Squid eggs and harlequin ducks are the latest signs of renewed life on the beach at the mouth of the Elwha River. They have only recently returned, some three years after the completion of the largest dam removal in the world.
The Elwha is now free-flowing through Olympic National Park into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. And it has been quickly returning the sediment that had been held back by two dams for nearly a century.
The transformation of the beach is striking. It’s gone from an inhospitable, hard and cobbled shore where you could easily sprain an ankle to a much wider, soft and sandy expanse where all kinds of creatures love to spend time.
“It’s such a beautiful place, you know, this beach, this nearshore,” said marine biologist Anne Shaffer. “It’s so captivating, and with just a few images you really can give people a powerful sense of what all has happened here.”
Shaffer has had her eye on that nearshore since long before dam removal began. She runs the Coastal Watershed Institute in Port Angeles and regularly sends out a newsletter with pictures that illustrate the dramatic transformation that has happened here. She’s a newly-minted PhD from the University of Victoria, but says her career-long fascination with the nearshore began during her childhood.
“The prettiest places were always the shallow places, the tide pools, the little...places where you could go and get wet and not worry about drowning,” she said.
That fascination propelled her into graduate studies, where she discovered the forest-like qualities of kelp systems in the underwater habitat of the nearshore.
“It started with just the beauty of it,” Shaffer says of the towers of kelp, often referred to as ‘cathedrals.’
“And then studying it, the ecosystem function, it became pretty apparent early on that they’re extremely complex places,” she said.
Her interest expanded from kelp to entire nearshore systems, including how humans interact with the shoreline.
Her focus on the Elwha nearshore predates the dam removal by more than a decade. But it has recently come into the spotlight as the dramatic transformation of the beach illustrates the benefits of ecosystem restoration.
“So it’s really gratifying now,” she says, “to actually have it be the poster child for the project.”
A recent visit to the beach at the mouth of the Elwha did not disappoint. With sunshine, a light breeze and the Olympic Mountains as a backdrop, the river ran high, full of green-grey snowmelt meeting soft sediments along the shoreline. Harlequin ducks and sleeping gulls decorated the beach in the distance.
The wide expanses of soft sand have only returned after dam removal ended in September 2014.
“There was approximately 20 million cubic meters of material that was held back by the dams that was estimated to be liberated into the watershed,” Shaffer said. “So we’ve had about three years now of sediment that’s been delivered to the river and out to the shoreline. And we’ve seen a dramatic transformation on the shoreline with the delivery of that sediment.”
It quickly built up new areas of the beach, which had been steep, full of coarse rocks and very inhospitable to fish.
Shaffer says the dams had put a chokehold on the whole ecosystem.
“It could be the equivalent of blood to a system,” she said. “And without that, the habitat started to erode. Our estuaries went from being very complex and large to being simplified and reduced and coarsened.”
As the river flows freely and sediment moves into place, it rebuilds habitat that a wide range of species depend on. Those include basic building blocks at the bottom of the food chain, like forage fish, surf smelt, sand lance, herring and squid.
Shaffer says this local ecosystem isn’t just good news for the Salish Sea.
“You know, it’s our entire region that depends on it,” she said. “It’s all a very important component to where we live, not just a lovely beach.”
And the transformation will continue. The dams were in the river for about 100 years. Shaffer says we’re really only about six years into a centurylong restoration.
And it’s all new. This is the first time a project of this scale has been done.
“So I think we were all shocked at how rapidly things change. But the restoration isn’t over. It’s going to take I would bet decades before the quote-un-quote ‘restoration’ phase ends,” Shaffer said.
Reading List
Anne Shaffer's suggested readings:
- Karen Martin. Beach Spawning Fishes: Reproduction in an Endangered Ecosystem. CRC. 2014.
- Colin Levings. Ecology of Salmon in Estuaries Around the World. UBC Press. 2016.
- Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., J. Andrew G. Cooper. The Last Beach. Duke University Press. 2014.