We gathered on the sunny side of the river for warmth, but
down in the canyon, the winter sun wasn’t much help. Danielle
Henderson, resource specialist for the Truckee River Flood project, was
there to meet me and five Environmental Studies majors to teach us
about the restoration work on the river east of town.
Like most rivers, the Truckee is subject to regular floods, some of
them catastrophic. Not only do the floods come from weather events like
a “pineapple express” storm system, but where the river
flows through the mountains east of Sparks, there is a scarp of basalt
known by various names such as “Vista shoals” or
“Vista break,” where the water passes through a narrow
canyon and, in flood stage, often backs up into the meadows.
In the 1950s, the vision of the Army Corps of Engineers was to
engineer rivers into straighter and deeper channels—the idea
being that flood damage would be minimized if the water could move more
quickly. But the result of this effort was to drop the water table so
far down that whole riparian ecosystems began to suffer. Now we realize
that the original, meandering path of the rivers helped to absorb the
force of floodwaters, recharge water back into the ground table, and
provided whole habitats more able to withstand damage from things like
invasive noxious weeds.
At a Lockwood site, we could witness the effects of this new
approach to rivers—the formerly straightened river now flows in a
wide arc around an island forested with old cottonwoods. New cottonwood
saplings, staked and wrapped to help get off to a solid start, stood
along the southern shore, someday to shade the hiking trails and picnic
tables.
A few miles down the road we clambered up a rocky hill to get a view
of a Mustang site, another restoration project in process. This looked
more like an industrial construction site than an ecological
restoration—tractors, dredgers and front-loaders zoomed across
sculpted, barren hills—moving huge loads of dirt and rock into
place to reconstruct another historic meander in the river.
The amount of collaboration, research and design going into this
project is mind-boggling. Danielle assured us that each meander is
carefully designed to mirror historic river flows and that the
construction of them includes careful attention to healthy habitat
requirements of the native plant and animal life.
Stakeholders include the city of Reno, city of Sparks, Washoe
County, the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, and the Nature Conservancy. And
as impressive as the view was from the bluff over the Mustang site,
these projects are only the initial stages of a hoped-for collaboration
with the Corps of Engineers to rebuild our entire community’s
flood resilience, this time paying closer attention to the needs of our
healthy ecosystem, as well as the economic concerns of property
owners.
Our last stop took us to a view of the very first river restoration
project at McCarran Ranch. The tiny, historic ranch house sits in a
stand of tall cottonwoods. Beyond, new stands of willow and cottonwood
stood basking in the radiant sunlight. Danielle told us that these
stands had not only withstood the onslaught of the 2005 flood, but had
also begun to self-colonize and expand, demonstrating that the efforts
to bootstrap a healthy, self-sustaining ecosystem had indeed
worked.
Is there a message here about bootstrapping our economy and getting
ourselves back to work? If so, it might be something about paying
attention to the historic pathways and slowing down the flow.