Wetlands witchery: project works to steady meandering river

Likening it to an out-of-control firehose, the Satsop River has spent the last hundred years unanchored by old-growth trees and firm banks, allowing it to whip all over the valley south of Satsop, undercutting banks and threatening farms and buildings.

A long-planned Grays Harbor Conservation District project to reinforce those banks and, using the tools nature herself uses, firm up the course of the river is underway right now, aiming for completion by August, said Anthony Waldrop, the watershed restoration program manager.

“There’s been planning and collaboration since 2018 with a whole bunch of different stakeholders,” Waldrop said in an interview at the work site. “This project design started in 2020.”

“The goal is to get the functions back to where this river moves and create habitat on its own without destroying farmland and businesses,” Waldrop said. “We’re creating this corridor that the Satsop River is allowed to be wild, essentially, and do its things.”

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