HABITAT REHABILITATION.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

COYOTE MOUNTAIN - The dirt kept coming, day after day, thousands of cubic yards of it loaded onto rail cars and dump trucks, and Forest Service geologist Mark Leverton had to figure out where to put it all.

The torrent of rocks, mud and trees, more than a million tons worth, hurtled down the mountain eight miles southeast of Oakridge when the earth gave way the morning of Jan. 19. Truck-size boulders and 150-year-old Douglas firs that had snapped off like matchsticks rode a slurry that tore out 1,500 feet of railroad track in one location, buried a short section of track below that and obliterated sections of two Forest Service roads before stopping several hundred yards above Salt Creek.

A disaster of epic proportions from the perspective of Union Pacific Railroad, the landslide was a fairly typical event in the geologic lifespan of the Cascade Range.

In the immediate days afterward - snowy, dismal days that hampered everyone's ability to get a grip on the massive scope of the problem - Union Pacific and Willamette National Forest Service officials put their heads together to figure out how to quickly restore a vital transportation link in the Interstate 5 corridor, yet minimize harm to pristine public lands within the national forest.

Seven months later, the railroad repair job is mostly done, but the impacts to the forest will unfold for years to come on the 60 acres of the slide itself, the 27 acres that became dumping grounds for the mud, and Salt Creek - key salmon habitat meandering along the base of the mountain.

A landslide in the Cascades is good news and bad news from a habitat perspective, said Leverton. On the downside, it can wipe out stands of mature trees, home to a range of critters from tree voles to northern spotted owls - birds at risk of extinction who can't really afford to lose habitat. The exposed bare soil also makes a great place for invasive species to anchor and grow,

Fine silt from such a landslide flows into and muddies creeks and streams. That's what happened in the weeks after the Frazier landslide. Coyote Creek begins as rivulets coursing down the face of the mountain before blending into a single stream meandering across a wetlands to flow into Salt Creek, key habitat for at-risk chinook salmon. The creek turned root beer brown.

Salt Creek and the Middle Fork of the Willamette also ran muddy for days with clouds of silt that likely did harm to the salmon just hatching at that time of year.

On the upside, landslides are a principal method for putting downed trees into streams. Those trees provide a range of benefits, creating hiding places for young fish, nutrients for insects the fish feed on and filters that trap and hold gravel the fish need for spawning. Downed trees also open up space for meadows that attract foraging creatures such as elk and deer.

Human activities - road building and clear cutting - frequently get the blame for landslides, but Forest Service geologists don't think that's what happened on the Frazier slide,

The ground gave way just below a narrow logging road and partially across a 15-year-old clear-cut. But the majority of the failure occurred in a stand of trees well over 100 years old.

The chaotic mayhem that occurred that January morning or the frenetic work of bulldozers and backhoes that followed in February and March is hard to believe when one visits the site in summer.

The railroad tracks run level on neat beds of fresh gravel. Above the upper tracks that sustained the most damage, about 20 acres of bare dirt slopes sharply, tinged a yellow brown from a seed-growing medium. The first faint tufts of grass planted to help anchor what's left have begun to sprout. Along the tracks Union Pacific has installed high fence posts with wires that will trip and alert the railroad if the land slumps again.

The 40 acres below that is all boulder and gravel, installed by the railroad almost down to bedrock level to create a safe, solid support structure for the rail bed. It looks like a gray gash against the otherwise green hillside, but Leverton said the rocks provide habitat for pikas, a hamster-sized furry creature related to rabbits.

The tracks double back in a long hairpin turn to descend the mountainside, and below the lower tracks, the Forest Service has chosen to mostly let the rumpled land lie. The eight to 10 feet of slide burying Forest Road 5876 will remain there, a Volkswagen-sized boulder sitting amid the dirt and strewn trees. Only a small portion of the debris on nearby Forest Service Road 399 will be cleared to allow Union Pacific access to a water drainage system. Coyote Creek flows perpendicular to the roads, clear and cold just now, as does Salt Creek below it.

"We'll have a water quality issue out of Coyote Creek and Salt Creek for some unknown number of years, but we're through the worst of it," Leverton said.

The last piece of this landslide puzzle: massive mounds of dirt.

Union Pacific officials first thought they would use the rocks and mud to shore up the mountain and use as part of their rail bed, but that turned out to be impossible, said Dave Orrell, general contractor for Union Pacific.

"It was almost liquid in form," he said. "There was no way you could use it as engineered fill that could withstand the weight of a train."

While they hauled in tons of rock from four quarries, they hauled away the slurry in rail cars and dump trucks. It was so wet it oozed where ever they tried to place it, Orrell said.

"It would just run down the slope until it found a flat spot," he said.

The railroad and Forest Service eventually selected five dumping locations, all of them along the railroad tracks, about 27 acres total to dump 1 million tons of debris. They built up snow and gravel berms - Leverton calls them big bathtubs - to contain the wet mess. In some locations, the snow, insulated by the gravel berms, is still melting.

At Wicopee, a dump spot just a couple of miles northwest of the lower slide area, about 30 feet of dirt was spread over eight acres. It covers part of a 25- to 30-year old tree plantation, Leverton said. The trees were cut down first - the dirt pile would have killed them - then the wood was chipped and the mulch spread across the dirt, which doesn't have much in the way of nutrients to support tree growth just yet, he said. Plants effective at quickly adding nitrogen to the soil will be planted, while some of the downed logs from the slide are placed on it to create habitat for a range of plants and animals. Though trees may eventually come back in this area, a broad meadow attractive to elk will be the most likely result, he said.

The Forest Service will monitor all the dump sites. Should invasive species take hold, Union Pacific will come back, remove them and replant.

The railroad has paid for the cleanup, including the hours of Forest Service staffers such as Leverton, who functioned as an agency liaison during the work. Union Pacific hasn't disclosed its costs, said Orrell, in part because restoration work continues.

Railroad officials have previously said it will be a multi-million-dollar effort.

Forest Service and railroad officials both say they worked well together, with daily briefings that dealt with a range of issues. Among the records requested by The Register-Guard were documents that verified close contact between the forest service and the railroad, including a contractor hired by Union Pacific whose sole focus was to make sure the railroad complied with federal law.

On-site explosions at a nearby rock quarry couldn't be carried out until foresters had considered the possible negative impact on nearby northern spotted owls, for example. And one of the debris piles encroached on a site that had historical significance, a scatter of obsidian suggesting it had been a place where Indians made tools. Where they ran into conflicts, both sides were professional about working them out, Leverton said.

"Considering the magnitude, the Forest Service did an exceptional job trying to get us back in service." Orrell said.

But not everyone is happy with the federal agency.

Some environmental advocates believe that human activity was at least partly responsible for this slide and they'd like to see logging on such steep slopes banned on public forests.

"Doing any sort of risky practice on such a major artery is a foolish gamble," said Josh Schlossberg with Cascadia Ecosystem Advocates. Schlossberg visited the slide during the winter, snowshoeing in to see the logging road above it, and revisiting it last week for another look.

Management practices aside, landslides are a feature of the local topography, Leverton said.

"The Cascades are one of the youngest land forms on the planet," he said. "Because they're young, they're steep. Gravity and precipitation are trying to make them flat as quick as they can."

FRAZIER LANDSLIDE: by the numbers

1 million tons: Weight of debris removed from the site, about the weight of 25 naval super aircraft carriers

700,000: Tons of rock trucked in to stabilize the mountain

340,000: Cubic yards of snow removed

660,000: Board feet of timber removed

200: Number of workers during construction peak

105: Days before full service was restored on the rail line

77: Days before partial service was restored

30: Daily average work train round trips hauling material in and out

0: Number of available hotel rooms in Oakridge during construction