Archie Creek Fire Recovery

My name is Spencer Dieterich, the Post-Fire Recovery Leader at Umpqua Watersheds. This story map details our community efforts to restore burned public lands during our 2021-22 field season. Before I joined the project, there was progress made by Phoenix Youth Corps and USFS partners disbursing seeds and planting trees, shrubs, and forbs in the Wright Creek area. I am grateful to help further this meaningful collaborative effort by organizing volunteer events.

After holding a prior online volunteer training to help inform and recruit community members about our project, I met with Eric Stauder, the Youth Corps Coordinator, early on November 20th to load up vans with tools, plants, and seeds to carry out our first volunteer event. After we loaded up, we met volunteers at the Roseburg Public Library for introductions over donuts & coffee and a project overview before caravaning to Wright Creek!

Once we arrived, we formed a tailgate safety circle to go over some of the dangers that come with working in a burned area, then handed out tools to the volunteers and demonstrated how to properly transplant. We achieved our goal of getting 300 plants in the ground, along with dispersing over 60 pounds of native seed, and removing around 300 square feet of noxious weeds! We achieved these outcomes with a total of 11 people including UCC students, USFS staff, AmeriCorps members, and Umpqua Watersheds supporters – reaching approximately 60 hours of service. Overall, our first event was extremely successful. We covered a wide area (depicted in map below), and lucked-out with beautiful blue skies and sunshine above our project site.

After our first successful volunteer event, I continued working alongside PYC crew members upriver on the North Umpqua Trail Mott Section, helping to restore an area with historic old growth stands that were severely burned (before and after aerial photos below). The crew made a lot of progress due to the soil being much easier to work with compared to our prior site that was compacted by log decks and equipment. On average, the crew planted 200-300 plants each work day, totaling around 1000 plugs in the ground so far!

We returned to school this week after our rejuvenating holiday break and are currently on pause due to winter storms that have brought heavy rain, snow, and ice to the Cascade Mountains and surrounding communities. We look forward to continuing our planting, seeding, and noxious weed removal efforts once highway access is returned and our restoration project site is safer to work within. I’ll be coordinating with SOLVE, the Glide Revitalization Project, and the local News Review to help get the word out about our project and increase our collective efforts moving forward into the new year!

After a slight delay a second Volunteer event was planned, with this event we hoped to plant the remaining plants. At that point we had around 500 remaining. This effort would focus farther down the trail compared to last time. We didn't have as much people this time around but we still managed to get 25 volunteer hours worth of work, in addition to planting the remaining plants we could fit into the vehicle. Which meant 100 remained for the PYC crew to go through and plant more thoroughly in areas that they worked in previously.