Land trusts are nonprofit organizations dedicated to preserving the natural, ecological, historical and/or cultural values of land and its amenities for future generations. Most of them are local or regional in scope and are funded primarily through membership donations.

They accomplish their goals through a variety of means including conservation easements, land purchases and life estates. Over 900 land trusts exist throughout the United States and 80 have formed in Washington state alone.

The Chehalis River Basin Land Trust (CRBLT) is one of the newest in Washington, established in 1994 to "preserve, protect and restore ecologically significant property within the Chehalis River basin".

The Chehalis River basin is the second largest in Washington outside the Columbia River basin, draining 2,600 square miles in parts of Lewis, Thurston, Grays Harbor, Cowlitz, Pacific, Mason, Jefferson and Wahkiakum counties. Grays Harbor and its tributaries are also included in these figures.

It is rich in natural resources such as water, wildlife, fish and timber. It boasts great scenic beauty in a land full of history and rural character. The founders and members of the CRBLT have a strong interest in maintaining this quality of life for many generations to come as development occurs throughout the area.

The organization gained its nonprofit status in 1995 and is served by elected officers and a board of directors. Membership is open to all citizens, especially to permanent residents of the Chehalis basin.

The CRBLT provides an opportunity for all citizens to make certain that their children, grandchildren and future heirs will be able to share in the natural riches which they enjoy today here in the basin.

A basin or watershed includes all the land over which water runs or soaks or migrates into a central river system. The streams and creeks on the map all eventually flow into the Chehalis River, which then flows into Grays Harbor.

For example, you might think that the Cowlitz River should be part of the Chehalis Basin since it is near to the Newaukum River, which is in the basin. But the Cowlitz empties into the Columbia River at Longview and is part of the Columbia Basin. Rivers as different and as distant from each other as the Newaukum and the Satsop share the fact that they are part of the same watershed.

To see the basin as a unified whole is to understand that what happens upstream affects what happens downstream. Another way to look at a watershed is to see all the water in it flowing downhill to the main river, called the main stem, and hence to the sea. If you can answer these questions--"What is my watershed? What happens to the rain water that falls on my land? Where does my drinking water come from?"-- then you are at home. If you can't, you haven't quite arrived there yet.

In 1992 I began the process of trying to arrive home. After an absence of 40 years, I came with my husband to live along the Black River near Gate (now a Rochester mailing address). In a way this is a continuation of a process begun by my family in April of 1921. This is when my grandparents, John and Anna Holm, bought this property.

They were not the first to live here--an old title abstract lists J.W. and Elizabeth Bennett, Ed. and Grace Cross, the Rochester Mercantile Company, and Alfred and Martha Wright as former owners.

Before these owners, when Washington became a state, sections numbered sixteen and thirty-six in every township of the proposed state were set aside as school land. Our property is in section 36 and was originally sold to James Wright in 1914 by the State of Washington for $800.

Part of coming home is understanding what happened before white people came to the Northwest Territory. I don't understand much yet, but I do know that native people came to the Mima and Gate prairies to dig the roots of the camus that still turns the roadsides blue in June. They burned off the prairies to keep back the firs. The Black River was a highway to Puget Sound for them, and they ate the salmon which spawned in the Black and its tributary creeks. Were these the Chehalis people who live just down the road near Oakville? One more thing to learn before I truly arrive home. When my uncle John lived here as a boy, he dug arrowheads from the rocky soil or found them in the river. Either he dug them all or I don't know how to look because I've only found a few shards.

There was a time before the native people came when everything was covered with ice. When I lived here 40 years ago, one of the many things I didn't know was that only 14,000 years ago this very place was the tip of the great Vashon glacier. This was when Olympia was covered with 1,200 feet of ice from the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. Fortunately for us, the climate changed.

As the ice melted and receded, a huge lake was formed where Puget Sound is today. Until the Strait of Juan de Fuca unfroze, all the ice melt flowed in a huge river along the Black Hills and down the Chehalis into the sea. This is exactly where I live today. To truly arrive in the Chehalis watershed, I try to visualize the great ice-melt river that shaped this basin. Some say that the Black River was as broad as Columbia when it entered the Chehalis in those Pleistocene days.

My grandparents struggled to arrive here, a part of the great flow of immigrants from Finland in the late 19th century. They would move back and forth between the farm at Gate and their first home in South Bend, Washington, depending on where work could be found in the mills. When the mills were "standing" in South Bend or up at Bordeaux, there was always the farm with its cows and chickens and vegetables.

My parents, Paul and Ruth Holm, struggled to make a living from the farm when my grandparents were too old to work it. The farm depended on the river. My dad irrigated the pastures and hay fields for his head of 30 or 40 Holstein dairy cows. The cows would go into the river to drink, something that can't happen today. With the end to the small dairy farms along the Black River, and the strict regulation of discharge of nutrients from the huge dairy farms that survive, the river may be cleaner in some ways than when I was a girl. A way of life is almost gone.

With some effort, we can regain a sense of place. I'm still not really here yet. There is so much more I can learn. I need more trips up the river in the canoe. I want to see the otters I hear about from our neighbor Dan Rotter. I want to learn how to observe the ospreys without disturbing them and to see again the great bald eagles. I want more frequent glimpses of salmon, a pileated woodpecker or a varied thrush. I need to learn the names of the native grasses.

The Chehalis Basin Fisheries Task Force (Task Force) is a not-for-profit, tax exempt, all volunteer organization. The Task Force is dedicated to the enhancement and increase of populations of salmon, steelhead, and searun cutthroat trout. This is accomplished by the restoration, enhancement, and protection of critical stream habitat within the Chehalis River Basin.

The Task Force was first established in February 1980 as an alliance with appropriate federal agencies, the State Department of Fish and Wildlife, local municipalities, tribal councils, and commercial and sport fishing groups.

The Task Force was originally named 'The Grays Harbor Fish Enhancement Task Force'; its' name was changed to the current name in the early 1990's.

The first ten years of the Task Forces' existence were spent in showing that its volunteer efforts were well worth the time, trouble and monies. The Task Force helped develop an Action Plan which has since become a model for the state of Washington. In 1990 legislation created 12 regional enhancement groups modeled after the Task Force. This legislation expanded Task Force operations to encompass all waters draining into Grays Harbor.

Since 1984, more than a dozen special projects have been started. Several of the earlier enhancement undertakings have been ended as fish runs have returned to desired levels, for an example, the Satsop and Humptulips late native steelhead runs.

In 1986, the Task Force helped the 'Long Live the Kings' project take over the Mayr Brothers Hatchery (built in 1972) when the timber industry decline forced the company to cease their efforts.

In 1989, the Task Force began the Satsop Springs project which became the model project for entire Washington State Service Corp training program. In 1990, Governor Booth Gardner presented the Task Force with the States' Environmental Award. Also in 1990, the Simpson Fish Hatchery, which was slated for closure by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, was taken under the Task Forces' umbrella. That hatchery has been kept running and operational and supporting multiple volunteer enhancement projects including the Muller/Satsop Springs, Chehalis Native Chinook and other basin volunteer coho projects.

Again in 1990, the Task Force spearheaded an effort resulting in the passage of the Chehalis River Basin Fisheries Resource Study and Restoration Act.

In 1991, the Task Force developed a five year action plan whose goals include fall chinook smolt production expansion; augmentation of wild fall and spring chinook; expansion of conditioning ponds for out-planting chinook; wild coho fed fry and wild coho programs; expand coho smolt hatchery production to 4,000,000 fry annually; expansion of summer and winter steelhead programs; chum augmentation; expansion of brood stocking capabilities; and stream and river habitat protection and restoration efforts.

In 1992, the Task Force worked for providing federal funding of the Chehalis Basin Act to begin habitat restoration; encouraged the coho survival study by the State Department of Fisheries on possible causes of low smolt survival as they migrate out through Grays Harbor. Also in 1992, the Task Force initiated a two-day symposium at Grays Harbor College at which over 60 professional papers were submitted relating to the economic recovery of the southwestern Washington coastal regions.

In 1993 and 1994, work continued on more than a dozen major rehabilitation/restoration efforts to create or restore more than 1,000 acres of habitat. During this period the Task Force worked to improve nearly eight miles of channel in 13 creeks and rivers in nine communities of the Chehalis Basin, using funds provided by the Chehalis Restoration Act. The Task Force also developed watershed partnerships with Weyerhaeuser International Paper and Pulp Company.

Today, the Task Force continues in its efforts to restore, protect, enhance and improve the second largest river system in the State of Washington. The Chehalis River Basin drains more than 2,600 square miles. The watershed area extends from the Raft River to the north and the Willapa drainage to the south. It reaches from the Pacific Ocean eastward to beyond Interstate 5.

The Chehalis River Basin includes 1,400 separate rivers and streams totalling nearly 3,400 miles in length. Counties included in the Basin area are Grays Harbor, Lewis, Pacific and portions of Jefferson, Mason, Thurston, and Wahkiakum counties. At least four Native American tribes call the Basin home: they are the Quinaults, the Queets, the Chehalis and the Shoalwater peoples.

The Chehalis Basin Fisheries Task Force continues to view its' 15-year-old mandate to be of vital importance. Without a flourishing river system, the many people living within the Basin will be bereft of all the benefits such a river system bestows. It would be a shame to watch the rivers flow without any of their traditional animal life on or beneath their surfaces.

We of the Task Force hope that this short history of the activities of the Task Force will prove of interest to our readers.

Ron Woodworth, CBFTF

Please take a few minutes and let us know your opinion and reaction to the Drops of Water insert you received with your newspaper.

Simply copy the questions on a sheet of paper and complete your reponse.