Big changes for the Yankee Fork

Today’s Yankee Fork is a far cry from the stream of yesteryear - and it’s a good thing.

Decades ago, water flowed rapidly through the straightened stretch of river like a flume headed for the Salmon River. It raced down valley taking with it most of the smaller gravels and any trees that happened to fall in.

And so the Yankee Fork remained for years after placer mining in the late 1800s and dredge mining in the mid-1900s. These floating mines scraped up the riverbed, sifted through and collected gold, then deposited pile after pile of rock, leaving the river to find its way.  

To make things worse, the hills were bare of trees, harvested as fuel for an ore mill, and to construct the towns of Custer and Bonanza. The river habitat was fragmented, homogenous and largely inhospitable to fish, effectively extirpating Chinook salmon and steelhead trout populations from the drainage. The resulting damage also greatly impacted resident Bull Trout and Cutthroat Trout. The existing habitat was disconnected from its floodplains and lacked woody debris, sinuosity, and complexity that create diverse spawning and rearing habitat for all life-stage of salmonids.

Thanks to funding from the Bureau of Reclamation, the Pacific Coast Salmon Recovery Fund, and Bonneville Power Administration, Trout Unlimited and its partners have been designing and executing multi-year river restoration projects in the Yankee Fork.   

By 2018, TU will have completed the following:

• 728 pieces of large wood placed in 7.4 miles of stream

• 12 large log structures

• 120 cubic yards of spawning gravel added

• 11 cover log structures (7-10 trees each)

• 55 large 2’+ boulders added to the river.

• 3 simulated avalanches, or rock and wood debris flows

• Creation of 3 separate pond series

• 2.04 miles of stream channel (West Fork)

• 0.55 miles of side channel (West Fork)

• 23.5 acres of floodplain and riparian habitat restored (West Fork)

• 0.48 acres of wetland connected (off-channel rearing) (West Fork)