Field Program

Our experiences on hitch are deepest through growing connections to place and ecosystem. I'm Daniel Hoelting, and I am interested and working in wildland restoration on Krassel WRT 2. I have been reading books about ecological restoration while on hitch, and one was Bringing Back The Beaver by Derek Gow, about the restoration of beavers to Britain. It included vivid descriptions of both the animals and the environments they maintained.

Beavers, as a keystone species, are crucial to an ecosystem's natural health, maintaining its diversity by providing habitats for numerous species. The book described how habitats for insects, amphibians, and small mammals are created by beaver activity, as well as grasses and flowers in the stilled waters behind their dams.

When we had flown into Big Creek, we hiked downstream looking for a campsite. The sidecreek we walked down looked like a place where beavers would have lived in pre-modern times. The stream meandered on a flatland below high flood banks, with young trees following its path. As we got closer there were pools of water. We set up camp on this flat plain, near the creek, giving us quick access to water. While settling in we saw it for the first time. A dam! Or something that looked a lot like one. The pooled water behind it was about a foot higher than where we stood, and it was made up of bits of inch-wide branches.

We had found multiple similar dams, one at our bear hang site, and another below the creek crossing in view. My suspicion was raised even more by the cut branches and stumps with shavings off to each side. But, maybe the dams collected debris, and maybe the stumps were cut to maintain the trail.

A few nights later, I was filling up our water before going to bed. It was evening and getting dark under the creek trees. I poured it out all at once but heard two splashes. I looked in the direction of the noise across the creek. A little further down, I saw it. A beaver! This was the landscape, this was an inhabited dam, and that was a beaver!

I was quiet and watched it. One thing the book did not mention is that they are cute, looking both like a rodent and a bear cub, with little round ears. They are also big, almost the size of a labrador. It would swim up to the shallow creek path, its feet touching the bottom, but when it got to the middle it would turn around, one, two, three times. On the fourth time, I realized my being there was going to stop it from going home.

I walked back fifteen feet, out of sight, so it could go home.

We saw it a couple more times over the next few days and called it Mr. Beaver. Each of us got a chance to see him with our own eyes. Mr Beaver had tended to the area, cutting down trees, and his backed-up stream had made a place where short plants were growing, and there were plenty of insects. This very closely followed what the book had said, enriching how I saw the landscape around me, intertwining education with experience.