Are you suggesting this slide would have happened whether this land was clearcut or not?

I surely could have! If you drive up hood canal you will see numerous slides like this but they were on ground with timber on it...The weather we had set us up for this...

The immediately troubling part is the high load of fine sediments. Not that the Halis is a traditionally clear river, but the clay type sediments are not the same river bottom sands/silts that we normally deal with. The river is not it's normal brown color, it is the same color as the slide in the picture. The plunkers are getting really itchy, and those fine sediments tend to carry a lot farther down the river (correct me if I am wrong). If that slide produces that kind of silt level on every rain event, fishing the main stem could be an issue for years to come. I hope they can do some kind of mitigation on that thing, this spring.

That sticky mud is coating everything in the river bottom. We have been cutting brush to blind the boat, and that sticky sh!t just coats everything. Turns a yellow lab into a chocolate lab before he even gets to fetch the first bird.

No Doubt Doc.....
Tier ZERO is on the way.

Peace
Fly

As in......almost no fish available, No harvest, no c-n-r, no season period?

Just want to understand the terminology. Sounds like Chehalis Sportfishing Advisory Group jargon.

Anyone surprized the road (on the left) sluffed off? Also, a slope like this should have a buffer at least twice what is shown IMHO.

Perhaps a better phrase would be; " Weyerhaeuser, The fish killing company."

Hans Mak

Timber
Fair enough....
How much timber was on the lands with slides, just little pencil trees or was there some adequate ground cover to prevent the water from really starting to run?

Just trying to understand

theres some decent sized timber that slid down on the hood canal..I just think with as much moisture as we had the ground was totaly saturated...Then as the pic above shows logging that didnt help but who's to say there wouldnt have been a slide even if the timber was there? Look at the slide up in the left corner of the pic it looks like it took a bunch of timber down with it..

Seen it on the news the other night.Sad.Good luck,
STRIKE ZONE

Who wants to start Golfing! I can get us Tee times at Pebble Beach and Spanish Bay! For a mere $350.00 for 18 and no cart!

Those slopes are greater than 100%. Any soil short of rock is unstable at that degree of slope. Soil like that is classified as unstable, highly unstable when disturbed. As long as it had forest cover, it was only unstable, and that probably allowed it to survive prior events. Highly unstable and more than 14" of rain, and the real miracle is that some of the hill didn't slide.

BTW, I was on the upper Chehalis today. The SF definitely has more red to it, although the mainstem is still like a mocha latte. A lot of small creeks that should have cleared by now are still very silty and turbid. Many houses totaled. I stopped by a friend's house; she got just over a foot of water inside. After she gets it dried out, new insulation, floors, and lower sheetrock and it will be livable again. The river left her about a 10 year supply of firewood in the yard and from zero to almost two feet of silt on the field and garden.

I saw that and read the article and it is bad. Could it be that the State was quick to sign off to keep jobs in economically depressed Lewis County?

Timber is right, these slides could have occured with or without tree cover. The rain we had was unbelievable. Any steep slope was at risk to sliding with the right soil and drainage conditions. Clearcutting obviously increases the risk by increasing the intensity of the runoff. The roots are still there to hold the soil together, but the water is not slowed down by the tree cover so it flows over and through the ground at a faster rate.... Personally I'm sick of seeing the places I grew up fishing logged with what seems like little respect for anything.

That unit looks like it was sprayed with a defoliant and it left the ground with zero vegitation. I'll bet it would have held up better had it not been sprayed. When it comes to handling rain fall its like a bare dirt lot vs. a healthy lawn. You know which won is going to have more erosion. I think the defoliant is a bad deal. The seedlings don't need bare ground in able to grow. Besides that the chemical of choice seems to be Garlon, a cousin to the defoliants used in Vietnam. The say it's harmless to fish, but its metabolites have been shown to cause coho to become disoriented, unable to protect themselves from predators or even find their way back to their native streams.

It's legal in the U.S. They tried to start using it up in Canada but the locals in the area where they were going to start using it freaked and the forestry people ended up not using it. I think they started using it very quietly here in the US. Google "Garlon" and you will find plenty of info on it.

I've often wondered the same thing about the fertilizer that Weyco applies. Few years back I was Elk hunting in the area of the photo and a helecopter flew over with fertilizer (I think?) spewing from the bucket. I was standing creekside and It felt like it was hailing. The product totaly covered the ground and did'nt even come close to missing the creek. What did that do to the water quality?