Walking down the scenic Hertz Trail, large Douglas fir, cedar and hemlock spire from the steep slopes to the left, looming over the glistening surface of Lake Whatcom. Further down the trail, six dump truck loads of soil mixed with flattened 100-foot trees course down the mountain into the lake, evidence of an erosion problem threatening the drinking water of more than 95,000 Whatcom County residents.
In 2008, the Whatcom County Council voted to turn more than 8,000 acres in the Lake Whatcom Watershed from timber harvested forestlands into a park. One goal was to reduce the transport of phosphorus into the lake. Phosphorous is a pollutant that fosters algae and plant growth and requires additional amounts of chlorine to make the water drinkable. But park visitors could further degrade their own water supply as increased traffic from hikers, mountain bikers and motorbikes on old logging roads could cause more erosion, leading to even more landslides that put more phosphorus into the lake than there is now.
"In a watershed which serves as a municipal water supply, the most important resource coming out of that forest is not wood; it's water," said David Wallin, professor of environmental science at Western Washington University.
In 1998, the lake and several of its tributaries were put on an impaired waterbodies list -required for every state by the federal Clean Water Act - because of low dissolved oxygen levels. Phosphorus in the lake acts like a fertilizer, encouraging algae and plants to grow. Increased phosphorus creates larger algae blooms that are consumed by bacteria as the plant life decays, removing oxygen in the water as a result through a process called eutrophication. This process creates zones of low oxygen in the lake that are less habitable to fish and aquatic life, but also require more chlorine treatment to disinfect the water to make it drinkable, according to a study from the Washington Department of Ecology.
April Markiewicz, the associate director for the Institute of Environmental Toxicology at Western, said the Whatcom watershed naturally has large amounts of phosphorus in the soil. Increased phosphorus levels in the lake due to human activity have been the driving force for improving lake quality, Markiewicz said.
The highest concentrations of phosphorus loading are associated with urban development, but in total, there is more phosphorus entering the lake from the larger undeveloped forested areas used for logging over the past century, Markiewicz said.
"We're paying the price for what the [loggers] in the 1890s and the 1930s did," said Fred Miller, local Bellingham resident and lake-front home owner.
Seth Cool, Conservation Associate of Conservation Northwest, a non-profit organization in the Pacific Northwest with the goal of preserving natural forests, said logging was a booming industry throughout Whatcom County in the early 1900s. When the Great Depression hit in late 1929, many private timber companies that owned the property around Lake Whatcom couldn't pay the taxes on the land, so they "cut and run," abandoning the land after aggressively harvesting it.
The State of Washington took over management of the abandoned properties, designating them as Forest Board Lands: publicly owned lands where revenue from timber harvesting goes to schools, universities, hospitals and other public facilities, to be managed by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
Remnants of old logging roads are scattered throughout the steep terrain of the proposed park. At the turn of the century, timber companies built roads using destructive methods that persist in the landscape today, Wallin said. Bulldozers built roads by pushing soil over the side of precarious slopes and filled canyons with massive amounts of soil with little environmental awareness, Wallin said.
Many of the soil slumps and slope failures in the watershed are from past logging road development practices. The loose soil, mixed with logs and shrubs, is pummeled with severe winter rainstorms that rush water down the steep slope, eventually ending up in the lake, said Tom Westergreen, resource manager at the Great Western Lumber Company.
"The whole watershed has been manipulated in some way through timber harvesting since the area was developed," Westergreen said. "There were no environmental regulations or anything back in the turn of the century, and so compared to today, it's like night and day."
New water quality and environmental regulations have reshaped the rules for modern timber harvesting in the watershed. The old methods of building roads are no longer in use today, but the imprint they left on the forest is clearly defined. The road's are now used as social trails: hiking and biking trails that branch off main trails or roads and are not included on official maps.
Increased traffic from hikers and mountain bikers over social trails along steep slopes will increase water runoff from seasonal streams, worsening the erosion of loose soils and carrying more phosphorus to the lake. The amount of soil it would take to fill a wheelbarrow could begin a landslide that would collect water, trees and more soil on its descent. By the time it reached the bottom, the landslide could accumulate enough debris to fill a dump truck.
Property owners in the watershed were required to inventory all old roads no longer in use and bring them up to new road construction standards. The standards require proper ditches and culverts to be installed within three to four years, according to the Landscape Plan, which was instituted by the county for public timberlands in the watershed.
The DNR has completed this inventory for lands in the watershed and spent more than $1 million on the repairing and upgrading of half a mile of old roads. But there are still more abandoned roads unaccounted for in the reconveyed land, which constantly trigger massive slides of phosphorus-laden soil into the streams. There were no grants and funds available to do this, so many of the old roads were never inventoried, Miller said.
Whatcom County's plan to turn the reconveyance from harvested land into an old growth forest will contribute to the reduction of phosphorus loading into the lake and protect the watershed, but it will take some time before there is a noticeable improvement to lake quality, Wallin said.
However, if the county doesn't account for the increased traffic and unregulated motor biking on old logging roads, which lack effective drainage, there will likely be even more landslides with greater impact on water quality than if it was left as timberland, Miller said.
Eventually the steep slopes will stabilize, but that could take anywhere from 50 to 200 years. In that time, phosphorus loading from the reconveyed lands could get worse due to high public traffic on the trails along steep slopes, Miller said. The county isn't anticipating the cost of fixing the drainage on the old roads and the impact they have on the quality of Whatcom County's main source for drinking water.
"What's the [Whatcom County] Parks Department going to do when they have to spend $3 million to come out and deal with something that actually is a risk to everybody's drinking water?" Miller said.
CJ Huxford studies environmental planning and policy. He has been published in The Western Front.