Mission Creek, Flowing Again

Once upon a time, Mission Creek (or whatever its name was then), flowed into the Sound just north of Olympia Town. Then some people bridged it, and then some other people dammed it, making a sluice-gate where they could capture the salmon foolish enough to enter.

Then, decades later, some other other people got funding to remove the dam, to open Mission Creek once again to Budd Inlet and the Puget Sound.

Inland finally flowing into Budd Inlet

This is "restoration," which earns its quotation marks because it follows not the historically  or archaeologically or LiDARly documented channel, but instead an engineer's plan. Doing so meant digging into an archaeological site, which had been written off by archaeocrats as less-than-significant. (As it happens, some of that site was salvaged, as described here under the keyword "Mission Creek".)

You're looking at high tide, not stream flow.

So now the stream flows free,...at least as far as East Bay Drive. Maybe the beautiful shell beach will persist, or maybe not. Restoration is a guess what used to be, and a gamble on its return. Contractors get surveyors to show them where the 3:1 slope gives way to the 1:1, and work accordingly. One entity satisfies a mitigation requirement, another satisfies grant requirements, and another gets a truckload of archaeological data. But now the machines are gone; the work is done and paperwork is being wrapped up. Tides and waves, rains and freshets will get to work, re-sculpting this artificial natural estuary.

The end result may not be exactly what was there before, but it's a heck of a lot better than the dam and culvert that blocked Mission Creek until a month ago. There's a free-flowing connection to Budd Inlet instead of a 3-foot concrete tube--creatures will find it much easier to drift, swim, and crawl in and out of the estuary.