Volunteers scour Chetco River during annual checkup

More than two dozen volunteers scoured the Chetco River for trash and other problems Wednesday in the annual Chetco River Check-up.

With long-term thermometers in the river for the summer season, it was the first year volunteers were not asked to also take the river’s temperature.

 Instead, volunteers got a lesson on what kind of monitoring happens on a regular basis from Cindy Ricks Myers of the Water Quality Monitoring Program of the South Coast/Lower Rogue Watershed Councils.

That included a spot-check of the temperature at Loeb State Park: 68 degrees at 12:30 p.m.

“That’s early in the day,” noted Myers, who said the highest temperatures usually are late in the afternoon and further downstream on the river. The reading also came within just a few hours of some heavy rainfall in the watershed.

That left the focus for the volunteers on cleaning up the river and its banks.

“There were a lot of ‘treasures’ found,” said Cathy Boden, also of the watershed councils. “A plastic outhouse door, a nice Gucci-style bag, a ‘Toy Story’ air mattress, and a portable potty chair.”

Most of the trash was less exotic. Boden said she snorkeled to the bottom of a deep hole to get four soda cans.

A crew from the Trash Dogs freed a picnic table that has been stuck in the gravel near the head of tide ever since an early June storm. They joined workers from Curry Transfer and Recycling to discuss how to get out a trash bin stuck in the river at Miller Bar, but could not work on it until Thursday under a federal permit to have a vehicle in the river.

Boden was pleased with the broad participation in the annual event, which also included Oregon State Parks, U.S. Forest Service, and volunteers from Smith River to Port Orford.

“We ask a lot from the Chetco River, from clean drinking water to recreation, and yesterday nearly 30 people gathered to give back,” she said. 

Myers and Carl Page, chair of the Chetco Watershed Council, used the event to compare the readings on their equipment, getting an exact match on temperatures and similar readings on dissolved oxygen and conductivity.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, she said, monitors seven sites, mostly from bridges along the river. The watershed councils program has monitored two sites every two weeks for a year.

That conductivity measurement, Myers said, is used to watch for minerals and possible pollution in the water. 

In general, she said, Chetco waters are very clean. Tests for bacteria like E. coli are “really clean” and nitrate levels are often so low that Myers said she could use them in her lab as “blanks” or control samples.

Efforts like the Chetco Check-up, monitoring by the watershed councils and even a private study by Page are beginning to build up a baseline of data on the river, Myers said. 

A new website – www.currywatersheds.org – went live this week and will be used to post all the watershed program information on the Chetco and other Curry rivers.

“I’ve got a notebook of water quality data of Curry County,” she said. “We’re going to be loading it up. All the information and analysis will be there.”

Those interested in the work of the South Coast/Lower Rogue Watershed Councils can learn more at the organization’s Stream Trailer at the Curry County Fair this week.