The helicopter-powered quest to save salmon in B.C.

Jessica Hutchinson, executive director of conservation group Redd Fish Restoration Society, remembers the long, restless night in December 2025 listening to the thrum of a rainstorm in Tofino, B.C. Lying in her bed, she hoped the culmination of years of planning, weeks of construction and eye-watering helicopter bills would hold. 

As Hutchinson lay awake, rain poured down from the steep hillsides surrounding Tranquil Creek like it normally did, sending a surge of water into the river below. But now the deluge had an obstruction: a tangled mass of around 50 trees, tufted like a giant bird’s nest and lodged into the riverbed, causing the flow to ricochet and swoop under and above. Pools and eddies had begun to form below the wooden mass of the river’s new intruder, also known as an engineered logjam, reflecting a years-long effort that is relatively uncommon in B.C.

Engineered logjams are large-scale interventions for places with large-scale problems. In Tranquil’s case, the watershed needed life support.

Redd Fish watershed restoration director Tom Balfour describes the approach as “open-heart surgery.” 

“You don’t do this to rivers that need a little help,” he says. “You do it when things are really desperate.”

Logged extensively between the 1960s and the 1990s, the valley soon became a funnel for sediment flowing down from the steep hills. The river weaving through it had become a highway of fast-moving water, and sand and gravel, threatening to bury or drag salmon eggs out to sea. By 2017, Chinook were on the verge of local extinction, while chum, coho and steelhead were in severe decline.

The Tranquil Creek valley was logged extensively in the 20th century, leading to landslides and erosion that altered the river’s flow, destroying salmon habitat. The river now runs too fast and straight to support salmon spawning like it used to.

The Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, whose territory encompasses Hiłsyaqƛis (the Nuu-chuh-nulth name for Tranquil Creek), identified the region as an urgent priority, and Redd Fish subsequently launched their multi-year quest to figure out how to help it heal.

“Tranquil’s got a special place in my heart,” Tatt Charlie, lead guardian for Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, says. Tla-o-qui-aht guardians are working with Redd Fish to restore the watershed. “It’s one of those amazing ecosystems where we could get almost all of our salmon spawning in that again and rejuvenate it for our people.”

The Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation worked in partnership with Redd Fish to develop a long-term plan for Tranquil. It required learning about what went wrong, and then gradually bringing the missing pieces back. It wasn’t cheap or easy, but ten years into their journey, Hutchinson says it’s been worth it.

Tranquil Creek’s trajectory

“The dock is very slippery,” calls out Frank Witter as he steers the silver skiff up to the small wooden landing just outside the mouth of the Tranquil Creek inlet. Witter, Charlie and fellow Tla-o-qui-aht guardian Nathaniel Currie get ready to disembark.

The dock is remnant infrastructure from the watershed’s heavy logging days. So is the dusty sorting yard to our left, replete with metal loading skids angling into the ocean, as if the valley’s forests were still full of big trees to take away.

Tranquil Creek flows into the Tranquil Inlet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Members of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, along with Redd Fish team members, reached the mouth of the river by boat, before travelling upstream to inspect the results of their watershed restoration project.

Hutchinson has come back from working on the riverbed to meet us, and we pile into one of Redd Fish’s company trucks. From the window, other signs of change soon follow: we pass a pile of pipes and metal planks near a recently decommissioned forest service road.

Witter, Redd Fish’s project manager, stops the truck as we reach a high point on the road, and we climb out to take a look. From here, the watershed’s history opens like a storybook. 

What appear to be white, fuzzy scars carved into the mountainside are actually landslides, Hutchinson tells me. These are the places where disturbance-loving alder trees have lodged themselves onto the scree slopes, their foliage still bare from the winter. 

After they lost the big conifer trees whose roots were anchors, the fine-grained sediment, gravel and jagged rocks that comprise the region’s hillsides started to fall. Logging roads made things worse, cutting holes in the hillside like a dispenser below a gumball machine. When Clayoquot Sound’s famous rainstorms bear down on the valley, they tend to pull the already-loose sand and rocks down with them. 

The valley bottom, too, had lost its defences. Once fortified by big, steadying trees like cedars and spruce, the flat-lying ground is now peppered with daintily rooted species like alder. Over time, the river got wider and flatter.

Seen from a distance, landslides appear as white, fuzzy scars carved into the mountainside. These are areas where disturbance-loving alder trees have lodged themselves onto the slopes, their foliage still bare from the winter.

For salmon, this layered onslaught of sediment spells trouble. 

All five species of North American Pacific salmon have historically spawned in the Tranquil watershed, and for salmon, spawning is a miraculous event. It requires adult salmon to survive in the open ocean, replete with fishing nets, predators and pathogens, sometimes for up to around decade. If the salmon is fortunate enough to reach its elder years, it tracks the earth’s magnetic field and then draws on its keen sense of smell to return, sometimes over thousands of kilometres, to the same stream channel where it was born.

Under the right conditions, the salmon digs a nest beneath the gravel just deep enough for its eggs to stay covered during the river’s most turbulent months. If things go wrong, baby salmon can asphyxiate beneath a buildup of sand, or if the water moves too fast, they get washed out to sea. 

It wasn’t always like this, Charlie says, as he gestures to the mouth of the estuary below us. It was once the bustling village of Hiłsyaqƛis, one of many village sites in the territory, where members of the Tla-o-qui-aht came to fish and camp each year.

Back then, surrounded by an intact forest, the now-rushing Tranquil Creek consisted of meandering paths of water braiding together. For millennia, the Tla-o-qui-aht people helped keep it that way, using various techniques to keep the populations in balance: cultivating strong-rooted crabapple trees that helped mitigate erosion in the estuary, for example, and building rock weirs to count and manage how much salmon swam up to spawn.

“You would allow the strongest of the river to go up, enough fish to make sure every square inch of gravel is spawned,” Saya Masso, Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation’s natural resources manager, says. Once enough salmon had travelled up the river to support the forest and its animals, Masso says the community would then begin their own harvest. 

Jessica Hutchinson is the executive director of Redd Fish Restoration Society, which spent years studying the Tranquil watershed along with Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation. Together, they concluded the watershed was “not on a healing trajectory,” Hutchinson says. That finding prompted Redd Fish and Tla-o-qui-aht to intervene.

That stewardship was suppressed as Canada dispossessed the nation of its territory. 

Over a century later, the Tla-o-qui-aht partnered with Redd Fish to conduct a years-long investigation to determine the damage caused in the interim, piecing together Tranquil’s history of disturbance through historic photos and terrain assessments. Their research determined logging strongly contributed to the watershed’s downhill slide. They also discovered that the watershed was unlikely to heal on its own in time for salmon to benefit.

“It’s not on a healing trajectory,” Hutchinson says. “It’s actually unravelling and becoming worse through the years.”

Witter’s team worked to stabilize the landslides, creating terraces and staking willow trees, known for their hearty roots, to prevent further movement. Throughout the lower watershed, Redd Fish planted 120,000 trees and restored 100 hectares of young, replanted forests by thinning out trees to create light to help big ones grow. 

They also turned their attention to the river. 

“Rivers take annual presence to become productive,” Masso says. “Our plan is to get to a system of abundance.”

How logjams help salmon

Western science was slow to realize that wood and salmon need each other. 

Since at least the last Ice Age, salmon’s decomposing bodies have fed and plumped the big trees of the Pacific Northwest. Those trees, in turn, feed the river, depositing big logs that create the smorgasbord of habitat types and pools salmon require to survive. Logs and logjams act like sorting hats for gravel, distributing patches of coarse and fine gravel that suit different species’ needs.

“It quickly became apparent to me in studying the rivers of this region that wood was as important as sediment and water,” geomorphologist David Montgomery says. He was one of the early contributors to a growing scientific recognition of the relationship between wood and salmon in the 1990s. 

By then, much of the damage to these ancient Pacific rivers was done. Logging companies had clear-cut many watersheds, as they did in the Tranquil. Some fish biologists even encouraged wood removal from streams and rivers, thinking it would help fish travel upstream.

This antipathy to river debris had deep roots. Large-scale “log drives” in the late 1800s and early 1900s culled wood from the vast rivers, including in the Cowichan Valley, where people used explosives to clear off wood and other impediments. 

In B.C. and throughout the Pacific Northwest, government-funded restoration crews gradually began bringing wood back in the 1990s. Early interventions were often targeted to smaller streams where a single log or two could make a meaningful impact. But big rivers like Tranquil Creek’s mainstem require something sturdier.

A short walk downriver, one of Redd Fish’s many engineered logjams comes into view, knotted and gnarled with trees piled atop one another, holding firm like a fortress as water passes dutifully around its edges.

A series of engineered logjams now interrupt the flow of Tranquil Creek. They are strategically placed to create the kinds of pools and eddies that salmon like to spawn in.

“Frank, have you seen it?” Hutchinson says, getting Witter’s attention. River debris is accumulating in the logjam, a natural addition to the engineered effort. “That’s not even us, that’s just wood piled up.”

This is the promise of a well-built logjam: it takes up a life of its own, collecting wood the river throws at it. Ideally, it becomes self-sustaining, forming forested islands in the river that contribute their own source of wood.

To match the ferocity of the Tranquil’s rainy season flows, Redd Fish had to craft logjams with around 50 trees piled atop and between each other, lasagna-style, staked in place with tall logs piled deep into the riverbed. 

“It basically is trying to mimic what an old growth tree would do if it rolled into the river with its giant root plate,” Hutchinson says. 

“It would maintain the force of the river.”

During rainy seasons, Tranquil Creek’s flows become intense. The restoration team had to use excavators to drive logs into the riverbed to ensure the logjams wouldn’t be washed away. The goal is to “mimic what an old-growth tree would do if it rolled into the river,” Hutchinson says.

These human-made jams are not cheap, requiring heavy equipment to temporarily isolate a spot along the riverbed with pumps and sandbags, and helicopters to haul wood and logs up to 15 metres tall. They also require teams of engineers working closely with traditional knowledge holders, geomorphologists and other scientists to ensure the investment and design will hold up.

“It’s a team effort,” Montgomery says.

“All those gears have to sing. But when they do, I’ve seen really good results.”

‘They’ve done all their homework’

A shock of cold hits my legs as I venture forward into Tranquil Creek, in a channel that’s surprisingly deep and aquamarine blue. 

Last year’s work is already visible, marked by the first crop of young willow trees clawing their roots into the gravel, one of many impediments Redd Fish and Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Park Guardians have installed to slow the water down. 

Redd Fish staff are here, hammering the new generation of stakes into the dry riverbed. For a moment, conversation lulls, and there’s just the sound of running water and syncopated tapping, then the conversation starts up again.

The team planted willow branches into the riverbed to help solidify its banks.

So far the outcomes of their efforts appear hopeful, though Hutchinson avoids drawing early conclusions. On snorkel surveys through the river, one of the organization’s efforts to monitor the completed work, Redd Fish has found salmon taking refuge in the pools created by the logjams, including during heat waves. In the last two years, those pools have gotten deeper.

Though costly and time-consuming, Redd Fish’s monitoring efforts and years spent studying the watershed are critical, Jason Hwang says.

“It’s an excellent example of a project in the current day that is doing all the right things,” Hwang, who is the chief program officer and vice president of salmon at the Pacific Salmon Foundation, says. “They’ve done all their homework.”

But the Tranquil faces pressures old and new.

Tatt Charlie, a tribal parks guardian with Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, says Tranquil Creek has “a special place in my heart.”

Climate change is heating Tranquil’s waters, and fish farms nearby pose additional risks for the Tranquil river’s returns, potentially spreading pathogens that can infect migrating wild salmon as they move past. At the same time, restoration efforts across the province face constant funding challenges as government priorities shift. 

This February, the mining company Imperial Metals received a permit to conduct extensive exploration work in the Tranquil watershed’s headwaters, in hopes of eventually opening a gold mine there. The Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation and representatives from the broader Tofino business community have voiced their opposition to the mine.

Many of Tranquil’s challenges remain, but for now, Hutchinson is glad to watch the river evolve on its own terms now that it’s had some help. She hopes it might be a model for what’s to come. 

“We haven’t restored a single entire watershed, top to bottom,” she says. 

“I was always hoping that Tranquil would be that watershed.”