ABOVE: Autumn above the sweeping, glacier-sculpted moraines of Iwetemlaykin (Nez Perce for “at the edge of the lake”), headwaters of the Wallowa River and homeland of the Wal-lam-wat-kain Nimiipuu who, along with their leader Chief Joseph, were forced from their lands in 1877.
Photo: Ben Herndon
If you have never woken up to the overnight plummet of a Wallowa County, OR, fall night and found your wading boots sheathed in diamond dust and just as hard, hit them together and heard their hollowness echo in the still morning of your heart; if you have never driven a caliche or ice-slick Flora, Rattlesnake or Wildcat grade with dreams of steelhead driving you onward, only to find the Grande Ronde River a sheet of ice chunks from bank to bank; if you have never woken up to the feeling that you live in a country full of ghosts, impossible not to acknowledge, as theirs are all the best places for catching winter sun, rings of rocks set into the earth, rock shards left in their wake—then welcome.
The creeks and rivers in Wallowa County drop from the Eagle Cap Wilderness into various canyons, the steepest descent being 7,993 feet ending in Hell’s Canyon, the deepest river gorge in North America. These tributaries and rivers also make this county middle of nowhere, center of the universe, for those of us who live here, including Ian and Heidi Wilson of the Wilson-Haun Ranch. Located on a gentle gradient of the Wallowa River, the ranch sits just north of Lostine, OR. The reclaimed river bottom is a wide, spread-out tangle of chest-high grass, willows, red osier, beaver-chewed trees fallen across the river, and life, so much life, broken up between two, three, four, sometimes five different channels of water and ponds. The floodplain is a hummocky world of water and life. White-tailed deer startle and dash away, mule deer walk the sagebrush basalt steppes above. Signs of bobcats, coyotes and herons are left in the mud. Songbirds cut loose. The smell of skunks or foxes drifts in the air. For the entirety of the mile-long stretch of the Wilson-Haun Ranch, there is life. In this once-channelized section of river set wild again, there are no barren, 6-inch-deep, 200-yard, pin-straight riffles. Instead it is a cacophony of pools and deep undercuts, mysterious root wads leading into fathomless depths. But the river wasn’t always this way.
Ian Wilson stands in front of woody debris that was placed in the Wallowa River for habitat enhancement. The Wallowa Mountains in the Eagle Cap Wilderness (Oregon’s largest) can be seen in the background.
Photo: Kendrick Moholt
Ian inspects beaver chew. A family of beavers—Ian’s favorite mammal— moved onto the Wilson-Haun Ranch within months of the restoration project’s completion.
Photo: Kendrick Moholt
AS I PULL IN and greet Ian (who is tinkering in an outbuilding and collecting fishing gear for the day), I wave and smile. Just as each tributary entering a river system adds to a river’s flow, so too do our friends and neighbors. I first met Ian and his wife, Heidi, in 2010 when we were 16 years younger and like a spring freshet. Now wiser (unless you ask our wives) and balder (but still full of energy), his kids have both grown-up, while my 2- and 4-year-olds keep me up most nights. Not quite in our August years, it’s more like we are in the tailing end of an epic multi-week hatch. Ian married Heidi (née Schmidt), one of two legendary Wallowa County sisters who grew up on the ranch, and has been fishing these waters for almost 30 years. Kinder than an Upper-Midwesterner in the 1980s, Ian always has a twinkle in his eye and a genuine salt-of-the-earth smile. We’ve fished, guided and sat together on the front porch enough times that I would never hesitate to hand my kids over to either him or Heidi so I can finish a meal (or a beer).
“Where do you want to fish?” Ian asks as we wader-up. Looking out across the floodplain, the weight of the fly reel grounding me to earth, the rod weightless as a bird ready to take flight, I shrug my shoulders. It has been almost a decade since I last fished this stretch of the Wallowa. A decade of dried-algae droughts, anchor ice winters and river work.
“I’d like to see the whole river,” I suggest. “Start at the bottom and work our way up.”
As we walk down paths along the river, we pass a wedding arbor Ian built for his daughter and son-in-law. A grill sits under a giant cottonwood. I ask questions as Ian shares memories, and as we near the downstream property boundary, we get into a discussion about the changes the river has undergone on his property and plans for future changes. As Ian describes the large movements and redistribution of earth across the floodplain on the ranch, he gestures over a wooden fence. Just downstream, the Rocking 11 Ranch, Trout Unlimited, the Grande Ronde Model Watershed, and other partners are developing plans to move a winter cattle feedlot that is set in the old floodplain right beside the river and do river restoration work similar to what has been done on the Wilson-Haun Ranch.
Kyle Lerch with a Wallowa Valley rainbow before release.
Photo: Ben Herndon
A few miles downstream from where we’re standing is the Wolfe Ranch. It’s a sixth-generation family ranch situated on Nez Perce ancestral lands, which in 2011 placed large portions of the property under conservation easements with the local land trust, protecting riverfront, marshes and historical sites. About one mile upstream from where I’m standing is the McDaniel Ranch, where land steward and rancher Doug McDaniel partnered with the Grande Ronde Model Watershed, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Nez Perce Tribe, and a local nonprofit, Wallowa Resources, in an extensive, multiphase river-restoration project. Two additional completed restoration projects, one farther upstream toward Enterprise, OR, on the Six Ranch, and another downstream of Wallowa, OR, on the Baker Ranch (aka the Rough Diamond Ranch), also involved extensive river-restoration work. These projects represent not only holistic stewardship practices, but also serve to illustrate what is possible when we are rooted in relationships—relationships with rivers, fish, riparian zones and each other. Why, might you ask, are all these Wallowa County ranchers and landowners so wonderfully stewardship-oriented?
Besides the fact that they don’t blink an eye at breaking ice out of water troughs in negative-degree mornings, calving during February blizzards, or turning leathery during droughts, it could be something in the water. It could simply be that ranchers, farmers and riparian landowners are made to outlast and endure. It may be the sweet conservation angel of forethought and love of the land has graced the people of Wallowa County. It probably has something to do with the Nez Perce’s long-standing history and relationship to Wallowa, which translates to “Land of Winding Waters.” McDaniels, for his part, also sat on the founding board of Wallowa Resources, whose mission is to “empower rural communities, like those in northeast Oregon, to build strong economies and healthy landscapes through land stewardship, education and job creation,” fostering a “stewardship economy” where people and the land thrive together for future generations. But it could also be simply a love of fish and game, the desire to improve wildlife habitat. Whatever the case, ranching and farming require stewardship to thrive; so, too, in this day and age do rivers. Specifically, the Wallowa, in whose riparian corridor most of Wallowa County’s 7,500 residents live.
The Wilson-Haun Ranch was established in 1878, one year after Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce across the Snake River at Dug Bar, trying to escape the violence of the war of 1877. While Joseph’s and the Nez Perce’s dream of freedom and a return to their ancestral homelands remains a complicated and unfinished story, the ranchers of Wallowa County have continued to work the land, with each generation putting down deeper roots in the valley. In the early years, mostly to avoid flooding, ranchers up and down the Wallowa straightened, leveed, diked and diverted portions of the river. As was also the case with most rivers throughout the 19th century, small dams and diversions for mills and irrigation were built. Ultimately, the straightening and channelizing led to increased water speed, down-cutting (which lowers the water table), and the loss of the rich sediment deposits that riparian corridors rely on. Not to mention, for any of us who love to fish, a straight, steep streambed is usually a recipe for heartbreak: It has little to no holding water for fish.
Spring snowmelt brings high flows to the newly reconnected floodplain habitats across the upstream end of the Wilson-Haun Wallowa River Project. Before the project, all flows at this river level would have remained in the main channel. Now the river inundates broad swaths of the historic floodplain, including additional side channels, ponds and wetland habitats—all important spawning and rearing grounds for Lower Snake River salmon and steelhead.
Photo: Connar Stone/ Grande Ronde Model Watershed Council
From the project’s completion until now, the natural ecosystem within the riparian zone has been adjusting and flourishing. In this stretch, where the river splits apart into multiple channels and a side pond, Ian and I quit fishing. Instead, we explore the chew marks of beavers and Chinook salmon redds; water overflows in abundance. Ian, and later Levi, explain that a big part of floodplain restoration used to focus on fish passage with rocks, logs, the digging of pools and trying to improve a single-thread channel. What this section of the river highlights is the latitudinal effects of water storage where multiple channels braid. Rather than a single holding area for fish, that, depending on flow levels, may or may not provide suitable holding water, Ian and Levi’s work created a more dynamic environment.
Recent data collected by Ian and Levi suggests there has been an average increase of 600 percent width in the river, which is critical for oceangoing fish such as steelhead, salmon and Pacific lamprey, because they need places to hang out in “low-velocity habitats.” When fish have these hiding places, they grow bigger and healthier. Multiple channels increase the places for them to spend time during all flow levels. When the river is low, fish can find undercuts and deeper pools to rest in. When the river is high, flows disperse, and there is more resting water.
When the main part of the project was completed in September 2022, the response was immediate, not only in fish that live their early lives on the property and need low-velocity currents for spawning beds and wetland habitat, but also in waterfowl. In a predominantly single-threaded river, when flying over, they saw water, water, everywhere: drinkable, feedable, broodable water. Water without paradox.
Restoration project managers Andy Scheele and Andy Hill and landowner Ian Wilson pause to discuss the day’s progress during the construction implementation of the Wilson-Haun Wallowa River Project.
Photo: Levi Old/Trout Unlimited
“The more complex habitat, the more habitats, is mission critical,” Levi says. “A lot of times people ask, ‘Did you improve the temperature of the water for cold-water species?’ But really, the thinking and objectives are on temperature diversity—different species want to have a lot of different options. Warmer water in the winter can be as important as cooler water in the summer. As many types of streamflow as we can give different fish, the more options, the more resilience into the future. A lot of times, we just put wood and trees and boulders in the main channel and called it restoration, but now we are thinking about holistic, complex projects to help the river and riparian zone become more high-functioning.”
Put another way, where fishing asks what the river can give in the moment, stewardship asks what the land needs in return: care, reciprocity and commitment to leave our rivers healthier for those who come next.
This type of work isn’t just occurring on the Wilson-Haun Ranch. The aim of Trout Unlimited, the Grande Ronde Model Watershed, Nez Perce Tribe, ODFW, and other partner organizations as they continue to implement these projects, is to create areas along a river system where fish, if they can make it there, will have much better habitat in which to live. While it remains to be seen what the future holds for dams on the Snake River—one of the largest human-made obstacles to salmon and steelhead recovery in this region—smaller restoration projects like these are helping carry the vision of river and land stewardship forward. And while the energy and farming benefits from dams offer community stability, the dams themselves carry high ecological costs in terms of fish survival and tribal fishing rights.
Ian on a side channel of the restoration project with the family ranch in the background.
Photo: Kendrick Moholt
FISHING AND CHATTING with Ian, I get the feeling, as I often do along the banks of Wallowa County’s rivers, how empty 3,000 square miles feels on a late fall day when tourists are gone. The way Wallowa County holds silence, the way intermittent light dances off the broad stretches of the Wallowa River like a path of fool’s gold, wide and curved as the facets of basalt cliffs above or the sweeping head of a bighorn sheep before it plummets to vertical emptiness below. The way the belly of a trout slides from palm back to river like a psalm. This, over almost anything else, is what drew me here. By the time Ian and I near the upstream property boundary, I feel a deep sense of peace as we take turns casting into the final deep run of the day, the last flurries of sun, wind and rain passing overhead.
This article was first published in print in Issue 17.3.