PHOTOS BY CLAIRE FRANELL
Volunteers of all ages arrived at the Oxbow Trail property near Riverfront Park in Hermiston Saturday morning to help plant trees.
The 2014 Leadership Hermiston class, administered by the Hermiston Chamber of Commerce, facilitated the Oxbow Tree Planting Day. The goal of the project was to plant 7,000 trees in a 20-acre section of the Oxbow Property.
Planting began at 6:45 a.m., and the project facilitators had hoped for at least 50 volunteers to show up. They got much more than that; Greg Silbernagel, executive director of the Umatilla Basin Watershed Council and co-chairman of the Leadership Hermiston class, said that more than 200 people came out to help.
“It’s only 9:30, and we will probably be done in less than an hour,” Silbernagel said.
The Oxbow Property was purchased by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 2000 under provisions of the Umatilla Basin Project Act of 1988 as part of a fish restoration plan. The 222-acre property extends 1.5 miles along the east bank of the Umatilla River.
Agricultural production in the area has led to the removal of an estimated 97 percent of floodplain forests from the banks of the Umatilla River, according to the Umatilla Basin Watershed Council. This has resulted in an unnatural increase in bank erosion and water temperature which has lowered survival rates among juvenile steelhead and salmon.
Having received a grant from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board in 2012 as a trial to restore a strong floodplain forest, the Umatilla Basin Watershed Council targeted the publically-owned Oxbow Property for tree planting in hopes of improving fish and wildlife habitat along the river.
This project will also have removed invasive weeds such as thistle, mullein and poison hemlock from the area and will provide shaded hiking on the Oxbow Trail.
To learn about more volunteer opportunities related to this project, see the Umatilla Basin Watershed Council’s Oxbow Tree Planting Event Calendar.
For information on future Leadership Hermiston classes, contact the Hermiston Chamber of Commerce at 541-567-6151.
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