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I see the moon and the moon sees me down through the leaves of the old oak tree.
The things that makes this place so special is that we have Phillips Creek, Dean Creek,
and Mount Scott Creek.
These trees used to fill the Willamette Valley.
They're huge and they're beautiful and only a small portion of them are left.
97% of Willamette Valley legacy white oaks have been lost to development in the last
150 years.
One percent of legacy white oaks in the valley resides on public land and is within our grasp
to protect.
Clackamas County has a plan to build a road through the last unprotected remnants of the
old-growth white oak forest between the Clackamas and Columbia Rivers.
The Sunnybrook Boulevard West Extension is part of an outdated transportation mindset
for the Clackamas Town Center that views nature through the prison of a traffic grid.
Sunnybrook Boulevard needs to come off the regional transportation plan and we need to
get all of these trees protected in a wildlife preserve or something of that nature.
The
Three Creek Natural Area is located in the Kellogg Mount Scott watershed just outside
of Portland, Oregon in unincorporated Clackamas County.
The 89 acre site is classic old-growth upland white oak forest that slopes to the oak savanna
below.
Quite a few wildlife species here in this area and I would just give them the quality
of the habitat and the habitat size and its location.
You can expect a lot of different species to be using this area for either part or their
entire life cycle from deer, coyote, raccoon to some of the smaller animals.
Oak trees, big oak trees have deep road bark and it's those nooks and crannies that provide
bats, the roosting places that they need and the reality is we just don't have a lot
of those big trees, big oak trees left on the landscape so wherever they occur that's
viewed as an extremely valuable resource.
There's really two ways I think the Three Creek Natural Area is exceptional both from
a biodiversity perspective within the Mount Scott Kellogg Creek watershed and in the context
of the larger region and then also from a human access and access to nature perspective
and both are really significant with this site.
Brother and I, we call this area the Bunny Park because we really don't know what the
name really is and there are so many bunnies that.
Traditionally, people have come to the confluence of the Three Creeks for millennia to partake
in fishing and food gathering opportunities.
It's also a beautiful place for a hike.
It makes me feel really good to be able to walk through a forested area that's undeveloped
that you don't have to see a shopping center or a sidewalk or a street or a curb.
Three Creeks is a phenomenal location for our outdoor education programs.
It is one of those places that few people know about in the neighborhood and they absolutely
should.
There's so many unique places to visit, unique habitats in this location and when we bring
kids here, they are astonished and amazed.
We have over, I would say, 100 to 150 children visiting Three Creeks every week.
The Southgate neighborhood that contains the Clackamas Regional Center and Three Creeks
Natural Area is one of the most park-deficient areas in the region.
It has something like 13% of the population within a quarter mile walking distance of
a public park or green space.
At a regional level, it's about 50% of the population.
So very deficient parks and natural areas.
The upland forest is super important to the wetlands.
They buffer the riparian zone along the creek and wetlands themselves.
The more buffer you have, the more healthier your watershed is going to be.
We're about a half mile upstream from the Three Creeks on Mount Scott Creek once again
right against the Mount Talvert Natural Area, which is a really beautiful little mountain
up here.
The riparian zone is perfect and beautiful.
The only problem is when they rebuilt Sunnybrook Boulevard, they put in a huge retaining wall
really close to the creek to support the road.
So this is one of the things when we heard that they were talking about Sunnybrook Boulevard
through Three Creeks, it was totally unacceptable.
It's one of the reasons we fought so hard to keep it from coming down there.
Adjacent to the Three Creeks is Clackamas Community College, a growing institution with
a vision for the area.
Still want to see this campus being a model of as energy efficient as it can be, as green
as it can be, the best connection from the indoors to the outdoors, this notion of integrating
habitat to be able to feel like the park, the woods in some ways comes right up on campus
and have that experience.
I think we'd like to see a lot of that happening here on this site and probably less parking
lots and less streets and roads.
We're not just talking about protecting the forest that remains.
When this access road was built 15 or 20 years ago, there was an oak forest here and they
cut a lot of it down to make this road and to plant the lawn and to install ornamental
vegetation.
There's a lot of opportunities right here to reforest this area with an oak forest.
The development around the Three Creeks has eradicated the vast majority of the ancient
white oak forest with a mix of highways, expressways, and boulevards that today all lead to the mall,
Clackamas Town Center.
The proposed Sunnybrook West extension continues a policy of environmental abuse at the Three
Creeks, the origins of which begin with a journey downstream 150 years into the past.
In 1858, on the banks of the Willamette River in the lively port city of Milwaukee, Oregon,
a dam was built at the mouth of Kellogg Creek.
The dam powered a flour mill that went boom then bust before the clock ran out on the
19th century.
The dam became a fixture and was stoutly rebuilt and repaired several times.
So it's interesting to be miles upstream from the Willamette River and still be so impacted
by Kellogg Dam which blocks this entire watershed from an easy migration out to the Willamette
and the Columbia beyond that.
For coho and steelhead, even the resident cut throat trout, those areas that are currently
dammed once open, those official move right up in there and we are seeing spawning occurring.
Which is really exciting because right now there's a big project in the city of Milwaukee
to take that dam out.
It's probably the biggest thing that could happen in this watershed is take out the blockage
at the mouth where the Willamette is.
Man, you'd have every school kid from the region down here and instead of driving to
Bonneville Dam and looking at fish, you come right here to your little tiny creek in everyone's
backyard and you're like, dude, salmon in our streams.
There's biology, hydrology, ecology, everything.
The 20th century introduced chemical compounds unseen before in nature and the wetlands have
paid a high price.
Today, a grove of poplar trees work like straws to draw out the toxins in a quarantined area
of the three creeks.
We have here is a great example of what happens with all the garbage and litter in our urban
areas.
It eventually gets washed into streams and ends up in a log jam like this full of garbage,
bottles, plastic, a lot of plastic making its way out to the giant plastic island out
in the middle of the Pacific.
The wetlands still deal with an intense runoff of oil, gas and pesticides.
If you've paved just 10% of a watershed, you'll start impacting the stream.
So these watersheds are about 50% paved or more, so these streams are really impacted
severely.
Well, impervious surface just increases flow and potentially pollutant load to streams.
It gets there faster and without proper water quality treatment before it reaches the stream,
it can decrease the water quality.
The Kellogg-Mount Scott Basin is pretty impervious.
It's highly built out, pretty high impervious areas, and the things the West is doing there
is to make sure that our detention facilities and our infrastructure is treating water quality,
addressing flow, street sweeping, activities that can really remove pollutants and decrease
flow coming off those impervious areas.
The 21st century began with an intrepid crew of volunteers meeting at the three creeks
to help restore it.
They dubbed themselves the tsunami crew, and like a wave of restoration, they began to
remove invasive species and replant native trees.
So when I first came out to three creeks, one of the first things that really struck
me about this place, here we live in this region, in this greater Portland metropolitan
area, where we have a lot of agencies that invest a lot of resources into this idea that
we should engender a strong sense of place in the hearts of our citizenry.
We have this idea that if we can create a strong sense of place, and if we can create
this sense of stewardship over the land, then we'll ensure sustainability into the future.
I started the tsunami crew back in 2001, and it's a group of people, volunteers that just
come out every Sunday for a lot of years, and plant trees and cut weeds generally have
a great time out on the three creeks.
Where are the sunlight and the water without the competition from the grass?
It's like finding a buried treasure.
And when I came to three creeks and learned about the work of the tsunami crew, I saw
that that's happening here.
It's happened here organically.
It just, it came.
It's the best output that all of those agency efforts could ever hope for.
And it just happened all by itself because there's a group of people who come out every
week all year long and just steward this place because of the sheer love that they have for
it.
We need to take plants straight from the site, the same gene pool as what's already here,
and recreate it in a big brush mat along the creek that will hold, the roots will be holding
the banks in, the trees will be shading the creek, all things we need, and providing wildlife
and habitat, and buffering the creek so there's not a lot of road traffic or garbage traffic
or whatever that gets into the creek.
So it's pretty good.
It all got chewed last year.
It was taller last year.
It all got chewed down, but the willows and cotton would sprout so quick that their chest
high again at the start of growing season.
Over the past 10 years, the tsunami crew have planted over 21,000 native plants and removed
a mountain of invasive Himalayan blackberry.
But why?
We're saying yes to the salmon, we're saying yes to clean air, we're saying yes to...
We're just saying no to the stupid road, man.
In 2008, Clackamas County unveiled the Sunnybrook West Extension, a five-lane environmental
disaster that shifted the work of the tsunami crew from restoration to education.
The impact of the five-lane road disaster was coming off the hill and into all this
area.
It was really apparent from the start that the county was prepared to cut down a lot
of the old growth, white oak forest.
And we're talking about putting a road, basically cutting off the regional center and the neighborhood
from this natural area that has such potential for recreation and access to nature.
End up with this exact spot, because we wanted to know where the road was going through,
what it was going to impact.
Where I'm standing right now is the biggest oak tree on the three creeks, and it's been
estimated at up to 450 years by OSU biologists.
So we knew this was really important.
We knew the one right next to it is really important, and all these medium-sized trees
that are 200 or 300 years old are extremely important as well.
Hundreds of years old oak trees being chopped down.
And to build a road, we have so many roads around here that to build yet another one.
I think the county road engineers had any idea what they were cutting, and it kind of made
us mad, and we knew that we had to educate quick the people that were going to do it.
We worked with all the neighbors, neighborhood groups, City of Milwaukee, local businesses
we talked to.
We even pounded on doors along Harmony Road.
And the three creeks found a political ally.
By the end of the meeting, when someone asked her what she thought, she said, I hear that
you guys want no Harmony or Sunnybrook.
And that's the message she took back to the review committee, and from then on, Deborah
Barnes, the counselor from Milwaukee, was our strongest ally and the best opponent at
the elected level.
Well, I brought it up for a couple of reasons.
First off, the City of Milwaukee, our council has made a decision on the situation involving
the county's request to strip many old growth trees from the area in order to make a road
go through.
And let's be clear, it's a road.
It was this huge idea that we were really surprised and horrified about.
It was kind of interesting, the first meeting with the road folks, they were discussing
Harmony because Sunnybrook Boulevard was a done deal.
The amount of times they said Sunnybrook Boulevard is a done deal over and over and
over.
It's like, okay, we got it.
You think it's a done deal.
But they didn't realize, and what we knew is we didn't want Sunnybrook Boulevard more
than they wanted Sunnybrook Boulevard.
I came forward and said, no, after I've heard from residents, this isn't an area that we
want to pave over with asphalt.
Considering where we stand today, it's a place where I want my children and grandchildren
to enjoy for the rest of their lifetimes and for generations to come.
It's a classic kind of forced wars of the Northwest.
And after the first meeting, I looked at one of my cohorts in the meeting and said, hey,
we're going to be tree sitting this thing in about five or eight years or whenever it
is.
But there's no way they're cutting these trees down.
They're too big.
Allowing to public pressure, the Clackamas County Board of Commissioners sent the transportation
engineers back to the drawing board to come up with a new design.
The county wanted to spend millions of dollars to put a road through this intact, Oregon
white oak habitat forest.
Regionally we're spending millions of dollars to try to acquire land to attempt Oregon white
oak habitat restoration.
This is crazy.
Several miles north of the three creeks is an example of how protection of nature is
viewed by the generations who have followed.
It used to be a wasteland to a lot of people, a place they were scared to go into a beautiful
place that they love to go.
And we have seen really the whole neighborhood transform.
Great natural resource for the people who live here.
This is perfect.
But the first time I ever went to three creeks, it just blew me away.
Because not only did you not have to move as many of the invasive species, the natural
ecosystems there.
All the native plants, the huge oak trees, the native oak trees, just incredible.
We only have a few here in this park.
And they are beautiful, but three creeks has a lot.
There are still occasionally people who talk about Selwood Freeway, where we are now and
where the spring water trail goes through, there would have been a freeway connecting
the Selwood Bridge to the eastern parts of the county.
If we had a freeway, instead of that, we would have a desolate landscape that would
never be repaired, that would never be an inviting community space.
And I just feel so thankful that many years ago, a lot of people had a vision.
I move that the City of Milwaukee requests removal of the Sunnybrook Extension Project
from the original transportation system plan.
In November 2009, the Milwaukee City Council forwarded its unanimous request to remove
Sunnybrook West Extension from the regional transportation plan.
Clackamas County responded within days.
Sunnybrook West was full speed ahead.
Historically would have had thousands of oaks like this in this area, or now down to a few
dozen.
The loss of tree canopy is increased temperature, sediment load, decrease in water quality basically
in the streams.
Metro, the Tri-County government, formally adopted the regional transportation plan.
This guiding document for local planners includes the Sunnybrook West Extension.
This inclusion was met with deep disappointment by the City of Milwaukee.
The City of Milwaukee relies on groundwater for our drinking supply, and the impacts of
another road in a delicate habitat could really have a significant impact on our groundwater
supply as well as the rest of our natural resources in Milwaukee.
We're working hard to remove the dam on Kellogg Creek and restore that to a natural salmon
habitat, and adding another road to the system will just diminish the results of what we're
trying to do.
And that just led to this fantastic discussion of what is native?
Why is it here?
What is special about the Willamette Valley?
What is special about the Portland area?
And the idea that you can have five minutes from the Clackamas Town Center, this beautiful
campus field, we've had mink spotted here, we've had a variety of wildlife, we have an
amazing life here, this is a gem.
In May 2011, the road engineers came back with the county's new design.
Clackamas County held an open house to showcase the revised Sunnybrook West Extension.
Maps and people circled the room.
The tsunami crew came with different maps and set up in the hallway.
We're just saying you're putting a road that's going to impact some of the last three percent
of the Oregon white oak in the Willamette Valley.
Clackamas County commissioners Paul Savas and Jim Bernard were in attendance.
The tsunami crew leader was one of many tugging on the commissioners ears.
I think our point is, so you have an intersection that's impaired, but you also have the Mount
Scott Creek that's severely impaired and the oak forest, which is some of the remaining
three percent of the white oak forest.
When you pave ten percent of the watershed, you start impacting the streams and for Mount
Scott and Kellogg and Deer Creek and Phillips and all these in here, you're like 50 percent
at least.
In an environmental organization, Clackamas County Urban Green peppered the commissioners
with facts.
We spent a lot of time talking to the commissioners about the reason that that road was being
built.
I think it was really fortunate for us that the consultants and the planning department
were there and stated that that primary purpose of that road was to alleviate congestion in
one area and since we had maps that we could use to demonstrate, it wasn't terribly difficult
to show that by taking the congestion that was in one area, it simply moved it a half
mile to another area.
Ninety-nine percent of citizens in attendance that night had one response to the Sunnybrook
Boulevard West extension.
Yep, enjoy the tour?
Yeah, I did actually.
Yeah, great.
I really appreciate that.
The canvas is totally out now.
Sea of blue down there.
Is that right?
Yeah, it's really nice.
What do you think?
Fortunately, Commissioner Bernard and Commissioner Savas, I think, saw the wisdom of saying whoa.
The Linnwood neighborhood especially would be significantly impacted by another road
in the neighborhood.
We don't need to bring these huge roads.
My opinion is it's a project that really should go away.
We should look at some alternative ways to spend the money that could accomplish the
same thing.
As you can see around our beautiful area, we don't need to have asphalt here.
What we need to have are opportunities for children to play, families to gather, and
a community to feel safe, and that's what this area is like now without the asphalt.
To the surprise of no one, two days later, the Sunnybrook Boulevard West extension was
shelved for reevaluation by the Clackamas County Board of Commissioners.
I think we have the opportunity since that is now basically on the shelf off the table
to do something even better.
I don't know exactly what that will be yet, but I'm certainly wearing my Metro Regional
Counselor hat totally dedicated to coming up with a better solution, a way that we can
really grow this campus, protect that habitat, and move people the way that they need to
be moved around the community.
I could go on and on, but the list is long.
There are a lot of wildlife currently here and through protection and enhancement of
areas like these, the values are even greater.
A park within our community, wildlife sanctuary, that I think it would be a great place to
preserve.
That road is still in the county plan.
Personally, I don't think the road will ever be built.
I know that everybody is concerned that as long as it's in the plan, that there's a possibility
that it can.
But the way the county works is you can't take that road out until you have a new plan.
That's actually happening right now.
There's a transportation system plan that's taking place that's making plans for the next
10 years.
Those different values about the way that we look at our world are playing out in this
space and that fascinates me and it drives me out here to be involved in three creeks
to see how that dialogue will play out.
Currently the road project, the Sunnybrook Boulevard project is shelved and that's as
of the summer of 2011.
What we're trying to do is now that we all know it's not a good plan and the habitat
here is too important to put a road on, we're trying to get the Sunnybrook Boulevard extension
off of the regional transportation plan.
We're calling on these commissioners, the same commissioners who shelved this project
who realized that this is not a good road project to take this project off of the regional
transportation plan and then also protect the three creeks and set up the boundaries
so it contains all of this old growth forest, really protecting and then enhancing the surrounding
areas.
That's what we're looking for.
Saving the last remnants of an old growth forest or cutting it down will demonstrate
the values of the early 21st century more than anything we say, write, or film.
A commitment to healthy watersheds, wildlife protection, and forest preservation takes
action and political will.
Contact the Clackamas County Board of Commissioners and explain the belief that the three creeks
and the old growth white oak forest are more important than a mall, a road, or a car.
Learn out that some things are more important than that.
That's what we're looking for.
That's what we're looking for.
All I can think about is how I'm getting down.
That's what we're looking for.
That's what we're looking for.
