Cispus-Yellowjacket Phase 3 Restoration

The completed Cispus-Yellowjacket Phase III project site was located south of Randle, Washington, in eastern Lewis County, adjacent to the Cispus Learning Center, and outdoor education facility that hosts kindergarten through 12th-grade students year-round. PCSRF funding was combined with funds provided by Tacoma Power Utilities, and the Washington Recreation and Conservation Office (RCO).

The Cowlitz Indian Tribe, in partnership with the USDA Forest Service, restored salmon and steelhead habitat by building 25 in-stream structures, stabilized two natural logjams and added 200 extra pieces of large wood within the floodplain roughness structures, within the 1,900 lineal feet of the main stem Cispus River and Yellowjacket Creek. These logjam additions have resulted in the creation of new pools, sorted gravels, increased floodplain forest succession, and provided cover for adult and juvenile fish. The Cispus River engineered logjam structures were positioned and placed to split flows and created a multi-thread channel within the depositional mouth of Yellowjacket Creek. These structures remained stable throughout a range of flows, and provide excellent complex rearing habitat benefitting spring Chinook, winter steelhead, and coho. Tribe staff and Cascade Forest Conservancy installed hundreds of locally adapted native trees and shrubs in the surrounding floodplains and accelerated the recovery of the riparian corridor, previously disturbed during construction.

To prevent double-counting, the habitat metrics were roughly halved between the PCSRF and RCO PRISM databases. The PCSRF metrics include 12 structures in 950 lineal feet of main stem Cispus and Yellowjacket creek.

The Cispus-Yellowjacket Phase 3 Restoration project includes actions that will alter physical habitat conditions to form a resilient, forested floodplain island network, increase side channel habitat, improve instream habitat diversity, increase wood loading, increase pool area and residual depth, generally increasing the quantity and quality of holding, spawning, and rearing habitat throughout the project reach. We expect these changes to drive biological outcomes including increased spawning success and improved juvenile survival rates for listed salmon and steelhead populations.



Contractors will install 18 large engineered logjams in the main stem Cispus River and Yellowjacket Creek. These logjams replicate conditions expected in unmanaged watersheds, restoring habitat-forming processes at the site scale. This will provide cool, shaded rearing habitat for juvenile salmon and steelhead year-round.



Since the Cispus is now relatively protected by Forest Service management, we anticipate progressive improvement in habitat-forming processes over time. Left alone, however, this reach would require hundreds of years to regain its structure and function. This project will jumpstart the recovery process, providing the stream channel structure lost through over a century of human interference.