Silver Reach Preserve
Silver Reach Preserve
Acres Preserved:
14
Year Conserved:
2015
Category:
Land Trust Preserve
Natural Features:
This is a really beautiful property that spans both sides of the Big Quilcene River. It has a great gravel bar, floodplain, and channel migration zone. All in all, it’s a nice, intact piece of river and forest.
– Sarah Spaeth, Jefferson Land Trust’s Director of Conservation and Strategic Partnerships
A Birds-Eye View
Silver Reach Preserve is named for the silver coho salmon that pass through this stretch of the Big Quilcene River. With 2,600 feet of the Big Quilcene running through it, the 14-acre forested preserve contains critical migration and spawning zones for coho and other salmon and fish species, including Hood Canal’s endangered summer chum.
As the Big Quilcene curves through the property, it shapes a floodplain of gravel bars, forested wetlands, and side channels. Beaver activity on the preserve helps add logjams to the river, creating pools of protected water for young fish. The steep slopes rising over the riverbanks are lushly forested with mature second-growth trees, providing perching, nesting, and foraging grounds for many species of animals and birds.
On its journey into Hood Canal from the headwaters of the Olympic Mountains, the Big Quilcene empties into Quilcene Bay, where the Indigenous peoples of this area have been clamming and fishing since time immemorial. Today, Quilcene Bay is a major site of commercial oyster production.
The Preservation Story
The Land Trust works with many partners including the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group (HCSEG), the Skokomish Tribe, Jefferson County, Jefferson County Conservation District, and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to conserve and restore habitat for our native salmon in Quilcene Bay and Hood Canal while improving water quality, forest health, and habitat for the plants, fish, animals, and people who share this land.
The protection and restoration of this preserve builds on large-scale, multi-decade efforts to restore the entire Quilcene Bay delta and tidal marsh habitat to reverse impacts of human activities on threatened fish and wildlife habitat, degraded water quality, and harvestability of shellfish and other natural resources. These efforts continue to be spearheaded by our longtime partners at HCSEG.
The Land Trust received funding from the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office Salmon Recovery Funding Board and the Jefferson County Conservation Futures Fund program to purchase the property in 2015, and officially establish Silver Reach Preserve as protected habitat forever.
The Protected Property Today and Tomorrow
By increasing structural diversity in the forest and maintaining and enhancing habitats and waterways, we’re helping the land be healthier and more resilient while supporting regional species diversity.
A resilient, healthy forest will provide year-round shade and large woody debris to the Big Quilcene River — essential elements of healthy habitat for salmon and other water-dwelling creatures. Improved conditions here have a positive effect on Quilcene Bay and Hood Canal as well.
Thanks to invasive plant management by the previous landowners, portions of the second-growth forest were in relatively healthy condition when the Land Trust acquired the property. During the restoration phase, Land Trust staff and volunteers worked on further invasive plant removal.
Our stewardship staff, with the help of committed preserve stewards and other volunteers, regularly care for the land, monitor wildlife, and keep improving habitat conditions by removing harmful weeds.
Every 5-10 years, the Land Trust also conducts habitat health assessments on the property. These assessments, carried out with the help of volunteers, allow us to evaluate the ecological integrity and functions of forests and streams within the preserve and track the progress of our land management goals.
Now, new generations of local stewards will have the continued opportunity to care for this land and to welcome back, year after year, the silver salmon that gave this place its name.
