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Photo by Bob Pennell Circuit Court Judge Phil Arnold pours some bark dust on newly planted shrubs during a Rotary Club weekend effort to landscape the banks of Bear Creek near the Jackson Street bridge. Volunteers dig in to help Bear Creek Trees and shrubs will improve site's scenery, habitat By MARK FREEMAN An old downtown Medford eyesore received splashes of color and vitality this weekend in the latest effort to help make Bear Creek a better place for fish and people. Volunteers planted aspens, dogwoods and all sorts of shrubs along Bear Creek's banks to make the downtown stretch more pleasing to the eye and more palatable to the wild salmon living there. That dirt is something else," says Roger Stokes, one of several volunteers from four Rotary clubs that supplied the manpower for Saturday's tree-planting. "It was like digging in concrete. "But it's real good that we could get a lot of people there who care about Bear Creek and the city of Medford." The plantings came to a quarter-mile stretch of the creek where the old Jackson Street dam was removed last year and replaced with a series of concrete and gravel steps meant to be easily passed by migrating wild salmon. But the trees and shrubs are more than window dressing for the site of the Pacific Northwest's first dam removed to help wild salmon. The brush will help stabilize the banks and reduce erosion, thereby helping improve the creek's notoriously poor water quality. And when mature, the trees will shade the creek waters from harsh summer sun, making it more friendly to infant salmon and steelhead growing in creek pools. It's the latest stage in the continuing Bear Creek Restoration Project spearheaded over the past decade by the Medford Urban Renewal Agency. The biggest chunk of the restoration project was the $1.2 million removal of the old irrigation dam. "So far, everything's worked very well," Urban Renewal Agency Director Don Burt says. The Jackson Street dam was built to divert water to two irrigation districts. But its poor fish ladder and placement in the stream made it one of the main impediments to wild fish in Bear Creek and to the creek's water quality, which is among Oregon's worst. City leaders raised $1.23 million to replace it with a more fish- friendly diversion upstream, then cut down the 11-foot dam and transformed the area into a gravely stairway easily passed by fish. The dam demolition began under the national media spotlight on July 15, 1998, when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt used a few sledgehammer swings to whack the first chunk of concrete from the old dam. The fish stairwell was finished in late 1998, but the final bank stabilization efforts were not done until last month, Burt says. The landscaping will be done in several phases over the next few years. The volunteers from the four Rotary clubs formed the first foray into sprucing up the post-construction banks. The plants were all bought by the urban renewal agency and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and a local landscaping contractor helped show the Rotarians where and how to get the trees planted. "A year from now -- assuming everything lives -- it should make a big difference," says Stokes, who is president of the Medford Rotary Club. Next year, a similar project will help create and restore wetland areas along the water line, Burt says. This year's chinook salmon migration over the new fish stairway has been light, probably for reasons having nothing to do with the old dam or new fish stairway. A low salmon run, coupled with low water, are the likely culprits, says state fish biologist David Haight. This year's spawning salmon were living in the ocean when the dam was demolished, and all the work done to the creek area has created a better situation for salmon, Haight says. "When they do come back, we're prepared," Burt says. "There's a nice system for them to run up." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA