’s Interstate 5 was the civilized, manicured landscape of an 18-hole, country-club golf course. The Great Depression killed that endeavor in 1936.

In 1941, Harry Klineline, a former county roads worker, started the Klineline Sand and Gravel Plant on Salmon Creek. It eventually required diverting the creek away from the small pond that would become a quarry (before it became a larger, excavated pond again). That’s why Salmon Creek flows right past, not through, Klineline Pond, which is spring-fed. Also buying, working and impacting the basin was the Chevron Asphalt Co. of California.

The pace of progress quickened. Septic tanks and storm drain systems grew around the creek, followed by a sewer trunk line buried along the south side of the basin in 1977. You can get the occasional whiff when passing over a hatchway along the trail. Other than whiffs, though, the sewer is completely separate from the creek, Clark Wastewater District General Manager John Peterson said.

Ruins and restoration

As early as the 1950s, neighbors and policymakers were calling for the Salmon Creek basin to be included in a new parks-and-recreation system. In the 1970s, after a complicated and convoluted political process — driven by neighborhood activists like PTA mom Joyce Squier — the county started purchasing land and amassing donations to make it happen. The first part of the project, Salmon Creek Park and Klineline Pond, opened to the public on May 28, 1977.

“This park has taken the destruction man has done and turned it around for recreational use,” activist-turned-county commissioner Connie Kearney said that day.

In the early 1980s, county commissioners shrugged off hundreds of petition signatures and approved an off-road-vehicle dirt track in the greenway. Rent ‘n’ Ride Enterprises lasted only a couple of seasons.

“What will happen to the meandering hills, valleys, jumps and a watchtower?” The Columbian wondered in November 1984. The answer was, not much: Random dirt lumps and bumps still border the trail between the softball fields and Turtle Pond.

That’s not the only historical leftover in the greenway. Poke around, and you’ll find the odd concrete structure or mining-era remnant here. Toward the west, up in the woods, there’s even an ancient rail car on its side, covered with moss and rusting away.

Miles east of here, upstream of Brush Prairie, the water health rating in one big chunk of Salmon Creek’s watershed improved from “fair” in 2010 to “good” in 2023, according to a comprehensive June 2024 Clark County Stream Health report.

But downstream, Salmon Creek has not improved. Its 2023 health ratings remained where they were in 2010: “fair” in the east section, from Klineline Pond to tributary Cougar Creek; “poor” in the west section, from Cougar Creek to Lake River; “poor but improving” in the Cougar Creek tributary.

Salmon Creek missed most healthy water-quality targets, including temperature (too warm is prohibitive for fish), dissolved oxygen (fish need a certain amount), bacteria (especially E. coli, which is potentially harmful to fish as well as people) and turbidity (meaning cloudiness, indicating that sediments and pollutants are making underwater visibility, breathing and reproducing difficult for fish).

“All kinds of pollutants are in stormwater runoff,” said Chris Hathaway, community programs director for the nonprofit Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership. “Fertilizers, pesticides, oils, greases, toxic metals, tire dust, bacteria, household trash. All those things are in Salmon Creek for sure, like they’re in every stream in the country.”

Because much of the area was developed long before the 1972 Clean Water Act became federal law, Clark County has spent decades catching up with old, inadequate, failing or simply nonexistent stormwater and wastewater systems, including many leaking septic tanks.

“A lot of stormwater treatment and wastewater treatment wasn’t developed when the community was developed,” said Eric Lambert, the county’s clean-water outreach specialist. “We are always playing catch-up.”

Poop Smart Clark is the unforgettable name of a local program that offers financial and technical help for homeowners with septic systems, including grants and loans for inspection, repairs and replacements. The Clark Regional Wastewater District offers incentives to eliminate individual septic systems and tie into local sewers.

Pollution is not Salmon Creek’s only problem. Years of diverting, straightening and simplifying the stream channel resulted in water that flows too fast between banks that are too straight, deep and steep.

“You can see the banks are getting steeper and steeper, and they crumble in on themselves,” Hathaway said. “In a healthy stream, that’s not happening. In a healthy stream, the water is closer to the top where it can spread out across the flood plain.”

What Salmon Creek wants, he said, is “roughness.”

“A healthy creek will have large woody debris jams, large rocks, beaver dams,” Hathaway said. “A lot of different things usually slow the flow of water and spread it out across a large area. When those things don’t exist, the creek tends to cut lower and lower. It keeps receding deeper into its channel. That’s how the banks fall in.”

Flood plain

If there’s a local legacy of bossing Salmon Creek around to the point of ill health and erosion, a more recent legacy is stewardship and education.

Since 1990, in order to supply quality drinking water to its customers, Clark Public Utilities has focused on “an extensive, long-term rehabilitation of the Salmon Creek basin, where most of our supply wells are located,” according to the agency’s website.

“It was breathtaking,” she said.

That was 30 years ago. Since then, McCarthy has made a lifestyle out of walking the greenway trail just about daily. She used to keep a blog called “Tales of Salmon Creek” about the critters she saw and people she befriended along the way. These days, McCarthy, 85, walks a little less than she used to — just a couple of miles a day — but her greenway view remains uninterrupted.

What she sees worries her, she said. Her neighbors say the same.

“We’re the complainers, along this road,” McCarthy said with a chuckle.

They’re worried about development pressures around and even within the greenway. They’re worried about native beavers and beaver dams being removed, and about invasive nutria and nutria tunnels not being removed — all to the detriment of the flood plain. They’re worried about ponds going dry and about a mysterious pipe that recently turned up in one of them: Could it be stealing water?

The Columbian brought these concerns to Kaley McLachlan-Burton, spokesperson for Clark County Parks and Nature, and Denielle Cowley, program coordinator of the county’s Legacy Lands program. Legacy Lands, enacted in 1985, is a property-tax-funded drive to purchase and preserve outdoor places. The levy is a little over 6 cents per $1,000 of assessed value and has preserved 5,400 acres of county land so far. Legacy Lands drove much acquisition of the Salmon Creek Greenway, Cowley said.

“Legacy Lands properties are only for conservation purposes, for passive recreation and wildlife,” she said. “There will not be any soccer fields or softball fields replacing the ponds. Taxpayers are buying these properties to conserve them, not make them into playing fields.”

It’s true, Cowley said, that beavers and a beaver dam were recently removed from the greenway by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services. That’s the only legal way to do it, she said, and it’s a rare step to take. In this case, beavers were doing their job a little too well in the wrong place. They damaged a habitat-improvement project and caused major flooding on the trail near Cougar Creek, she said.

“If they are destroying investments and infrastructure, we might relocate them,” Cowley said.

Even after that strategic removal, there’s never any shortage of beavers along Salmon Creek, she added.

Beavers are native to North America. (A recent bestseller called “Beaverland” offers a deep dive into the role their natural labor has played in building American wetlands and waterways.) But nutria are invasive, having been transported here from South America over a century ago for industrial-scale fur farming, and eventually set loose upon the landscape. They are spreading rapidly in Western Washington, according to the Washington Invasive Species Council.

Nutria are semi-aquatic rodents. They may resemble beavers, but they behave like anti-beavers. Rather than building water-retaining dams, they dig tunnels and burrows that undermine soil, and they feast upon plant roots and stems. Nutria are known to turn shorelines into muddy bogs, and to destroy flood plains and wildlife habitat, according to the Washington Invasive Species Council.

But going after the nutria in Salmon Creek would be pointless, McLachlan-Burton said.

“It would be a losing battle,” she said. “Probably a week later, more nutria would arrive. It would be a constant use of financial resources to fight nature.”

What about that mystery pipe? Some neighbors theorize that it’s surreptitiously drawing extra water to the regional wastewater treatment plant about a mile downstream, beyond the greenway.

Wrong, Clark Wastewater District’s Peterson said.

“We can confirm that the pipe sticking up is not part of the wastewater system,” Peterson wrote in an email. “There are no connections to the creek or greenway.”

The pipe remains a mystery.

“We have no record of it. We flew a drone over it,” Cowley said. “We don’t know if it’s a relic from farming days. We are just as puzzled as everyone else.”

Flyover photographs of the ponds across several decades, provided by Cowley, reveal dramatically changing water levels. In 1974, the western flood plain was filled almost to the brim with water, but by 1984 that water had shrunk to what looks like a puddle in the forest. In 2007, the pond was larger and deeper again. In 2023, it was shallower and the surrounding trees were mostly gone (thanks largely to beavers, Cowley said). By May 2024, the pond was full again.

“All evidence points to natural causes for the changing water amounts in the wetlands,” McLachlan-Burton said. “We like to say we are watching natural cycles play out.”

Other than continuing to clean the water and plant more trees, she said, the county’s mission is simply to watch change happen, even as progress toward a healthier, more functional flood plain seems to take steps forward and steps back.

“This is what flood plains do,” she said. “We are scheduling drone flyovers for this year to keep an eye on the situation and document how the water levels change.”