One summer, many years ago while I was still in graduate school, we rented a car and traveled through the hills and valleys of Scotland. It was a wonderful trip, we met the very best people, stayed in farmhouses, explored abandon castles and ate some amazing food. One particular unplanned afternoon we were driving southwest of Edinburg looking for a ruined castle we were never able to find and got briefly lost in the outskirts of what looked to be miserable industrial town where we were STUNNED to a street sign that said

“Dunbar Scotland, Twinned with Martinez, CA”

Of course we later realized that Dunbar is the birthplace of John Muir, Martinez being his last home. Since then our two cities have since strengthened their ties in many ways – in fact in my last year on the JMA board some members took a trip to visit his birthplace and original stomping grounds. But that morning, when we felt so far away and beyond the reach of everything it was just a surprise.

Now I’m starting to think Martinez is twinned with Missoula too.

Ninemile Creek, straightened by gold miners, restored by humans and beavers

NINEMILE — On what he called “a scenic death march through the bomb zone,” Paul Parson cheerfully pointed out how looks can deceive in the stream restoration business.

The results of some million-dollar-a-mile geoengineering looked suspiciously like a toddler was at the controls of the bulldozer. Every tree for 50 feet on either side of the little creek was knocked over. Scraggly willow shoots poked out of No-Man’s-Land rock piles. Weird reddish-orange scum floated on stranded ponds.

“When I saw that, I panicked,” said Parson, who oversaw the restoration project for Trout Unlimited.

The project was supposed to restore 7,000 feet of stream bed that had been forced into an artificial channel by gold miners a century before. He called a consultant, certain that mine waste was leaking into the watercourse intended to host trout. She informed him that no, it was a kind of bacteria that only grows in places returning to natural conditions.

For much of the early 20th Century, this creek drainage west of Missoula crawled with gold miners using pressure hoses and dredging machines to gouge their way 20 feet down to the bed of Glacial Lake Missoula, where deposits of raw gold had accumulated.

That’s a nice story about a damaged creek being fixed, but how is it like Martinez? Don’t worry, it gets better.

NWF saw an opportunity to showcase some natural restoration methods, specifically the engineering prowess of beavers. Former Ninemile District Ranger Greg Munther had done extensive beaver transplanting in the drainage during his tenure in the 1980s and 90s. Some careful stream grading could encourage those remaining beavers to add their efforts.

But that required overcoming a lot of misperceptions about beavers. Lewis and Clark hadn’t even made it back east to St. Louis in 1806 with their report of the Voyage of Discovery when they met beaver trappers heading west. Barely 50 years later, almost all the beaver in the West were trapped out.

The remainder got constant bad reps from cattle ranchers who dried their ponds for grazing pasture, farmers who hated their meddling with irrigation canals, anglers who thought their dams prevented fish from moving around, and road builders who thought they created unnecessary drainage problem

Better biology dismissed all those concerns. Beaver ponds do take up grazing space, but they also keep cattle from degrading stream banks and promote a much wider range of plant and tree growth. The ponds actually make refuges for many species of fish, which have evolved for eons to move through them in summer and survive ice scouring in winter. As for giardia, many animals including domestic dogs can infect a waterway with the intestinal parasite, and municipal water systems have to treat for it whether the water comes from a surface or underground source.

Beavers do mess with irrigation systems and present road construction challenges. But both can be overcome inexpensively. Meanwhile, the benefits they provide turn out to be stupendous.

Don’t you love that paragraph? If this is all sounding a little familiar, don’t worry: it should! We talked about this project a while back when Sarah Koenigsberg’s film debuted and the National Wildlife Federation did such a good job promoting the story of beaver benefits by holding some community discussions.

Trout Unlimited researcher Christine Brissette studied the Ninemile water flows before and after the stream restoration and beaver activity occurred. She found more natural floodplains, enhanced by beaver ponds, stored much more water and kept tons of sediment out of the Clark Fork.

In late summer, when some parts of the stream had shrunk down to six cubic feet of water per second, the improved water storage added one more cubic foot of flow. That’s a 15 percent addition that would have been lost to spring runoff, but instead was keeping fish alive in late August.

“Without it, the streams were going dry,” Brissette said. “This allows them to connect to the river below. It was really exciting to see that it works.”

Yes it is exciting to see what a difference beavers make. And we’re glad you were there to document it even if people will forget again in three months or three years. Just like Martinez forgot how many baby ducks and turtles we used to have in our creek when the beaver dams flourished. These things come in waves, and we’re in a fine one right now. Interestingly, Jon and I are seeing more ducks fly into and out of the creek upstream where the beavers are living now. And the other day we found a huge broken duck egg in the park!

And besides this great article by Rob Chaney, how else and Martinez and Missoula twinned? The west coast premiere of Sarah’s film is just two weeks away.