It’s a funny thing…it took 4 years of permits, meetings and politics to get the Stanislaus River gravel restoration project off the ground and only 4 weeks to complete the actual work. We’re just about done renovating the 2-mile stretch of river we’ve been working on this month and it looks fantastic. With a gazillion tons of gravel and over 100 boulders in the 2- to 7-ton size range, this year’s fall run of Chinook salmon will have some stellar new habitat to call home.

Here’s a before photo of one of the spots we’ve rehabed:

And then the after picture…lots of good spawning gravel, some nice holding water and perfect flow!

Read on to see some other cool photos…

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As you know, I’ve been working with KDH Environmental over the past several weeks to help restore gravel spawning beds for chinook salmon on the Stanislaus River. Things have been going exceptionally well and the 2-mile stretch of river we’ve been on has undergone an amazing transformation. We’re getting close to being finished…here’s a little sneak peak at some of the stuff we’ve been up to.

Here’s a picture of a side channel on the backside of an island before we started cleaning it up:

And here’s what it’s looking like now:

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As I noted earlier, I’m currently working as a consultant with KDH Environmental on a salmon spawning riffle restoration project.

You can go back and read earlier posts, but in a nutshell here’s the deal: The Stanislaus, because of New Melones, Goodwin and Tulloch dams, doesn’t receive new gravel every winter to replace the stuff that washes out in high water. Because of that, the river’s turned into a gravel-free ditch with little suitable spawning habitat for the river’s wild chinook salmon population, which dwindled down to just a couple hundred fish in the 1990’s.

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We began work today on Northern California’s Stanislaus River to build several Chinook salmon spawning riffles and juvenile holding areas.

The gravel restoration work is being done by Dennis Hood of KDH Environmental, for whom I’m working as a consultant, and should give the river, which is a tributary to California’s San Joaquin River, a huge shot in the arm from a fishery enhancement standpoint.

Several riffles were built in the river’s upper reaches some years back and they helped bring the wild Chinook population back from near extinction (the run was down to something 200 fish) to a run that now numbers anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 fish annually.

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