Oregon Hikers

justpeachy wrote: ↑

October 11th, 2020, 6:47 am

Wow, they were planning to do thinning up Fish Creek? They decommissioned the entire road network up there after the 1996 floods so I wonder how they were planning to accomplish that. Rebuild the roads?

I heard that hiking up the old decommissioned Fish Creek Road was getting pretty challenging because of the brush. Now brush won't be the problem but hundreds of burned fallen snags.

I had not heard there were any thinning plans either. It was amazing how well nature was reclaiming that area and it was getting more challenging to hike due to all the brush. It will probably be essentially impassable now, especially with the soil instability. I'm sure there will be LOTS of slides this winter due to the lack of vegetation.

On the topic of this thread - Memaloose lake appears to have mostly missed serious damage. Looks like a bit of higher severity areas but the lake itself looks mostly untouched. South Fork Mountain and beyond is a different story, however. That looks to mostly high intensity burn.

I'm wondering if there is going to be a call for large scale salvage logging followed by replanting?

That’s great to hear Memaloose Lake itself was spared!
The Fishery Biologist for MT NF gave a presentation last January to Clackamas River Trout Unlimited, he said the logging company who won the bid would build/repair the roads needed to do the thinning in the Fish Creek area, his main concern is the geology in that area is vulnerable to slides.
From what he said they we’re definitely putting in the time to find the least susceptible areas to build the necessary roads.
With the fire I’d imagine there’ll be a change of plans.

Some good news he said the native steelhead runs have been improving in the upper Clackamas do to the recent work PGE and ODFW have done also the Bull Trout, they reintroduced around 10 years ago, have moved a fair amount throughout the system they did a eDNA sample on the Roaring River near the mouth and it contained Bull Trout dna, and one that was tagged went below the NF damn then came back up.

It is hard to tell, but I might have been a bit hasty with my "Memaloose lake survived" statement. It is hard to tell from the burn maps - here is the trail overlaid on one of the burn severity maps: You can see the trail definitely goes thru a least one high severity burn area on the west side of the lake. I'm thinking the campsites there are probably toast. It is hard to tell on the approach coming in what the severity of the burn is. It kind of looks like a bunch of red, but I can't tell - there is also some yellow, so that is moderate intensity burn for sure. The one place the looks unaffected (or at least limited effect) is the south side of the lake.

I guess no one will really know until we are able to get back up there, which almost certainly won't be until at least next year.