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South Fork Nooksack River

The South Fork Nooksack drains an area of 184 square miles from its headwaters on the eastern flanks of the Twin Sisters Range to its confluence with the mainstem Nooksack River near Deming. Along the way, the main channel of the South Fork covers more than 40 miles in Whatcom and Skagit counties, with many more stream miles traveled by its numerous tributaries, such as Cavanaugh, Skookum, Hutchinson, and Jones creeks. Typically, the tributaries originate in steep headwater areas, with numerous cascades and waterfalls found in the uppermost reaches. Downstream, the tributaries enter the floodplain of the South Fork as it winds its way through the valley floor, providing accessible habitat for salmon spawning and rearing.

This particular watershed provides critical habitats for all the species of salmonids (salmon, trout, and char) using the Nooksack Basin. In inventories of returning adult salmon conducted by the salmon co-managers, the South Fork Nooksack showed the greatest concentration of known spawning for native Nooksack spring chinook salmon. The native North/Middle Fork stock and South Fork stock are genetically unique with respect to each other and to other chinook throughout the Puget Sound region and are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act as "threatened" with extinction.

Salmon habitat issues in this watershed include high water temperatures in the summer and fall, increased sedimentation, lack of riparian vegetation, low levels of in-stream large woody debris, disconnection of the channel from its floodplain, and low seasonal stream flows. Many of the challenges facing this area are human-based and result from a history of timber harvest and road building, agriculture, flood control projects, and use of wetlands and meadows for other needs. Changes to forest practice rule and practices over the past 15 years are beginning to allow the upper South Fork to recover while the reach from Acme to Saxon, largely unconfined by levees and bank armoring, holds great promise for both retaining and restoring functional habitat conditions. A significant factor in this reach is that Whatcom Land Trust and County Parks have acquired land for conservation purposes and are actively participating in salmon habitat recovery planning and projects.

Many habitat restoration projects are on-going in the South Fork Nooksack to assist in the recovery of salmon and salmon habitats. In addition to land acquisition and conservation, road culverts are being inventoried and replaced to allow for easier fish passage, forest roads are being repaired or abandoned to prevent landslides, trees are being planted to create more shade and provide future supplies of woody debris, and artificial logjams are helping to create or maintain connections to floodplain channels and to supplement the critically low levels of in-channel cover used by both adult and juvenile salmon.

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