The Oceola Fish and Game Club is urging fish and game clubs located all around Okanagan Lake to help support restoration efforts on Mission Creek as it flows through Kelowna.
The Oceola club has donated $7,500 to the project and also committed to an estimated $10,000 to $15,000 more over the next three years as a project to widen and restore Mission Creek to a more natural flow has picked up some serious momentum lately.
"Our club is located in Lake Country but our members are from all over the valley," said Oceola director Mike Kamann, who also donated $1,000 of in-kind work from his company, which does habitat restoration work. "Mission Creek is really the heartbeat of Okanagan Lake. It's the main tributary and historically it used to feed the whole flood plain that is now Kelowna. Because it was diked years ago, a lot of wildlife and riparian values were lost. All of those values contribute to the health of the lake."
The Oceola Club has thrown its support behind a group known as the Mission Creek Restoration Initiative (MCRI). Led by the City of Kelowna, the group also includes the regional district and the province, the Friends of Mission Creek, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, the Westbank First Nation and the Central Okanagan Land Trust. The group is focussed on restoring Mission Creek back toward its original flows, before dikes straightened the creek. Originally as it entered Kelowna, Mission Creek would have wandered and meandered for 33 kilometres before dumping into Okanagan Lake. As Kelowna developed and dikes were built to control the flow, the creek was changed and now hurtles over the same stretch of land in just 11 kilometres.
But things are starting to change and the Mission Creek Restoration Initiative is nearly complete the first phase of restoring Mission Creek closer to its historical route. Working on a 800 metre stretch from the Casorso Bridge downstream, the south-side dike has been moved, increasing the width between the dikes on either side of the creek from about 40 metres to about 140 metres wide. That will allow Mission Creek to meander and more naturally flow as opposed to the water careening down a straight line towards Okanagan Lake.
Kamann says bringing a more natural flow back to the creek will have numerous benefits.
"It ail increase the amount of spawning areas for the stream spawning (kokanee), it will benefit the quality of the water going ion the lake and that's huge. It will promote more wildlife right from frogs to birds to deer and all of those have some sort of minor or major input into the health of the creek and the lake itself."
The widening of Mission Creek is going to be a long process that can only take place when land-owners near the creek agree to partner with the MCRI. In this case MCRI, led by the City of Kelowna, purchased the first parcel of land from the Casorso family in 2012. The next parcel followed and by 2014 the group partnered with engineering students at UBC Okanagan who worked on the design of the new dike.
Construction began last year and as of this week it is largely complete with finishing work on the dike and clean-up still to take place and in the summer (when allowed by the Department of Fisheries) more work will take place to help create a few meanders.
Several fish and game clubs have already stepped forward with donations but Kamann says there are more located in every city around Okanagan Lake that can step forward to support the project because it benefits the entire region. Along with the Oceola donation and ongoing support, Trout Unlimited donated $5,000 and the Peachland Sportsmen's Association also $5,000. There are many other funding partners as well. The City of Kelowna had set aside $1.4 million to help with property acquisition while two major grants gave the project a serious push as MCRI and its partners were awarded a $250,000 grant from DFO and a $380,000 grant from the Habitat Conservation Trust Fund.
At the City of Kelowna, Todd Cashin is the man in charge of the project and has been working on it in various levels since 2001 with the regional district. But it was spring of 2007 when Mission Creek saw flood levels hit a 50-year high that really signified it was time to get to work. By 2012 and '13 three separate flood events occurred on Mission Creek as water levels reached unprecedented levels.
It's this flooding that is the main reason for the work, along with creating better habitat for fish, and wild creatures living along the creek, said Cashin.
"Absolutely everyone benefits from Mission Creek whether it's in your homes with water quality, helping out irrigation for agriculture and supporting rainbow and kokanee fish stocks and species at risk," said Cashin. "That stuff is all really important but in my mind what's more important, with climate change as the big train coming at us, is Kelowna is on a flood plain. We've seen flooding in other communities and we need to pay attention to that. Moving the dikes back and giving the creek some more room is an important first step."