Nellita

Saturday afternoon - D needed time behind the wheel and I had been itching to visit this site for two months. Tom and Kathy were at the site and gave us the tour, helping us pick our way through thousands of new plantings.

This site is very different now than when I visited last May (South of Frenchman's Cove). The 400' bulkhead that used to define the shoreline has been removed and a low log-covered spit marks its location and encloses the new lagoon. Many thousands of yards of fill have been removed. The stream has been given a new, more natural channel, amidst lots of big logs and root wads. Instead of flowing over the edge of the bulkhead in a flume, it runs into the newly created lagoon and then out into Hood Canal across a rapidly reforming fan.

We don't know just what this place looked like 150 years ago, but we certainly know something about what parts were probably there and what the processes were that shaped those parts. The folks who put this project together put the basic pieces in place and gave them the ability to move. Now it just requires time. The plants will grow, the logs will move around, the dirt will erode in some places and deposit in others. The geometry will look different in 10 years, but it will look real.

It is rare to have an opportunity to completely restore a place. Check out the aerial view linked to the title of this post. Then check it again a couple years when they've updated those air photos.