Sensitive soils typically have excess water in the soil profile for at least part of the growing season. 

 Roads on sensitive soils collect water in the ditches, and are more likely to have small cutslope failures 

 associated with the roads than where they are built on non-sensitive soils. When sensitive soils are 

 disturbed by management activities such as road building or timber harvest the water can seep out of 

 the soil and onto the roads, ditches, skid trails, or landings where it moves quickly down slope. Water 

 that would have moved slowly to a stream through the soil profile is now quickly routed to a stream. 

 This efficient routing of water increases water yields, as well as increasing the risk of sedimentation 

 from the areas of rutted soil, and/or the road ditches. There are 50.3 miles of roads and 3532 acres of 

 past timber management activities on sensitive soils within the Big Creek basin. 



Historic Watershed Rehabilitation Projects in Big Creelt 



There has been a series of watershed rehabilitation projects done by the Forest Service in the past 

 twenty-five years. The logging that occurred on the private lands in upper Big Creek (sections 19, 20, 

 23, and 24) during the late 1960s early 1970s resulted in many sediment sources that were actively 

 eroding into Big Creek. When the Forest Service acquired those lands through land exchanges, a 

 series of erosion control practices were applied to eroding non-vegetated site associated with the past 

 logging. Erosion control practices such as waterbars, grass seeding, and shrub planting were applied 

 on sites where some improvement could be expected. The following page has a series of three 

 photograph pairs showing the recovery that has occurred on some sites since the logging. Refer to 

 photographs 1 thru 6. 



Spruce trees killed by spruce-beetle in the 1960s, were removed from riparian zones along portions of 

 the Big Creek, as part of the early timber management activities. This riparian harvest reduced or 

 eliminated the number of trees available to be recruited into the stream channel as large woody debris. 

 Large woody debris helps to control the gradient of the stream, dissipate stream energy, and acts as 

 sediment traps within the stream. For the three field seasons during the 1990s, woody debris has been 

 added to some of the headwater streams of Big Creek, including Skookoleel Creek. The goal was to 

 help trap bedload that is currently stored behind woody debris that are beginning to root and fail. 

 Retention of this bedload in the headwaters will help prevent pool filling in downstream fish habitat. 

 Pools are critical for over-winter rearing, resting, and feeding areas for fish. 



There were 34 acres of upland eroding areas, such as rills and small gullies stabilized by filling them 

 with woody debris, and/or waterbarred by a Montana Conservation Corps crew during July 1997 field 

 season. 



There has been 1 7 miles roads reclaimed in the past few years in upper Big Creek and Skookoleel 

 Creek. Also, there were approximately 4,950 shrubs planted in 2000 and 2001 on eroding upland sites 

 and along streambanks. 



The additional proposed restoration work is described in a later section. 



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