Reversing Russian River degradation from the Mining-Era Pits to Parks.
We met on site on a cool Saturday morning, August 8, and thank goodness it was cool, given the recent hot, smoky weather. The location, west of Windsor, consists of old gravel mining pits that are not yet designed for easy public walking, along with crumbling levees built to separate the pits from the Russian River. 

Don McEnhill, Deputy Director of Russian Riverkeeper, gave us the history of the site: a set of four massive, deep pits, part of a larger cluster of 17, mined for gravel for the past 100 years.  He ran us through the details of an ambitious restoration plan, using paper charts (remember those!) to show what they are trying to accomplish.

Imagine a massive, 357-acre restoration project filled with native vegetation and walk-in/kayak-in campsites, along a beautiful stretch of the Russian River. The project will convert a channelized and incised section of the river back into a historic wide floodplain, restoring its natural processes, including groundwater recharge. What is currently a series of severely polluted, disused gravel-mining pits is being completely reimagined as a thriving habitat for both land and aquatic wildlife, and as a public park.

This restoration is essential to providing ecological water-cleaning services, thereby protecting the quality of the Russian River water extracted for urban drinking supplies. This project carries the same ecological potential for salmon recovery as a dam removal.

It turns out there are many of these old river mining pits around the world, and Sonoma County is attracting significant attention for its innovative, multi-year, multi-agency, multi-million-dollar plan to return them to a more natural state.

After the talk, Don led us down a path to the Russian River, where we walked along the high, narrow, crumbling berm keeping the river out of the old pits. See the diagram to the left of the pits. We saw for ourselves that it is already failing. With El Niño storms predicted this year, it’s only a matter of time before a flood event causes the levees to melt away and the river to rush into the pits 

For more information on the restoration  click here. 

Neil Hancock