The Teanaway watershed is within the Ceded Territories of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. The Treaty of 1855 preserved the Yakama Nation’s right to hunt, fish, and gather throughout the Ceded and Usual and Accustomed use areas. The Teanaway plays an important role in the seasonal round of food, with abundant roots, berries and wildlife. The mission of Yakama Nation Fisheries is “To honor, protect and restore Nch'i-Wána [the Columbia River], its tributaries and its resources for the benefit of current and future generations of the Yakama people as reserved by them in the Treaty of1855”. Restoration of ecosystem processes will ultimately lead to harvestable salmon populations in the Teanaway watershed, which will benefit the Yakama people.
The 80-square-mile Teanaway Community Forest (TCF) was purchased in 2013 for $100 million, as the crown jewel of the Yakima Basin Integrated Water Plan. The TCF makes up approximately 34% of the entire Teanaway watershed. The Teanaway was the first Community Forest in Washington State. Lawmakers directed WDNR to manage the property in consultation with WDFW as the first state-run community forest under the terms of a 2011 law emphasizing community participation in forest management. The Forest aims to protect and enhance the water supply and protect the watershed; to conserve and restore vital habitat for fish, including steelhead, spring Chinook, and bull trout; and to support a strong community partnership in which the Yakama Nation, residents, business owners, local governments, conservation groups, and others provide advice about ongoing land management.
The TCF contains nearly 400 miles of free-flowing streams, but is severely impacted by a history of beaver trapping, fire suppression, heavy grazing and logging facilitated by splash dams, railroads and roads. Despite this legacy, 28-40% of the entire Upper Yakima steelhead population spawns in the Teanaway watershed each year. This project will address four of those goals from the TCF Management Plan (2015): Water Supply & Watershed Protection; Fish & Wildlife Habitat; Working Lands - Forest Health; and Community Partnerships. The Fish and Aquatic Restoration Strategy for the Teanaway Community Forest (2017) includes the following as priority projects in the West and Middle Fork Teanaway Rivers: reconnect mainstem floodplains, remove or recontour anthropogenic fill, riparian revegetation where proper soils exist, and large wood replenishment.
Teanaway Community Forest Aquatic Restoration
The Teanaway River Basin is a cradle of biodiversity and a hub of human activity in the Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area, a 1.5-million-acre landscape that has sustained and nourished life for millennia.
The Teanaway is a place revered by generations of people who have witnessed the harmonious coexistence of nature and human ingenuity. The river’s banks, though brimming with camas blooms, wildlife, and the rhythmic flow of wood, have been altered over time by settlers. The advent of logging and railroads, while symbols of innovation, brought unforeseen consequences, removing necessary wood from the river. Techniques like splash damming reshaped the river’s course, stripping it down to bedrock and disrupting the ecological balance.
The journey to fully restore the Teanaway River is a long one, estimated between 20 to 50 years—but it's just a fraction of the time it took for the habitat to degrade, and it's all being done through partnership. The watershed-scale project will achieve long-term sustainability by restoring natural and physical watershed and riverine processes. To meet project goals as efficiently as possible, the project partners have worked with an experienced river design team, Natural Systems Design, to design the correct work elements in the correct locations. As stream power acts upon the large wood and alluvium returned to the river, new channels will form, gravels will sort, and beavers and riparian forests will set the stage for future in-stream wood recruitment. The river will become more dynamic and productive as time passes. YN will monitor vegetative response (a proxy for floodplain connection) and topographic change through time following infrequent flood events. Yakama Nation recently acquired a multispectral camera for aerial mapping exercises. This camera will allow confidence in monitoring vegetative response (NDVI) through time. In addition, repeat drone flights can track changes in channel morphology over time with high accuracy and precision, as previously done on the NF Teanaway work. Thanks to advancing technologies, geomorphic change detection and repeat hydraulic modeling can be used with LIDAR flights to quantify erosion and deposition and estimate inundation, velocity, and depth changes as natural processes take over. WDFW has more than 20 years of Viable Salmonid Population monitoring, which will continue, that includes Oncorhyncus mykiss (rainbow trout/steelhead) annual population estimates at index sites in the West Fork Teanaway. These data will help us understand how the population responds through time as a result of the project.
North Fork Teanaway
The North Fork Teanaway Large Woody Debris project was completed in 2022. There are many more opportunities in this fork of the Teanaway to bring the native assemblage back!
Middle Fork Teanaway
Middle Fork of the Teanway is projected to begin restoration work in 2026. With two distinct reaches near the confluence and the 2 miles below Dingbat Creek confluence. For more information please see below!
West Fork Teanaway
This project will work at RM 5.2-8.0 in the West Fork of the Teanaway. Construction is slated to begin in 2025 and will include berm removal, large woody material placement, and re-engage side channels. For more information click below!
There are many techniques for restoring a river and giving it the tools to become healthier, so restoration projects need to consider where restoration—and which types of restoration—will have the most impact. The Teanaway Basin is the largest undammed headwaters to the Yakima River, and with over 400 miles of streams and rivers in the Community Forest, it’s a key location for watershed and habitat conservation because of both its size and its importance to endangered steelhead trout and sSpring Chinook. In the Teanaway Community Forest, restoration work has already taken on multiple forms.
Since the TCF was created in 2013, the land managers have worked to decommission two thirds of the logging roads that crisscross the landscape, preventing 190 tons of fine sediment from running off into the rivers each year. At the TCF’s 10 Year Celebration, Phil Rigdon with the Yakama Nation noted that the rivers, which once ran brown every time the Teanaway flooded, now flow crystal clear. But it’s not just the decommissioning of roads that’s cleaned up the water.
After years of careful planning, in 2019 the Yakama Nation, collaborating agencies, and Mid-Columbia Fisheries Enhancement Group began restoring the degraded streams and floodplains in the Teanaway with large woody material projects, beginning with the North Fork area. These efforts are coordinated with Tribal cultural resources programs, archaeologists, and land managers to ensure compliance with Federal and State Laws that protect archaeological resources and sacred sites.
Engineers and scientists chose sites along the North Fork Teanaway River and its tributaries to place woody material, considering where reconnecting a floodplain would rejuvenate the most habitat and water storage and how project design could affect downstream neighbors. Between 2019 and 2021, the TCF partners worked to restore natural river processes along four miles of the North Fork by placing a series of 10 large engineered wood structures, 25 splitters/deflectors, and 2000 loose wood pieces, making it one of the largest projects of this type in the Pacific Northwest.
The wood was incorporated into in-stream structures resembling old growth root wads to capture gravels and create habitat; partially buried and stacked as diversions for side channels; and placed freely so that the river could rearrange them as it sees fit. Many of the logs were sourced from local fire-wising and forest health thinning projects. Often times, these logs were placed by helicopters working with teams on the ground!