Light & Seed Winter/Spring 2024 by National Forest Foundation

™ WINTER/SPRING 2024

“I AM THE GUIDE I ONCE SOUGHT OUT.” Mardi Fuller grows from trepidation to transcendence on the White Mountain National Forest.

HOPE SPRINGS Salmon are returning to Alaska’s Resurrection Creek thanks to a collaboration between conservation and mining interests.

WATERSHED MOMENT A snow lab on the Tahoe National Forest is helping researchers and water managers understand the West’s snowpack.

THE MAGAZINE OF THE NATIONAL FOREST FOUNDATION

LIGHT. SEED. WATER. All life depends on a few essential elements — so much so, it can be easy to take them for granted. Our relationship with water, in particular, is often that of the everyday, the mundane. Open the tap. Cross a bridge. Tend your garden. Yet we are made of water, and by extension all it nourishes. So, how might we recast our relationship to this elements in a way that honors its intrinsic value? The National Forest Foundation’s new magazine, Light & Seed, seeks to do just that by showing that forests and grasslands are as vital as clean air and water. After all, National Forests and Grasslands are havens for these crucial elements: light, seed, and water. The stories in this issue focus on individual human connections to the waters of the National Forest System. We hope you’ll see in the stories a connection to your unique strengths and passions, and learn more about how you might contribute to these irreplaceable wild places.

Idaho Panhandle National Forest, Idaho Photo by Ben Herndon

CONNECTIONS

Want to dig deeper into the content? Visit nationalforests.org/connections to listen, watch, and read more about the articles in this issue.

Check out episodes of Baratunde Thurston’s podcast How to Citizen with Baratunde, which explores the ways in which we can wield our collective power to create positive change.

Watch writer Mardi Fuller in the short documentary Mardi & the Whites, by cinematographer Paula Champagne. The film, available on Vimeo, follows Fuller’s relationship with the peaks of the White Mountain National Forest and the great outdoors. And above all, it is a celebration of Black liberation in the wild. Learn more about the individuals featured in Heard in the Woods. Watch a TED Talk by Sylvia Earle, listen to Leah Thomas’ podcast, or read Susan Marks’ book.

Listen to Erica Nelson’s podcast Awkward Angler on Apple Podcasts. Start with “Geotagging and Gatekeeping,” a discussion of the complexity of accessibility in fishing culture, with guests Jaylyn Gough, founder of Native Women’s Wilderness; Vasu Sojitra, professional athlete and diversity strategist; fish biologist Anna Le; and Marco Kamimura, owner and founder of Iowa-based outfitter Xicana Fly.

Dan-Pepper via Shutterstock

Bite into how low-tech, processbased restoration, together with beavers, can help restore depleted watersheds like the Colorado River. Gather context on the state’s water crisis through the nonprofit Colorado River Resilience, and learn more about how managers work with beavers via the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Beaver Restoration Guidebook.

Photo courtesy Central Sierra Snow Lab

Photo by U.S. Forest Service

Explore the history of Resurrection Creek, a crucial salmon spawning habitat in Alaska’s Kenai Pennisula, through a collection of historic photographs and maps of the project site on our blog.

Get a sense of what it’s like to live and study at the UC Berkeley’ Central Sierra Snow Lab through an in-depth video and article, and learn more about the importance of the research conducted at the lab for water management in the West.

LIGHT & SEED

Photo by Mardi Fuller

Photo by John Holdmeier

Photo courtesy of Central Sierra Snow Lab

14 20 24

People of Public Lands: Erica Nelson

The Response: A Place to Dig in the Snow

NFF Field Report: Blueprint for Compromise

Heard in the Woods

The Last Word: Giving Beavers a Helping Hand

Photo by Janessa Anderson

TABLE OF CONTENTS People of Public Lands: Baratunde Thurston Journeys: An Enduring Bond

Cover photo by Joe Klementovich

LIGHT & SEED

An Enduring Bond Mardi Fuller climbs 5,793-foot Mount Adams Peak on the White Mountain National Forest as part of her journey to summit all of New Hampshire’s 48, 4,000foot peaks in winter. In her hauntingly beautiful essay, “An Enduring Bond,” Fuller explores her relationship to the remote Bond Range over 13 years, growing from an eager 20-something to a skilled mountain woman. “Crossing the ridgeline, I now know the Bonds in all four seasons, as they have known me in all seasons of my adulthood,” she writes. “Within a matter of miles I will be stumbling, limping out on abused legs, returning to my basest self. But on Bondcliff, I take my moment of ephemeral peace—or perhaps I allow it to take me.” Read the full story on page 14.

Photo by Joe Klementovich

A Place to Dig in the Snow The Central Sierra Snow Lab, on the Tahoe National Forest, has provided researchers and water managers new tools to understand the West’s snowpack for over 75 years. Digging into the lab’s storied history and modern operations, writer Tom Hallberg reports that an “atmosphere of practical collaboration” has earned it outsized influence. Unlike traditional ecological or climate research—which can be siloed in universities or research institutes—the results of research conducted here are often used immediately by professionals on the ground to predict things like downstream flooding. “Scientists need a place to shut their computers and dig in the snow to ensure their research has real-world impact,” Hallberg writes. Read the full story on page 20.

Photo by Florence Low / California Department of Water Resources

Resurrecting Hope Workers put the near-finishing touches on a new stream channel as part of a restoration project on Resurrection River outside of Hope, Alaska. Since the late 1800s, placer miners have removed soil from Resurrection’s once-braided beds, straightened the waterway, and blocked its path from the flood plain. The salmon quickly disappeared, hobbling the ecosystem that relied on the keystone species. Now, the waters of Resurrection again run pink with salmon. In a first of-its-kind partnership for Alaska, conservation nonprofits and mining companies have joined to help heal the damaged river. “I’ve realized that to get beyond what’s stopped most of this environmental movement,” said one Hope local, “you’ve got to work together.” Read the full story on page 24.

Photo by Janessa Anderson

PEOPLE OF PUBLIC LANDS

CASTING FOR COLLECTIVITY

For the guide, podcaster, and DEI consultant, being a Diné woman in the fly-fishing industry means speaking up and out until she starts seeing more faces like hers on the water. INTERVIEW BY ERIN VIVID RILEY

Photo by John Holdmeier

rought up in Kirtland, New Mexico, Erica Nelson has spent the last decade guiding—rock climbing, whitewater rafting, backpacking, skiing, and now fly fishing—across the West. She’s often one of few women, let alone non-white women, let alone Native American people, in any given space.

To combat lack of representation in the sport, Nelson hosts the Awkward Angler podcast about the intersection of fishing and social justice, consults on diversity and inclusion with companies including Orvis, and serves as an ambassador for the advocacy organization Brown Folks Fishing. In between, she guides fly-fishing trips on rivers near Gunnison, Colorado.

“To me, it’s about looking at fly fishing as if everything is connected,” says the Orvis-endorsed guide based in ancestral Ute territory, now Crested Butte. “We need healthy air, we need healthy water, we need healthy birds and bugs to be able to catch healthy fish…. I’ve found that fly fishing is a gateway to conservation.”

How did you get into fly fishing? In 2016, I moved to Wyoming for a job with NOLS [National Outdoor Leadership School], where everyone liked to fly fish. I thought it was unattainable and expensive, but my coworkers were casual about it and went in jeans and flip-flops. I started watching Youtube videos and asking fly-fishing guides on Tinder to teach me, and soon honed my skills. At that point, I was over “guide life,” but when I moved to Crested Butte in 2018 and didn’t see myself reflected on the water, I wanted to change that.

LIGHT & SEED

“

I’ve found that fly fishing is a gateway to conservation.”

Photo by John Holdmeier

What is it like being the only non-white, woman guide in your area?

[often isn’t] any integration. Personally, I’m drained. I have given so much to every training, every consultation,

Most other boats I pass [look] so serious. When I do my pro-bono fishing trips for the queer community here in the valley, we’re dressed up and playing our music and having so much fun. Those are the people I want to see out on the river—people who see fly fishing as fun and educational and who bring their authentic selves to it.

everything I do. I don’t want to say I’m burning out, but where are the other people willing to carry this burden?

Have you noticed a change in the fly-fishing community in recent years? There was a spike in women getting into the sport in 2021 [at the height of the pandemic], but I knew we were going to see a decline soon after because the industry isn’t changing, [in terms of] being truly inclusive of other demographics.

How are efforts to make fly fishing more inclusive going? Most people in the industry are waiting for results that make a business case for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that’s not part of the work. Companies appease staff through trainings and creating committees, but there PEOPLE OF PUBLIC LANDS

How is this playing out on the water? I asked 20 women who came to a retreat I recently [helped facilitate] about what barriers they face, and they all talked about access and belonging. In my experience, the majority of people you encounter are white men who are not friendly, and that can result in an environment where I sometimes don’t feel safe. It’s also too much of an elitist club. I predict we’re going to see younger people developing a new outlook on where the industry should be. Follow Nelson on Instagram at @awkwardangler, and learn more about her at awkwardangler.com.

Book Nelson’s fly-fishing guiding services through Willowfly Anglers in Almont, Colorado.

PEOPLE OF PUBLIC LANDS

FINDING NATURE’S STORIES Comedian, activist, and host of the PBS’ hit series America Outdoors, Baratunde Thurston searches for the human heart of wild places. INTERVIEW BY ERIN VIVID RILEY

aratunde Thurston has a knack for flipping the script. From paragliding over the Great Salt Lake to see its climate change-induced transformation to fly fishing with foster youth in Arkansas’ Ouachita Mountains through a program that uses nature to relieve stress, he’s traveled the country in search of unexpected stories for America Outdoors. The six-part series, which recently premiered its second season, has a simple premise: We can’t begin to know our natural environments without first understanding the people who live, work, and play in them. Thurston tells us about his ever-evolving relationship with the outdoors, what makes America Outdoors resonate, and his most memorable National Forest backdrops.

Photo by Baratunde Thurston

LIGHT & SEED

How does the show pick its stories? We find stories that are diverse in so many ways: in ecology, geography, demographics, physicality, and intention. There are the big conservation and adventure stories, but we also focus on people who work in and with the outdoors, because we want to remind viewers that it isn’t only a place where people play or do extreme sports.

Do National Forests feature in America Outdoors? A lot! For season two, I went on a turkey hunt in New Mexico’s Cibola National Forest, rock climbing in Utah’s Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, and fly fishing in Arkansas’ Ouachita Mountains.

What was a highlight from filming season two?

Photo by Baratunde Thurston

Near Northern California’s Klamath National Forest, in the Klamath Basin, we visited a regenerative ranch, which I didn’t know was possible. The family behind Agency Ranch has restored it to a much more natural state. They still run cattle, but in a very particular way. They’ve rehabilitated wetlands and brought fish back. They’re thinking more holistically about their role in the water cycle. Seeing the way their efforts intersect with Indigenous practices and ranch culture was very meaningful.

When did your love for the outdoors begin?

Do you have a favorite National Forest?

My mom was very adventurous and exposed me to a lot. We’d go hiking, biking, and camping all over the East Coast, from Maine to Florida. I became a Boy Scout and have amazing memories of spending a summer at a camp in upstate New York, where I’d climb a new mountain every week, canoe on a lake, and make campfires. Having grown up in Washington D.C. in the ‘80s, I had an extraordinary relationship to the outdoors.

Idaho’s Boise National Forest may have been one of the most memorable places we’ve visited with the show. We went with a group of teenagers who are refugees and part of a program called New Roots. This experience was one of their first impressions of America. At one point, the program leader pulled out a map and asked the kids, “Where are we?” And the kids yelled, “A National Forest!” And she said, “What does that mean?” And they answered, “That means it’s our forest!” It gave them a right to be there and that’s so beautiful.

Has America Outdoors changed your relationship to nature? For a while, I was living my digital life in New York with occasional outdoor dabbles, but something started to pull at me to get back to nature. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles to do just that, America Outdoors emerged as a possibility. Since filming started in 2021, I notice things more. Birds and animals. Plants and flowers. I see trails and wonder if there are truffles on the forest floor. I consider the Earth a lot more in my day to day and feel more at home wherever I am outdoors.

PEOPLE OF PUBLIC LANDS

Follow Thurston on Instagram at @baratunde and learn more about him at baratunde.com.

Stream seasons one and two of America Outdoors, in addition to the show’s compendium science-focused online series America Outdoors: Understory, on the PBS YouTube channel.

JOURNEYS

AN ENDURING BOND Photo by Mardi Fuller

Charting my decade-long love of the Bond Range on the White Mountain National Forest

BY MARDI FULLER

y relationship with the White Mountains began in college. On a five-day backpacking trip in Vermont’s Green Mountains, a co-traveler told me of the Whites’ rugged and beautiful terrain. A few years later, when I moved to Boston as a young adult, I bought a guidebook, grabbed a friend, and headed north to the wilderness that straddles New Hampshire and Maine.

Sometime after that first trip, I was drawn to one particularly remote area, the Bonds, and soon after began methodically exploring this set of three mountains deep in the White Mountain National Forest. I started by joining more experienced 14

friends and the local mountain club on mini-expeditions, practicing trail navigation under guiding eyes. Years passed, and I grew comfortable in these woods. It wasn’t long until I was giving out trail advice, pointing

out peaks, and sharing my own stories of the hazards and glories of past outings. Today, I am the guide I once sought out. Here, a reflection of our relationship over five trips, 13 years, and many life chapters.

LIGHT & SEED

Fall 2007 The first time I climb these steep, forested uplands, I am full of trepidation. We plan to summit six mountains, covering 21 miles in two days. The final three are the Bonds, which are known for serious terrain and conditions—tricky river crossings, abrupt elevation gain, and at times, harsh weather. It’s daunting for someone like me, of average fitness and athleticism. We reach 4,265-foot Bondcliff, the final mountain of the traverse, at nearpeak foliage, under clear, calm skies. Among many wonders, Wobanadenok, as it is known to the Abenaki, or White Mountain National Forest, holds 48 mountains 4,000 feet and higher, or “the 48” in hiker parlance. Although they’re not tall compared to the Rockies or the Sierras, these peaks are steep and rough; their trails often gain 3,000-plus feet of

JOURNEYS

elevation with few switchbacks. The trails in three stretches of the White Mountains, including the Bonds, have at least a mile of above-treeline travel. The weather is often poor in these areas due to the collision of storm tracks that meet at the highest peak in the Northeast, 6,288-foot Mount Washington. I’m 27, a young woman piecing together my identity, throwing myself into the expanse of life. Looking out from the summit of Mount Bond, I ask these mountains to echo that expanse back to me. My trail companion and I are close, and as we hike neither of us knows that we’ll leave our friendship here, in the Whites. We learn these woods as we learn about each other. During long stretches on the trail, the secrets we share are soon forgotten into the vastness.

Photo by Mardi Fuller. Map courtesy of U.S. Forest Service.

Photo by Mardi Fuller

Spring 2012 In May, a group of friends and I set off for South Twin, part of the Twin Range of the White Mountains. Typically at this time, residual snowpack remains, hardened, rotting, full of postholes. But this winter hasn’t seen much snowfall, and we amble along easily. I’m eager to impress and I spend the day flirting with a new friend I’m not sure I’m even interested in. Instead of pursuing the scenery and the experience, I burn my thought-energy trying to be cute and clever. And so, on Bondcliff, I miss out on transcendence. At first, I’m disappointed, but soon after, I realize it’s okay—the mountain is more patient with me than I am with myself. The exquisite summit ridge, golden in the late afternoon sun, felt no need to say, “Hey, look at me,” while I did just that for this man. Whether I engage deeply or remain on the surface, I leave a layer of myself on the Bonds each time, embedded in the strata of glacially tilled granite, in the dark ochre subsoil that grounds me. The forest holds them for me, these past selves.

Summer 2016 I promise my dear friend the best panorama of her life. She and I hiked across the White Mountains together before she scaled back as she raised a couple of kids during the intervening decade.

JOURNEYS

I’m eager to show her all I’ve discovered since. We climb 4,540foot West Bond in hopes of catching the sunset, but the area’s fickle microclimate whips up a heavy fog where previously there was sun and fast-moving cumulus. I’m discouraged that I can’t show off these precious mountains to my friend, that she’s now skeptical of the Bonds I’ve come to love. This is her last opportunity to hike here before she moves away. This trip crystallizes a role I’ve grown into: an interpreter of these mountains. I’ve developed a fairly comprehensive knowledge of them, and I’ve done so as a Black person, contemplating matters of racial exclusion and confronting the associated barriers. I realize as we set up camp that I’m excited to bring

“

this understanding to communities of color who haven’t had access to this sacred place. The next morning, we reclimb West Bond. This time, we aren’t rushed, and time feels abundant. The sky delivers its best blue. “This is the best hike I’ve ever done,” my friend says, and I suddenly see the Bonds through her eyes, as if it’s my first time again. In another three miles, we’ll be trudging out an interminable logging road, our bodies cranky with exhaustion, but for now, I’m present in this euphoria.

Winter 2019 Three friends and I attempt the Bonds in February of a big snow year, on what might be my hundredth hike in the Whites. There are no reports of anyone pushing past Zealand Mountain within the last week, which means we’ll have to break trail. In case we can’t make the traverse, we book bunks at Zealand High Mountain Hut.

Whether I engage deeply or remain At mile seven, we encounter a man on the surface, I leave hiking toward us. He appears surprised to see us—four women, one Black—out a layer of myself on in winter. We say hello and continue the Bonds each time, past, but he engages us, asking about preparation and plans. We’re polite embedded in the strata our but brief. Unsatisfied, he continues, of glacially tilled granite, nearly yelling: in the dark ochre subsoil “Do you know where you are?” At the spur for Zealand Mountain, we that grounds me. The meet a wall of unbroken snow. With 10 of trail-breaking and navigation forest holds them for me, miles ahead at midafternoon, we decide to retreat, subsumed by the emotional these past selves.” ambivalence of an anticlimax. Upon

entering the hut, we discover that our trail interrogator is also spending the evening. He and his group are throwing a Caribbean-themed night. Nearly 20 people in Hawaiian shirts and leis greet us, seeming to have missed that neither is very Caribbean. As the daughter of two Jamaicans, I cringe both inwardly and outwardly, wishing I’d built a snow cave beyond Zealand for the night. To make the situation bearable, I convince them to let me take over selector— the Jamaican word for DJing— responsibilities. I groove to Dancehall and Soca alone in a corner, while my hut companions process sounds new to their ears.

Winter 2020 A year later, at 41 years old, I return with the same group of friends. We’ve heard the trails to the Bonds are broken out, and the forecast is mostly in our favor—except for 50-plus mile-per-hour winds along the most exposed section. Our plan is to push to treeline and double-back toward the hut if conditions are poor. When we poke into the alpine, we find calm winds. It seems the mountains may allow us to pass. I’m giddy as we reach West Bond, and I practically prance up the mile-long ascent, undaunted by the 1,000-plus feet of elevation gain. The serrated ridge of Bondcliff unfolds, a familiar and cherished view that in this season is flattened by thin light into a monochrome of blue-black and white. Crossing the ridgeline, I now know the Bonds in all four seasons, as they have known me in all seasons

Photo by Mardi Fuller

of my adulthood. Within a matter of miles I will be stumbling, limping out on abused legs, returning to my basest self. But on Bondcliff, I take my moment of ephemeral peace—or perhaps I allow it to take me. Follow Mardi Fuller on Instagram at @wherelocsflyfree, and learn more about her adventures at mardifuller.com

Hike two miles along a southern section of the Whites, from Old Bridle Path to West Rattlesnake, for a beginner-friendly outing with big rewards. The roundtrip features 360-degree views of the Lakes Region from a 1,200-foot summit.

A lifelong backcountry adventurer, in January 2021, Mardi Fuller became the first known Black person to hike all 48 of New Hampshire’s high peaks in winter. Based in Boston, Fuller works as a nonprofit communications director, volunteers with the local Outdoor Afro network, and advocates for racial equity through writing, speaking, and community building.

LIGHT & SEED

“

Photo by Mardi Fuller

Three friends and I attempt the Bonds in February of a big snow year, on what might be my hundredth hike in the Whites.”

THE RESPONSE

A PLACE TO DIG IN THE SNOW

The Central Sierra Snow Lab, set on the Tahoe National Forest, has provided researchers and water managers new tools to understand the West’s all-important snowpack for more than 75 years. BY TOM HALLBERG

Instrumentation collects snowfall and snowpack data during a powerful winter storm at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab on December 27, 2021. The main lab building, in the background, is the location of both daily operations and employee living quarters. Photo courtesy Central Sierra Snow Lab

ain lashed California’s Donner Summit. During the midwinter downpour, Andrew Schwartz, a Ph.D. atmospheric scientist and director of the Central Sierra Snow Lab, noticed runnels forming as water percolated through the site’s snowpack. He snapped a photo and posted it to Twitter.

LIGHT & SEED

At home in nearby Reno, Nevada, Anne Heggli perked up when she saw the post. A staff research scientist at the Desert Research Institute, Heggli was studying rain-on-snow events at the lab. She called Schwartz. “I’m getting in my car,” she said. “Can I come dig a snowpit?” An hour later, after excavating 51 inches of sodden snow, she found 3.5 inches of standing water atop the ground, a potential flood with nowhere to go but downhill. That soggy shoveling was a brief but evocative moment in Heggli’s groundbreaking push to develop a method for predicting rain-on-snow events. Her study is one example of what Schwartz hopes to facilitate at the lab: research that helps inform water managers, hydrologists, and weather forecasters, thus influencing the lives of residents who depend on western watersheds. Mountain snowpacks can only hold so much water. During periods of sustained rain, they can become saturated. Compared to melting, when water generally seeps out slowly, the outflow from rain-on-snow events can cause intense flooding. Using the lab’s historical records, Heggli examined 14 years of soil and snow saturation data to uncover a signature spike in hourly snowwater equivalent (SWE), which is the amount of water in the snowpack. The spike correlates with water moving over the ground during rain-on-snow events and gives water managers an early warning to anticipate flooding. Developing new methods like Heggli’s can be difficult. It often requires THE RESPONSE

“

Built in 1946 on the Tahoe National Forest, it was one of three such facilities the U.S. Weather Bureau and Army Corps of Engineers constructed around the West to monitor snowfall and predict spring runoff.”

A scientist records measurements of outside conditions during the lab’s early days. Prior to the advent of digital instrumentation, scientists often recorded measurements by hand. Photo courtesy of Central Sierra Snow Lab

historical data, a place to house the research, and collaborators steeped in practical science. Northern California water managers and researchers say the snow lab is the perfect place for this work.

physicist, developed a nuclear snow gauge to measure SWE at the facility in 1948, paving the way for remote sensing and data transmission, according to a retrospective from the Donner Summit Historical Society.

Built in 1946 on the Tahoe National Forest, it was one of three such facilities that the U.S. Weather Bureau and Army Corps of Engineers constructed around the West to monitor snowfall and predict spring runoff. The two-story building isn’t a lab in the forensically clean, white-coat sense. Rather, it’s a space for snow-science fieldwork and instrument development. Over time, the Montana and Oregon labs shuttered, but the Central Sierra facility maintained.

Gerdel’s invention laid the groundwork for the more than 900 SNOTEL sites western water managers rely on today. Short for SNOw TELemetry and managed by the Natural Resource Conservation Service, these remote weather stations are located mostly on public land. Sensors at the sites measure snowpack, soil and climate conditions, available data that recreationalists and professionals use to understand the snowpack. The lab has a SNOTEL station, and devices used in the sites and other methods of weather and snow observation have been developed there.

It quickly developed a reputation for the practical research that still takes place there today. Lab founder Dr. Robert W. Gerdel, a Weather Bureau

“There’s a constant parade of new instruments that we’re testing, to see 21

how well they [tell] us how much water is in the snowpack,” Schwartz said.

California’s precious water supply, according to the Historical Society.

While SNOTEL stations offer huge datasets across watersheds, the lab offers a concurrent, yet different, resource—a staffed facility.

For Heggli, who’s investigating a phenomenon that changes by the hour, having Schwartz there to give real-time updates is invaluable.

“As a testbed, it is enormously valuable, somewhere you can have new instrumentation or new ideas that you can test, and there’s [someone who] can actually get verification data that things are working or not working,” said Tim Bardsley, senior service hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Reno.

“You can’t put a dollar sign on that,” she said.

At the snow lab, professionals like Bardsley and researchers like Heggli can develop projects with Schwartz, knowing someone will be on site to collect manual measurements and confirm instrument accuracy. Over the decades, those arrangements have led to advancements in flood control and management of

“

History hasn’t always been kind to the lab. The Forest Service oversaw it for decades but shuttered it in the late 1990s due to budget cuts, while maintaining ownership. In stepped the University of California-Berkeley, which has run it since. Fluctuations

in funding have diminished staffing numbers, from several scientists in Gerdel’s time to one person for much of the post-millennium era. This type of facility is rare. New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington Observatory, situated atop its namesake peak, provides researchers in the eastern U.S. a similar service, and Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Biological Lab looks much like the snow lab but focuses on ecological studies. Heggli and Bardsley could think of no analogous operationally focused hydrologic research labs in the West.

History hasn’t always been kind to the lab. The Forest Service oversaw it for decades but shuttered it in the late 1990s due to budget cuts, while maintaining ownership.”

The snow lab is at the headwaters of the Yuba River, pictured here in January 2017, after the water rose by approximately 15 feet. One project hosted at the lab, Anne Heggli’s work studying rain-on-snow events, identified the start of runoff in the mountains nearly 24 hours prior to this peak. Heggli’s 2022 paper provides a decisionmaking framework that water managers and hydrologists now use to prepare for potential downstream flooding. Photo by JD Richey

LIGHT & SEED

Andrew Schwartz makes measurements of snowpack depth, density, and water content using a Federal Sampler on January 26, 2022. These measurements are made multiple times a week at the lab to track the evolution of the snowpack during the season. Photo by Florence Low/California Department of Water Resources

Perhaps the most crucial element of its success, and one Schwartz has championed since taking over in 2021, is an atmosphere of practical collaboration. Ecological and climate research is often largely theoretical, and researchers can be siloed in a university or government agency without a way to connect with professionals on the ground. That’s where projects like Heggli’s fit in. She published a paper on her work in May 2022, and water managers in western Nevada are already implementing it. Bardsley uses it at the National Weather Service to understand the risk of flooding during rain-on-snow events and how to communicate that to downstream residents, water managers, and dam operators. While researchers and managers expect the Sierra Nevada snowpack to shrink in coming decades, warming wintertime temperatures in the

THE RESPONSE

immediate future may lead to what Heggli’s paper calls “peak ROS,” or peak rain-on-snow. The Sierra will still have abundant snow, she writes, but warmer storms with more rainon-snow events will lead to increased instances of potential flooding. That’s why a tool like hers, which she and Bardsley hope will one day incorporate quantitative predictive components, is so crucial.

By extension, that’s why the Central Sierra Snow Lab under Schwartz’s direction matters because scientists need a place to shut their computers and dig in the snow to ensure their research has real-world impact. “All this stuff takes time,” Bardsley said. “Without people like Andrew who are engaged with both the research community and the operational community, it takes much longer.”

Submit your observations of the snowpack to the nonprofit Sierra Avalanche Center or Snow Pilot, an open-source, free software that allows users to graph, record, and database snowpit information, both of which provide crucial data to the snow lab. Spending time in other snowy ranges? Check out avalanche.org to find your local avalanche center.

Tom Hallberg is the managing editor of Backcountry Magazine and a freelance writer based in Victor, Idaho. In addition to covering outdoor recreation, he enjoys any story about western communities finding solutions to difficult problems.

NFF FIELD REPORT

Blueprint for Compromise

For decades, mining interests destroyed a crucial salmon-spawning habitat in Alaska’s Chugach National Forest. Now, a unique collaboration between conservation nonprofits and mining companies, led by the National Forest Foundation, is bringing those species back.

BY ERIN VIVID RILEY

Alaska’s Resurrection Creek flows from the West Kenai Mountains. Photo by Janessa Anderson

hen Lance Williamson was growing up in the early ‘70s, he’d fish, camp, and explore Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, a 9,000-square-mile spit of temperate rainforest jutting down from Anchorage into the Gulf of Alaska. LIGHT & SEED

“I remember camping in friends’ front yards with views of the sea,” Williamson said. He lived in Hope, a small community of 50-odd people in a larger-than-life setting: to the north, the dramatic shoreline of Turnagain Arm; to the south, dense forests of Sitka spruce and mountain hemlock; and running through the center of town, Resurrection Creek, which flowed out of the West Kenai Mountains.

2006, the fish began to return; all at once, in staggering numbers. First came the mighty king, a species found in few other streams in the area. Not long after, the speckled chum and the diminutive pink salmon, and eventually, the darkmetallic coho and prized sockeye. The water, otherwise deep green and gray, flashed pink with fish,

running two per square foot of water. They rested in newly dug pools and spawned in freshly laid gravel beds. And the following year, in 2007, their populations increased sixfold. These astonishing returns were evidence that a project led by the Forest Service to restore 15 miles of Resurrection Creek had been a success. Despite this resounding

Despite the surrounding bounty, Williamson said the creek was “devastated” for as long as he could remember. The site of one of Alaska’s first gold rushes, Resurrection’s gilded banks drew fortune-seekers from all over the world in the late 1800s. By the turn of the 20th century, thousands lived in Hope Mining District. The creek, previously a lifeline for the surrounding ecosystem, became a lifeline for just one interest. Miners used hydraulic and heavy-equipment placer mining, including with water pumps and excavators, to remove soil from creek beds, straighten the waterway, and block its path from the existing flood plain. “Historically, there were huge king salmon runs here,” said Williamson, who spent much of his life in Hope and is now retired. He remembers old-timers’ tales of such plentiful kings that residents used them as dog food. But within only decades of the industry’s establishment, that vital population disappeared, and with it much of the diverse ecosystem that relied on it.

The NFF’s Chief Conservation Officer Marcus Selig and Pacific Northwest and Alaska Director Patrick Shannon viewing in-stream work at Resurrection Creek. Photo by Janessa Anderson.

“

The water, otherwise deep green and gray, flashed pink with fish, running two per square foot of water. Salmon rested in newly dug pools and spawned in freshly laid The creek remained like this for nearly gravel beds.” a century, until one spring day in NFF FIELD REPORT

“ A heavy equipment operator working in June 2023. Photo by Janessa Anderson

impact, lack of funding put the project on hold, and more than a decade passed before more work could be done. “We knew that without active and ongoing restoration, this prime habitat would never return to what it once was,” said Kenzie Barnwell, the NFF’s Chugach Stewardship Coordinator for the Chugach National Forest. Now, thanks to an unlikely set of alliances, restoration work at Resurrection Creek is again underway. Slated for completion in 2025, the project’s second phase will rebuild 2.2 miles of waterway and 74 acres of riparian habitat. In a firstof-its-kind partnership for Alaska, conservation nonprofits and mining 26

companies have joined to help heal the damaged river. On a bluebird day in August, at the tail end of a salmon run that saw Resurrection Creek’s waters again turn scarlet red, engineers and excavators worked side-by-side along the river banks. As before, the team is building features crucial for salmon to navigate and spawn during their freshwater life stages: reconnecting the historic floodplain; constructing new pools and ponds; installing logs and root-wads in new stream channels, and revegetating the adjacent wetlands. Before long, this work site will resemble the sinuous stretch of creek, restored during phase one,

Now, thanks to an unlikely set of alliances, restoration work at Resurrection Creek is again underway. Slated for completion in 2025, the project’s second phase will rebuild 2.2 miles of waterway and 74 acres of riparian habitat. In a first-of-its-kind partnership for Alaska, conservation nonprofits and mining companies have joined to help heal the damaged river.” LIGHT & SEED

A restored stream channel completed during phase two. Photo by Janessa Anderson

completed in 2015, a lack of funding and resources caused the lengthy delay. Things changed in early 2021, when an infusion from the Alaska Abandoned Mine Restoration Initiative, an unusual collaboration between conservation nonprofit Trout Unlimited (TU) and mining company Kinross Alaska, reinvigorated the effort. To ensure a multi-year, phased project, the NFF raised an additional $7.1 million dollars in state, federal, and private dollars, including from the Department of Commerce, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Transformational Habitat Restoration and Coastal Resilience Grant.

“

Fish are the best critics”

For TU, part of the venture’s appeal was its accessibility. “Some restoration projects are in remote places, but this is where many kids go to catch their first salmon,” said Marian Giannulis, communications director for TU’s Alaska Program.

Moving boulders and harvested logs to create crucial salmon-spawning habitat. Photo by Janessa Anderson

where, at the height of the recent salmon run, a young bear was spotted fishing in newly formed ripples that brimmed with fish. Corinne Marzullo, a Forest Service civil engineer and one of the lead designers on the project, described how having a successful blueprint

has been a balm in the face of such a large-scale endeavor. “Fish are the best critics,” Marzullo said, pointing to a run of pink salmon, whose population numbers have increased tenfold since 2005. Though the environmental review for the project’s second phase was

These are not the only unlikely bedfellows here. The 130-year-old Hope Mining Company is still actively mining on private inholdings across the phase two’s restoration area. To create a working corridor, the NFF and Forest Service established an agreement with the mining company to allow restoration work to occur alongside mineral extraction. The scene is as uncanny as it sounds: to one side, Forest Service excavators moving earth to create new creek

LIGHT & SEED

bends; on the other, mining excavators moving earth for gold. “The original miners turned [the creek] into a straight ditch, which was great for mining, but horrible for habitat in one of the most beautiful valleys in the country,” said Hope Mining Company Vice President Jim Roberts. Unlike at the height of the industry, only a few operators actively mine the area today. “The impact on the environment is not nearly what it was,” said Barnwell, the NFF’s stewardship coordinator. Williamson, who grew up in Hope, returned to the seaside town a few years ago after retiring from a career in construction, landscaping, and critical habitat restoration. Having kept a home in Hope for 50 years, he’s watched the community morph over time, from a place driven exclusively by mining interests to one sustained by outdoor tourism, from a quiet town of a few dozen people to a recreation hub whose population fluctuates with the seasons, and ultimately, from a vestige of the gold-rush era to the site of cooperation that will set precedent for future conservation initiatives across the state. “I grew up in an era when you were on either this side or that side,” said Williamson. “At this point in my life, I’ve realized that to get beyond what’s stopped most of this environmental movement, you’ve got to work together.” Reporting contributed by Joe Yelverton.

NFF FIELD REPORT

A map depicting phase one and two restoration efforts. Credit Trout Unlimited

Hike or backpack the 39-mile Resurrection Pass Trail, which begins along the creek near the town of Hope, in Alaska, for a firsthand look at the dynamic ecosystem benefiting from the NFF’s Resurrection Creek Restoration Project.

Erin Vivid Riley is a writer, reporter, and editor whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Condé Nast Traveler, and The New York Times. Before going freelance, she was an editor at Departures and Outside.

HEARD IN THE WOODS “We call the river-being our lifeblood, the main artery of our existence. Without a healthy river, everything else is sick.” Wendy “Poppy” Ferris-George, member of the Hupa-Karuk tribe, as quoted in Audubon

“If we continue on the current trajectory, one-half of the plants and animals that are dependent on freshwater could go extinct in this century. This future is closer than you think—but we can still act now to ensure water is managed more sustainably.” Sandi Matsumoto, California Water Program Director, as quoted in The Nature Conservancy

“No water, no life. No blue, no green.” “In Hawaiʻi, water is the essence, the foundation, of wealth. Before trade and tourism, we had water. Water is culture. Water is sustenance...Without it, we would become impoverished of our identity, our existence.” Dana Okano, Program Director, Hawai’i Community Foundation, as quoted in The Funders Network

Sylvia Earle, Oceanographer, as quoted in TED Conferences

“The coming generation will not take water for granted.” Dan McCarthy, Former President & CEO, Black & Veatch Water, as quoted in Wells Bring Hope

“Water is the most personal issue we have.” Susan Marks, Author, as quoted in Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America

“We really need to understand that we live in watersheds, not just in neighborhoods, not in states and counties, but we live in watersheds. And there are people downstream and upstream from us.” Steven Hoch, Volunteer, Minnesota Wetland Health Evaluation Program, as quoted in CBS News Minnesota

“What could happen if instead of treating water like a luxury to be hoarded, we understand it as a resource that’s meant to be shared? As a sacred element that ties us all together?” Leah Thomas (@greengirlleah), Founder, Intersectional Environmentalist, as quoted in As She Rises

“The fact that warming removed as much water from the [Colorado River] basin as the size of Lake Mead itself during the recent megadrought is a wakeup call to the climate change impacts we are living today.” Benjamin Bass, Project Scientist, UCLA Center for Climate Science, as quoted in Earth.com

“The precarious nature of our modern water cycle should give all water managers pause. We just have to think, how are we going to live in a world where there’s going to be much less?” Kyle Roerink, Executive Director, Great Basin Water Network, as quoted in KUNC

Eldorado National Forest, California. Photo by Thomas Cluderay

THE LAST WORD

Giving Beavers a Helping Hand

Low-tech, process-based restoration could be key to helping restore ecosystems on the Colorado River. BY CAROLYN BUCKNALL

fter decades of drought, communities across the Colorado River Basin are having difficult conversations about how to preserve the river system that 40 million Americans rely on for their livelihoods, and culture. The National Forest Foundation (NFF) is working with an unlikely hero to build a solution: the beaver. The Colorado River’s epic 1,450 mile journey across the American West begins high in the Rocky Mountains, where snowmelt from National Forests feeds the river’s headwaters. Before European fur trappers arrived, these streams meandered through alpine meadows, flooding the surrounding land and creating thriving riparian ecosystems. But the decline of these ecosystems’ keystone species, the beaver, means water rushes by before it can become the groundwater that surrounding communities can use to weather drought.

Western Colorado University students participating in the stream restoration activities on Trail Creek. Photo by Ecometrics

Volunteers work together to weave willow cuttings between posts placed in the stream, creating a post-assisted log structure, or a PAL. PALs help slow the water as it moves through a system, allowing more water to seep into the surrounding riparian habitat. Photo by Eli Smith

Now, with a little help, beavers and their historical habitats are making a comeback. Starting in 2021, the NFF has built beaver dam analogs along Trail Creek on the Gunnison National Forest above Crested Butte, Colorado.

and helping communities weather drought.

These dam analogs have slowed stream flow and created wetland habitat, which has attracted beavers back to the area. The beavers’ return makes these wetlands sustainable, radically altering the future of the ecosystem by reducing soil erosion, increasing resilience to floods and wildfires,

With the success of Trail Creek,the NFF is now scaling up this work across the Colorado River Basin, with the goal of creating an interconnected system of restoration projects to support the vital lifeline of the West, the Colorado River.

This type of low-tech, process-based restoration offers a promising and simple way to start revitalizing the streams and riparian areas that feed the Colorado River.

Open the fold-out to learn more.

LIGHT & SEED

Light & Seed ™ Editor-in-Chief: Hannah Featherman Editors: Emily Stifler Wolfe, Erin Vivid Riley Writers: Erin Vivid Riley, Mardi Fuller, Tom Hallberg, Joe Yelverton, Carolyn Bucknall Designer: Shanthony Art & Design

Why We Print At the National Forest Foundation, we believe forests and grasslands are as vital to all communities as clean air and water. Through Light & Seed, we aim to share stories that connect you to the incredible lands of the U.S. National Forest System.

Sustainable Printing Light & Seed is printed on recycled paper made of 30% post-consumer content. This FSC-certified paper ensures the highest environmental and social standards have been followed throughout the process of wood sourcing, paper manufacturing, and print production. More at fsc.org.

Photos by Janessa Anderson, Baratunde Thurston, John Holdmeier, Courtesy Central Sierra Snow Lab

THE “HARDEST WORKING RIVER” IN THE WEST

National Forests comprise less than 20 percent of the land in the Colorado River Basin, but contribute more than 60 percent of the river’s water.

The problem: disconnected floodplains Vast networks of the Colorado River’s tributaries have been disconnected from their historical floodplains through a process known as stream incision: where erosion deepens a stream’s active channel. Changing land uses on the Colorado’s tributaries have increased erosion exponentially. This causes water to rush downstream so quickly that adjacent groundwater levels drop too low for roots of nearby plants to reach.

A nature-based solution A connected floodplain with a robust riparian vegetation community is more resilient to stressors including drought, wildfire, and flooding. These connected floodplains play a vital role in increasing the quality and quantity of water. Since 2021, the NFF has used low-tech, process-based restoration to restore more than 45 acres of riparian habitat on Trail Creek, above Crested Butte, Colorado. These efforts have attracted beavers to continue the work.

The Colorado River Supports:

5M+ 16M

acres of farmland

jobs across the west

$26B $1.4T

in outdoor economy

annual economic activity

40M 30

people in the U.S. and Mexico Federallyrecognized Tribal nations

780K+ homes powered by hydro

Photo by Eli Smith

National Forests comprise less than 20 percent of the land in the Colorado River Basin, they contribute more than 60 percent of CHEYENNE the river’s water.

The NFF added 316 structural treatments to address ecosystem degradation. DENVER

Photo by Ecometrics

AD OR IV E

TRAIL CREEK

L CO

The Colorado River runs 1,450 miles from Colorado’s Never Summer Mountains to the Sea of Cortez.

The NFF’s project on Trail Creek restored 1.4 miles of degraded stream corridor.

LOS ANGELES

National Forests Watershed

National Forests Need You. We need National Forests. They provide millions of Americans in thousands of communities with water every year to live, play, and work. But National Forests also need us. The National Forest Foundation, our partners, and our supporters are engaged in critical work restoring watersheds, revitalizing riparian ecosystems, and rebuilding recreation infrastructure on public lands across the country. Will you join us in protecting these incredible landscapes? Here is how you can get involved: Follow the NFF on social media to get the latest updates on our projects.

Sign-up for Tree-Mail™ and receive news and more straight to your inbox.

Visit nationalforests.org/ volunteer to get involved on your local National Forest.

Become a donor to ensure the health of public lands for future generations.

nationalforests.org Olympic National Forest, Washington. Photo by Aidan Yu