Willow Creek Restoration Project

In June 1999 the founding board of the Ventana Wilderness Alliance made a two day traverse of the Willow Creek watershed from the Coast Ridge to Highway One. This trip was made as part of the statewide wilderness inventory that resulted in the introduction of the California Wild Heritage Act of 2002 and the Big Sur Wilderness and Conservation act of 2002.

In addition to viewing a spectacular watershed clearly worthy of wilderness protection, the trip identified several large deposits of trash and debris along the main stem of Willow Creek. These deposits were left on abandoned mining claims and by illegal human habitation. These trash deposits appear to be the largest concentration of trash sites within the Monterey Ranger District of the Los Padres National Forest. In January 2001, the VWA Board of Directors decided to undertake the cleanup and restoration of this area.

The first step of this project was to inform the Monterey Ranger District of the existence of these trash deposits and to establish a partnership with the Forest Service to remove the trash from the wilderness. This partnership was forged during 2001 and a list of Forest Service requirements for the clean up was established. These requirements included a hazardous materials survey, an archeological reconnaissance and a complete biological survey of the project area. The hazardous materials survey was completed by the Forest Service in 2002. The archeological and biological surveys were to be funded and managed by the VWA. In the summer of 2002, the VWA secured grant funding for these studies from the Monterey Bay Aquarium/Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Employee's Conservation Action Fund. Local consultants have been hired to perform these studies which should be completed by the end of 2003.

While the remainder of the studies are under way, the VWA will develop a specific plan to remove the trash from the wilderness. This plan will most likely rely on a team of hearty VWA volunteers to package and transport the trash to a staging area where the trash can be loaded on to trucks and transported to an appropriate disposal site. The most notable challenge to this process, in addition to the shear volume of trash to be handled, is the need to transport all of the trash across Willow Creek to reach the existing wilderness trail.

Once the preliminary clean up plan is completed, a second round of fundraising will raise the money required for the hard costs of the cleanup. It is anticipated that the planning and fundraising efforts will run concurrently with the archeological and biological studies now under way and that the actual clean up work will begin in 2004.

CONTACT

For more information about this project, contact Tom Hopkins, VWA Board Member/Willow Creek Restoration Project Coordinator at tom@ventanawild.org.