QUARTZ CREEK, Lane County, Ore. — As the restoration worker dipped a metal wand into the water — ZAP! — fish in this part of the creek were a bit stunned from an electric current. All the easier to net and scoop them into buckets.
Rainbow trout, sculpin, Pacific giant salamander, cutthroat trout. Everybody, out!
These workers were part of an expansive restoration project on the McKenzie River, relocating these fish and other aquatic life alive and thrashing, from the tributary creek to the mainstem.
The idea here is to create prime habitat, as work proceeds to remake this creek more like it used to be, in an effort to help native species and revive river health and boost water quality as the Northwest sees higher temperatures and drought.
Called “Stage 0,” or valley reset, this method is one of the more extreme versions of the so-called slow-water movement in river restoration. In these approaches, the goal is to reset rivers altered by agriculture, dams, logging and other development. Simplified to a single channel, running beneath the grade of their natural flood plain, damaged rivers become fast, downcutting streams of water.
Heavy equipment is used to regrade the entire valley floor, and cut down river banks to raise up the water, reconnecting the river with its flood plain and reactivating relic side channels. Suddenly, high dry banks are wet again. Lots and lots of logs, root wads — all kinds of dead and downed wood are also added to the flow.
Then the river spreads out. Slows down. Digs pools and stacks gravel bars. Meanders into rills, riffles over rocks and makes hidey-holes under logs. It, in other words, does what rivers naturally do.
Here on Quartz Creek, a suite of partners — the local utility district, the Eugene Water and Electric Board, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Forest Service and local nonprofits — are all working together.
This is restoration on a big, bold scale. “We salmon biologists don’t have a clue what a functioning riverscape looks like because they are all gone,” said Chris Jordan, a NOAA research fish biologist, based in Newport, Ore., touring the restoration on a recent spring day. That is because today many rivers are basically water running in a ditch, Jordan said.
“People don’t like it when I say that,” Jordan said. “But nature in the raw is suffering all the ills we have imposed on it for the last 150 years.” But give the river back its flood plain, and it wets the land once more. “The water remembers,” Jordan said. Fighting words, for people who want their rivers to stay put, and their land to stay dry.
The way Jordan sees it, though, land has been stolen from the river for our purposes, and true restoration involves giving it back, and allowing the river to resume its natural processes of flooding, receding, meandering and wandering in the treated area.
Low and slow
On the south fork of the McKenzie, the results of a “Stage 0” restoration completed in 2019 are becoming visible. Water cold and clear eased down the channel, spread wide and slow. Water skeeters etched the surface of quiet pools; a kingfisher prattled on a log. Ducklings swirled in a back eddy and baby fish schooled and darted. It was a dreamy world, all dapples and riffles and easy current.
There were dead, downed logs everywhere, a horizontal forest of dead trees. Shrubs were sprouting in the rot, and everywhere the banks were crowding with willow and cottonwood, where the river had wet the flood plain.
This was the idea, to create meanders, pools, side-channels, heaps of wood and complexity in every direction, vertically in the water column, and horizontally across the channel. Nothing was barreling through this river, it was too full of wood, vegetation, gravel bars, pools, holes and meanders for that. There were rills, pools and ponds in a connected riverscape — this was not a single flow in one channel.
Caddis flies trundled in their cases on the soft bottom, and a sandpiper worked the bank. There were so many greens, even the rocks were alive with periphyton, the nutritious fuzz of algae that feeds the little things on the river bottom that feed everything else.
It’s not perfect. Anywhere managers try this method, there had better be a plan to deal with vegetation on the banks once they are wetted: Jordan scowled at a thick mat of invasive reed canary grass deeply rooted across the channel, effectively stealing the opportunity for native plants to grow.
Treated reaches also are hard to monitor. Unlike a single channel that lends itself to a fish trap or even sonar fish counting, where to begin in such a complex system?
But so far, the fish seem to be voting with their tummies: a 2025 scientific paper found the project in the South Fork McKenzie is resulting in flood plain fatties: nice long juvenile Chinook taking advantage of higher quality juvenile habitat conditions, with lower velocities and depths and more cover.
And Jordan noted there are more dense concentrations of Chinook redds counted by the Oregon Department of Fish Wildlife per river mile in this section of the McKenzie than elsewhere on the river.
“They are voting with their stomachs, and with their eggs,” Jordan said of the fish. That is the kind of change that boosts survival, and can turn salmon populations around toward recovery, Jordan said.
Skeptics and converts
The lack of published science on the effect of these types of projects in a still relatively new method is one of the controversies around valley reset as a restoration technique. “I don’t think the science is really there, that is the big question,” said Tim Abbe, a geomorphologist whose work regionally has included building log jams in the Lower Elwha River to help bring back more of a natural reconnection of that river with its forest and flood plain.
“It’s impressive, I like what I have seen,” said Abbe, who has toured all the McKenzie River projects. He hopes valley reset won’t prove just a fad, and that monitoring and scientific rigor can prove out the promise of the method. “It needs to continue to get vetted. It’s happening faster than our science is evaluating it.”
One of the questions is the durability of the restorations, he noted. Where are the big trees, the forested islands and forested banks to grow up and fall in the river, to keep the complexity going? How is the wood placed in the channel stabilized so it doesn’t just rinse out in a big flood — or bash and crash human structures such as bridges if logs are mobilized?
Sherri Johnson, a retired stream ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station in Corvallis for 25 years, said she would like to see more scientific rigor as well.
“It is going to take a while before we know how effective it is,” she added. “I look at this and say, it will be interesting to see what happens in 10 years, in 15 years, what happens in a 100-year flood?”
On Quartz Creek, the project partners are all in. The dirt was flying and dump trucks lumbering as the valley floor was being rebuilt.
John Trimble, restoration projects manager for the McKenzie River Trust, a nonprofit conservation group based in Eugene, said the goal was to raise the elevation of the creek 6 to 9 feet, so the creek could once again flood its banks. It doesn’t top its banks anymore, he said of the creek. “But by August, it will.”
The restoration is intended to help the creek recover. The stream was channelized, and the watershed above the creek was largely clear-cut and burned. That caused flash floods, a murky muddy mess that moved most of the logs the river needs out of the watershed, with little being deposited in the channel, Trimble said.
“We are trying to give it that jump start, to reset the river across the valley.” He is invested in the project’s success, not only on behalf of the land trust, but because he and other Eugene Water and Electric Board customers drink the water from this river.
Reconnecting the river with its flood plain and slowing it down is hoped to help cleanse and recharge its flows, and to boost the health of the watershed.
“It is all interconnected,” he said.
