It’s in the Water
Maggie Peyton Makes Protecting the Upper Nehalem River Watershed Her Life’s Work
Published by West Oregon Electric Co-op
The Nehalem River watershed has always been a part of Maggie Peyton’s life. Growing up in the North Plains, Portland, and Hillsboro areas, her extended family came to the Vernonia area to picnic, swim, and gather crawdads.
“That was our summer fun,” she says. That first exposure to the Nehalem River watershed eventually became a passion to protect what, for Maggie, are sacred waterways. As a founding member and now the executive director of the Upper Nehalem Watershed Council, Maggie has worked for more than 25 years to try and restore endangered salmon runs, cool water temperatures, and restore streams degraded by decades of logging to their natural state.
It’s been an effort that required a unique skill set. It required bringing together diverse partners and stakeholders, navigating numerous bureaucracies and agencies, piecing together funding from multiple sources, developing timelines to complete projects, and gathering scientific data to back up the work.
“There’s a certain magic,” Maggie says. “I don’t know, somehow, I see how things could work. The whole point was to get everybody sitting in the same room with some form of focus and recognizing that there were so many things to do that we could easily agree on, and that those things were also fundable or volunteers would support them.”
Getting Her Feet Wet
Maggie stands inside a failing culvert on Oak Ranch Creek in 2015. It was replaced with an open-bottom culvert in 2018 that allows fish to pass higher into the watershed.
Maggie moved to Vernonia in 1989, and the UNWC was founded in the summer of 1999. She was a volunteer at first, along with other grassroots activists working to protect the watershed. It all started when some neighbors who were concerned about plans to allow small cargo planes to fly into Vernonia Municipal Airport knocked on her door. Maggie says that through that and another issue involving the expansion of the local golf course, she learned a lot about going through a public process, working with neighbors and attorneys, and how environmental laws and regulations are implemented, particularly in relation to watershed issues.
She began working with the local chapter of the Isaac Walton League, another group interested in water issues. She sampled water temperatures in the Nehalem River and other tributaries and planted trees to help try to shade and lower water temperatures.
“That’s when I first learned the Nehalem was too hot and often lethal for salmon during the summer,” she says.
The idea to form a regional watershed council took shape, and salmon recovery became a priority for Maggie.
“At that time, the governor’s Coastal Salmon Restoration Initiative was a big political grassroots endeavor by Gov. John Kitzhaber to have Oregon work to recover native salmon,” Maggie says. “That’s where I was literally able to spend time with the governor and get incentives from the grassroots efforts to show up and do something for our community. That’s what he allowed us to believe we could do. And I did. His outreach came to our first watershed council meeting. I’ve been embedded in the movement to save salmon the entire time.”
The effort received financial support from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board to fund a paid coordinator position, which Maggie assumed. She worked with the Columbia Water and Soil Conservation District as its first fiscal agent. A nonprofit was formed in 2003, with a board of directors, and Maggie was named executive director several years later.
“I always was an executive director in practice, but it took a while for the title to catch on,” she says. “Certain things had to happen. I had to execute certain high-end, difficult maneuvers through quagmires of bureaucracy and paperwork. Policies, processes, people, personalities.”
Making a Difference
1 of the first projects the group got involved in was the Habitat Restoration Jobs Program through the Department of Commerce. The program provided funding to hire out-of-work fishermen in the Lower Columbia River region who were suffering because of declining salmon runs. Maggie says keeping cattle out of rivers and streams was a hot topic at that time, and they were able to individually engage with local landowners because they had funding.
“We ended up working with Finnish gill netters who built and repaired about 14 miles of fence and helped us start a native plant nursery,” she says. “We had 1 fisherman work with us off and on for over 17 years.”
Over the years, Maggie helped develop and undertake many successful endeavors on behalf of the Nehalem watershed and the people, wildlife and plants, and trees that make it their home. She helped initiate the Nehalem River basinwide activities. That led to the formation of the Lower Nehalem Watershed Council, which she coordinated for the first several years.
She became adept at finding agencies that could provide funding for restoration projects, writing successful grant applications, being accountable for following the rules, and, most importantly, effectively delivering completed projects. She built a track record as someone who could bring together various stakeholders, including timber companies and private landowners, to support UNWC-initiated projects.
Maggie gives a lot of credit to the engaged citizens who served on the UNWC Board of Directors over the years. She’s developed a good working relationship with the Vernonia School District’s forestry program to help manage the UNWC self-sustaining native plant nursery. 2 years ago, UNWC took over the organizing of Vernonia’s annual Salmon Festival, an educational and fun fall harvest event that celebrates the return of the salmon to the Nehalem watershed.
Some major projects the UNWC helped initiate include replacing the culverts and bridges that blocked fish passage with open-bottom culverts, allowing fish to migrate upstream. It also placed large, woody debris into streams to help create natural habitat for juvenile fish while also slowing stream flows and cooling the water, and it planted trees to shade and cool streams.
The UNWC also takes part in pilot projects to install beaver dam analogs— man-made dams that encourage beavers, considered a keystone species in Oregon rivers and streams, to return and colonize waterways and help restore their natural functions. The group is continuing multiple long-term data gathering projects to count fish, measure water turbidity and track water temperatures.
Against the Current
Maggie’s work to protect the environment hasn’t always been popular with everyone in a region known for logging for generations. But she’s never been afraid to speak her mind and tackle issues she believes in, which has helped make her work successful.
“We’ve been fortunate to have as much emphasis in our region on stream restoration work, watershed health, and salmon population recovery,” Maggie says. “It’s not that we haven’t had our fair share of scuffles learning how to do all this, because we have. There’s been a lot of conflict, and some of them you have to ride out for years and years in order to resolve them. But we have survived the trials and tribulations of trying to get it all to work.”
1 sure sign that Maggie’s approach to protecting her watershed is working is the ongoing partnerships she has developed, especially with timber companies. Many projects over the years have taken place on timberland owned by Weyerhaeuser, a huge timberland owner in the region. Maggie has managed to carve out a solid working relationship with the company.
“We did complete several projects this summer on their land,” she says. “I received a quite enthusiastic and unexpected, but delightful email from them saying, ‘Let’s do more!’”
As she looks back on what has become her life’s work, Maggie knows it all started with a child’s love for the rivers and streams in the Nehalem Valley.
“The truth of the matter is, I played in the Nehalem or worked here or lived here my whole life,” she says. “There’s something that gets in your DNA. I think it’s in the water.”