User:Taylordw/sandbox/Big Beef Bay

Big Beef Creek is a river on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington State, about two miles east of the town of Seabeck. The mainstem of the river is 11 miles long, with an additional 24 miles of tributaries, draining an area of about 14 square miles. It is the largest river in the Big Beef-Anderson Subbasin of the Hood Canal watershed and the longest river contained entirely within Kitsap County. It is part of Washington State Department of Ecology Water Resource Inventory Area 15. Two important features of Big Beef Creek are Big Beef Bay, a tidal flat at the mouth of Big Beef Creek where the river empties into the Hood Canal, and Lake William Symington, an artificial lake on the river, built in 1965 as the recreational selling point for a housing development project.

Big Beef Creek is one of the most important salmon streams in the region. In the 1960s the University of Washington, School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (SAFS) purchased 400 acres, which includes the lower river and Big Beef Bay, and established the Big Beef Creek Field Research Station at the mouth of the river. Owing to the University presence, Big Beef Creek and Bay is one of the most intensely studied salmon estuaries in the world.

Big Beef Creek is a complicated assemblage of geological, ecological, social, legal and political forces; of fishery, forestry, recreation, transportation, residential, environmental protection and tribal treaty interests. It has alternately been adapted for human use and managed in a way intended to return it to a natural state. In these ways Big Beef Creek is, on a smaller scale, what Richard White has called the Columbia River: an "organic machine"; or as Emma Marris has termed similar environments, a "rambunctious garden".

Physical description
Rivers flowing into the Hood Canal from the Kitsap Peninsula to the east differ considerably from those flowing from the Olympic Peninsula from the west. Rivers on the Olympic Peninsula originate in the Olympic Mountains; thus their source is snowpack at high altitude. These rivers are colder, have steeper grades, are more likely to contain natural barriers such as falls and experience their highest flow rate during the spring snow melt. Rivers on the Kitsap Peninsula originate from headwaters in marshes fed by rainfall and spring water at lower elevations. Thus they are warmer, traverse less grade and have their highest rates of flow during the rainy season in late fall and winter.

From 1969 to 2012 the U.S. Geological Survey maintained a gauging station (#12069550) on the river.

Morgan Marsh


Big Beef Creek starts as a series of channels in several wetlands in the central Tahuya Peninsula, just west of the Blue Hills, including the area known as Morgan Marsh.

Big Beef Bay


The mouth of Big Beef Creek is on Big Beef Bay, sometimes also known as Big Beef Harbor. Originally the estuary was separated from the Hood Canal by a naturally dynamic spit. The spit and bay have been considerably altered by the construction in 1965 of the Seabeck Highway causeway.

History
In the 150 years since European descendants have settled the region, people have done significant damage to the stream and its salmon runs — logging the river riparian zone, channelizing the lower river, building the Hood Canal Bridge, the Seabeck Highway causeway, the Lake Symington dam and the Bangor Annex. None of these individually caused the salmon runs to become threatened or go extinct, but each contributed to the strain on the salmon. Ironically, research on the impact of each of these activities was a major source of our coming to understand the conditions necessary for salmon thriving. And that new understanding has lead to significant activities to restore this salmon habitat in recent years.

Twana Native Americans
The Hood Canal was populated by two groups of Native Americans: the Twana and the S'Klallam. The Twana inhabited the majority of the length of the Hood Canal and the S'Klallam primarily lived on the southern shore of Strait of Juan de Fuca from the Hoko River to Discovery Bay, but also resided in areas of the Hood Canal seasonally.

The primary social unit of the Twana people was the winter village. Winter villages usually included a longhouse, a potlatch and other smaller structures, and were located in places where there was abundant food resources – usually salmon streams – and natural protection from winter storms. Winter villages were occupied year-round, but in the summers, some members of the village would relocate to temporary, seasonal camps (kʷd’i·’l).

The Twana mantained permanent winter villages throughout the interrior of the Skokomish River valley on the north fork of the river, on Lake Cushman, and Vance Creek; on the Olympic Peninsular coast of the Hood Canal on the shores of Daybob Bay at the mouths of the Tarboo and Little Quilcene rivers, and the Finch, Duckabush and Dosewallips rivers; and on the Kitsap side at the mouths of the Big Mission and Tahuya rivers. Seasonal camps of both the Twana and S'Klallam were regular at Big Beef Bay as well as the Seabeck, Stavis, Anderson, Dewatto, Redsland, Shoofly and Union rivers on the Kitsap side of the Hood Canal and the Lilliwaup, Jorsted and Hamma Hamma rivers on the Olympic shore of the Canal.

There are two European-descendant chroniclers of Twana place names: T. T. Waterman, whose work was published in 1920; and William W. Elmendorf, who did the field work for his studies in the 1940s, unaware of the prior work of Waterman. They record different Twana place names – a not unusual occurrence owing to the fact that they worked with different people, with varying knowledge of the area, separated by twenty years' time.

Waterman records the Twana name for the tidal bay as Q!ɛtsak, which is a term said to refer to someone not having wiped himself after defecating. The river was called Sp!oa'lqo, or "flatus water". Elmendorf records a name, T’qa'tsa·d, which meant "splatter" or "splashing" and referred to both the bay and the river, but also the Lone Rock, a large rock on the Hood Canal intertidal about a half-a-mile north of the river mouth. Waterman records the Twana name of the Lone Rock as La'otaiyEqw, with no accompanying translation.

The current convention of Big Beef Bay and Little Beef Bay may derive from the Twana, in which Little Beef Bay was called Tatq!a'tsa, a diminutive of T’qa'tsa·d.

Big Beef Creek and Bay were part of the territory ceded to the U.S. Government in the Point No Point Treaty of 1855.

Early European settlement
Not much is known about the Big Beef Creek watershed prior to the settlement in 1886 of Peter Emel, Sr. (b. 25 December 1853, Ontario, Canada; d. 21 February 1924) and his family in Lone Rock.

The Emels began logging and dairy farming shortly after their arrival and it is believed that Big Beef Harbor and Creek, as well as Little Beef Bay and Creek were named as places where ships loaded and offloaded cattle.

Big Beef Bridge


When the Emel family arrived in 1886, the land rout from Silverdale to Seabeck was only a trail. He had to unhitch his oxen team so they could walk single-file and for parts of the way, the trail ran on the beach. As the population of the area grew, Emel proposed that bridges be built over both Big Beef and Little Beef creeks. The county commissioners approved the projects and Emel won the contract to supply the lumber and build the Little Beef Bridge. Little Beef Bridge was completed 4 July 1896 and construction was then started on Big Beef Bridge. The bridge was wooden planks on creosoted pilings with a four foot high railing. When it was completed, it was 16 feet wide and 1,170 feet long. The original bridge was used until 1916, when new pilings were driven and it was replanked. The bridge was rebuilt again in 1942. In 1965 the piling bridge was demolished and the existing causeway fill was constructed.

Part of the original Emel property today makes up the University of Washington, Big Beef Creek Field Research Station.

Logging of the old-growth forrest
Logging of the original old-growth forrest was accelerated by the establishment of Camp Union in 1920. Up until the 1940s, logs would be transported by truck to the river and rafted to Big Beef Harbor. In the 1940s and 1950s a portable sawmill was located on the Big Beef watershed, but its location is unknown today.

Lake Symington Dam


When the dam was originally built, it was designed by Whitacre Engineers, Inc. of Tacoma to the then current legal standard that it meet the 100-year flood design criteria: that it be able to withstand an amount of rainfall likely to happen once every hundred years.

A 1979 inspection by the Washington State Department of Ecology, Dam Safety Service and the Army Core of Engineers determined that the width of the entrance to the spillway and the curvature of the outflow ramp unacceptably limited the flow rate. In a major storm, the lake might overwhelm the spillway and overtop the embankment, leading to failure of the dam.

In 1985 the Washington State Legislature passed a bill allowing for the creation of lake management districts. This would allow the Lake Symington home owners association to assess residents a fee for upgrades to the dam spillway.

Saathoff et al. v. Kitsap County
In the heavy storms in the winter of 1994-95, the first winter after the reconfiguration of the Symington dam spillway, Big Beef Creek began to erode the bank along two properties fronting the river just below the dam, belonging to Navy family, Susan and Kevin Brown and their elderly neighbors, Ervin and Joanne Saathoff of 4185 and 4225 Redwing Trail NW, respectively.

When the Washington State Superior Court ruled Big Beef a river, not a creek, this triggered higher levels of environmental protection, prevented the property owners from building a retaining wall or lining the bank with riprap to prevent erosion.

Structural experts cautioned both residents that Big Beef Creek had undermined the embankment to such a degree that their houses could no longer safely be occupied, so both families were living in trailers placed on their property at the farthest possible remove from the river.

The plaintiffs hired Seattle attorney Ron Franz and sued Kitsap County. The County contracted attorney Greg Wall of Port Orchard. Attorney Jack Cyr brought suit in federal court with Assistant Attorney General Gary Andrews representing defendant, the state Dam Safety Division. Seven other families further down stream, whose bridge was destroyed by trees washed out by the stream, also joined the suit.

Kitsap County Superior Court Judge Terry McCluskey dismissed the case with prejudice on 17 October 2001. The case then went to the Appellate Court in Tacoma, which sided with the defendant in 2002. On 3 April 2003 the State Supreme Court rejected their petition to review the case.

Bald eagles
In the twentieth century bald eagles were in the brink of extirpation in the lower 48 states with populations reached their nadir in 1963, with a mere 400 nesting pairs in the U.S. The bald eagle was added to the Endangered Species List in 1967. After a series of government measures to restore populations, the bald eagle populations made a dramatic recovery and they were removed from the Endangered Species List in 2007. During the endangered period, sighting of a bald eagle at Big Beef Bay was extremely rare. As their numbers recovered, the estuary became a major feeding ground for bald eagles, attracting a large number of eagle watchers, both casual and professional. On many days in June, the causeway fills up with parked cars, stopped to observe dozens of eagles at a time. Area wildlife photographer Bonnie Block brought national attention to Big Beef estuary when she was awarded the Audubon Photography Awards grand prize in 2016 for her photograph of a bald eagle at Big Beef Bay.

Recent restoration work
In 2015 the Salmon Recovery Funding Board awarded grants for four salmon habitat restoration projects in Kitsap County, totaling $1.5 million. The largest grant, $441,000, was made to the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group for continued restoration work on Big Beef Creek. The work will continue to restore the river to its state prior to human damage, including removal of two wells and an access road, reconnecting the river to its floodplain and other recently restored wetlands and addition of further large woody debris to create pools to enhance survival of spawning and juvenile salmon.

Other research
A survey of transient fish in the tidal bay conducted from September 1968 through July 1969 using a fyke net revealed a seasonal pattern dominated by four out of a total thirteen species observed: shiner seaperch (Cymatogaster aggregate, 55% of total catch), surf smelt (Hypomesus pretiosus, 27%), pile seaperch (Rhacochilus vacca, 9%) and midshipman (Porichthys notatus, 4%). Also observed were Pacific lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus), starry flounder (Platichthys stellatus) and dogfish (Squalus acanthias). No fish were caught in the months of December through February. Small numbers were observed during the spring, with the majority of fish being observed in June through October. The authors noted that the most fish were observed when temperatures and salinity were at their summer peaks, owing to diminished freshwater input from Big Beef Creek.

In 1998-2002, Karl M. Polivka (University of Chicago, Department of Ecology and Evolution) studied three species of euryhaline cottids inhabiting the intertidal bay and upper mixohaline zone of the river, viz. the coastrange sculpin (Cottus aleuticus), prickly sculpin (Cottus asper) and Pacific staghorn sculpin (Leptocottus armatus). Researchers from Cornell University, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior have studied cuckoldry and sexual characteristics in midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus).