Hanford Reach National Monument area protects more than 195,000 acres of nature and wildlife

The Hanford Reach National Monument, established in 2000, is a crescent of land with the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River flowing through it. It’s also a major incubator of salmon. The Department of Energy calls it “the largest natural animal and plant community in the arid and semi-arid shrub-steppe region of North America.”

The Reach has remained largely pristine, protected from agriculture and development, because it was a security buffer around the central Hanford site – one of the most contaminated spots on earth. But the Reach is still home to a wide variety of plants and animals, including endangered plant species like the White Bluffs bladderpod and the endangered ferruginous hawk. We get a first-hand tour from Mike Livingston, the Washington Fish & Wildlife regional director for south central Washington.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Hanford Reach National Monument was established by President Bill Clinton in 2000. The nearly 200,000 acres once served as a security buffer around the Hanford nuclear reservations factories, which are now one of the most contaminated sites on earth. But you wouldn’t know that when you’re on the Reach. It’s an undeveloped crescent of land that includes the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River in the U.S. and one of the few remaining large-scale shrub-steppe ecosystems in the Western U.S.

We visited the Reach yesterday with Mike Livingston. He is the regional director for South Central Washington for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. We joined him on a boat tour down the Columbia on a hot summer-like autumn day, with Hanford on our right and the undeveloped sagebrush landscape to our left. After a while, we pulled over to that non-Hanford shore for some welcome shade under a clump of willow and elm. I had Mike describe where we were.

Mike Livingston: Yeah, we’re at the Hanford Reach on the Columbia River, and I can see the white bluffs, which is a nice backdrop on the left bank of the river. And then also we see central Hanford in the plateau. We can see some of the old reactors from the Manhattan project and also a nice gravel bar here. We’re parked right on the river.

Miller: What goes through your mind when you look around here?

Livingston: Beautiful. It’s just absolutely pristine as far as just the landscape and the scenery. You can see for a long ways, which is a nice feature of Eastern Washington. We just have these wide open spaces.

Miller: What do you think this landscape, the land around here would look like if the Hanford Nuclear reservation had never been built?

Livingston: Likely, particularly the deeper soil areas, where there is flat ground, would have been turned into irrigated agriculture. So you would see a lot of center pivots, alfalfa, potatoes, corn, perhaps a lot of orchards. This place is fantastic for growing a lot of orchard crops: apples, pears and cherries. And maybe even some vineyards and hop fields.

Miller: So you’re saying it would look a lot like the rest of Central and Eastern Oregon and Washington.

Livingston: Yep. Anywhere there’s water available, it would have been converted into irrigated agriculture.

Miller: How much of this habitat, this ecosystem, did there used to be?

Livingston: There was 10.5 million acres of this shrub-steppe habitat in Eastern Washington, historically.

Miller: And now, how much?

Livingston: We’ve lost about 80% of it. So, it’s been converted to other uses, whether it’s agriculture, or houses in cities, and roads, and whatnot.

Miller: It’s one of the ironies of this place that it was a super top secret, in the end, very, very toxic industrial site that preserved the land around it.

Livingston: Yeah. It’s an irony that we don’t maybe appreciate completely because of the fact that they had to protect this land for that Manhattan project, that it preserved many acres of the native habitat.

Miller: You said shrub-steppe.

Livingston: Yeah.

Miller: What is shrub-steppe?

Livingston: Shrub-steppe is a term we use for a sagebrush-dominated landscape that also has an understory of grasses. Steppe is the Russian term for grassland. So you see sagebrush dotting the landscape and then underneath that, there’s bunch grasses – bluebunch wheatgrass – and a number of flowering plants as well.

Miller: What makes this shrub-steppe special?

Livingston: It’s a very unique environment that is really shaped by the aridity of the climate here. It provides habitat for a lot of more specialized species that you wouldn’t find elsewhere, say, in the forest, like animals that need to burrow into the ground: burrowing owls, ground squirrels. And it’s just got this real fragile feel to it, but also a super harsh feel to it as well.

Miller: Is the fragility real?

Livingston: It absolutely is. It doesn’t take a whole lot to disturb this native landscape because of the fact that the plants are super dependent upon less disturbance than you would see in a forest, where if you went in and cut some trees down, it grows pretty quickly. Here, if you disturb it, you could lose the native plant community pretty quickly.

Miller: Can you tell us about some of the species that call this place home?

Livingston: Yeah, on the land, you have a lot of large mammals: mule deer, elk – we have Rocky Mountain elk that live here. Jackrabbits in between, in the small and medium size, plenty of coyotes. We have plenty of birds, from burrowing owls, ferruginous hawks, to a lot of songbirds, Brewer’s sparrows, sage sparrows, and sage thrashers. So, just a real diversity of the bird community as well. Then you have reptiles – some short-horned lizards, plenty of snakes and amphibians – that are living in the margins between the river and the uplands.

Miller: Am I right that there are some species that now you can only find in this Hanford Reach?

Livingston: One of the unique things on the Hanford Reach itself and the river is that we have the largest, and probably the only really spawning, fall Chinook population left in the lower 48 states.

Miller: And they’re here right now, right? I mean, on our way up to this much quieter area, we passed a lot of folks in fishing boats. They’re here for the fall Chinook?

Livingston: Yeah, they’re here fishing for the fall Chinook – “upriver brights,” they’re called. And they are here naturally spawning. There’s two hatcheries on this river that provide salmon as well.

Miller: What have the salmon that got back up here, what have they had to contend with in the course of their lives to make it back here?

Livingston: Well, first of all, when they migrate out as juveniles, they have to navigate the hydroelectric dams – McNary, John Day, Dalles, and then Bonneville – and they got to get through there with a lot of predators, non-native fish, that are here. And then they have to survive the avian predators. There’s a whole slew of challenges that they have to face before they get to the ocean. When they get out to the ocean, they face a lot of challenges there as well. We’ve had some warming ocean temperatures, and these fish migrate as far north as up to Alaska waters. They spend a couple of years up there and then they end up returning back here. And then they have to go right back over all of those four ladders …

Miller: Fish ladders, or whatever the passageways are, four dams, and finally back here to spawn and die?

Livingston: Yep. Yep.

Miller: And bring with them some of the nutrients from the solar-powered ocean deep and bring it back here to the arid, inland west.

Livingston: That’s right.

Miller: Every time I hear that story, I find it so moving and so amazing.

Livingston: Yeah, that marine-derived nutrients is something that, when you don’t have a naturally spawning population, they’re not bringing that back. And when they die on the shorelines, they provide food for a whole lot of species – birds and insects – and then that just continues to feed the system.

Miller: So you mentioned the dams downriver that they have to contend with. But upriver, as I’m facing right now, this is not a managed waterway. This is the only part of the Columbia up to Canada, right, that’s not managed by humans?

Livingston: Yes.

Miller: What does that mean to you?

Livingston: It means that we have this amazing stretch of the river that kind of gives us a glimpse of what it used to look like, historically from the beginning, from the headwaters out to the ocean.

Miller: Minus the reactors in the distance.

Livingston: Minus the reactors in the distance, yes.

Miller: You fish here, right? Am I right?

Livingston: I fish in the Columbia River, yep.

Miller: So do you ever fish around where we’re talking right now?

Livingston: Not here, no.

Miller: Why not?

Livingston: Because I don’t want to destroy my boat on the rocks and gravel. [Laughs]

Miller: [Laughs] OK. So it’s not because of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Livingston: No.

Miller: It’s because it’s shallow in parts here, and you like your boat.

Livingston: That’s right. Yes.

[Both laugh]

Miller: How much do people explore the land of the Reach as opposed to the river?

Livingston: Yeah. So there’s portions of this that are open. The central Hanford portion’s closed to the public. But this Wahluke Slope over here, I’d say in the spring in particular, is a very popular place, time for people to come and hike and enjoy wildlife in the native landscape.

Miller: How much do you think about everything that Hanford is when you’re around here?

Livingston: It’s hard not to have it in the back of your mind when you do field work out here, you’re counting birds, you might be interacting with people that are recreating out here, and you can always think of it. But the open spaces here are wide, and you can see the legacy of the Hanford project here. So it’s usually in your mind at some point or another.

Miller: That’s been one of the surprises to me, just in the last couple of days, is I’d heard about Hanford for, I don’t know, nearly 20 years at this point. But I’d never been here until the last couple of days, and I didn’t realize how close you could get. I mean, on the boat ride here, we were, I don’t know, maybe half a mile away from some old reactor. Some of them, you can still see some of them have been cocooned, I guess is the word. But I didn’t realize just how close I would be able to get.

Livingston: Yeah. Yeah, isn’t that kind of interesting?

Miller: Yeah.

Livingston: When you think about what was produced there – plutonium – and the hazardous waste that was created after that manufacture of the plutonium, it is interesting that you get that close.

Miller: We heard yesterday about the first native elk hunt on what in English we call Rattlesnake Mountain that happened this past December. But we’ve also heard that there are thousands more elk on the landscape now than the landscape can sustain. What are the plans going forward?

Livingston: So we’re in communications with the federal government, with the treaty tribes about future hunts that might include the public. The tribes – the Yakama Nation in particular – they’re having ceremonial hunts, and I believe they’ll probably do another one. Some of this is all being discussed and none of it’s certain. And we’re just trying to figure out a path forward on that.

Miller: What’s the problem with that many elk?

Livingston: They go on to private land that surrounds the federal land, and they cause crop damage when they’re out there eating the crops. They do trailing through there and knock fences over. So they’re just doing a lot of crop and property damage.

Miller: So that seems like one conservation or management issue you’re dealing with. What are some of the other pressing ones right now for this land?

Livingston: Wildfire is a huge issue that we’re dealing with throughout the arid West. And when fire comes through in these sagebrush dominated landscapes, it completely eliminates the sage. It also opens up a pathway for non-native plants to come in, particularly Chee grass, which is a huge challenge for us. They outcompete the native plants. And so suddenly you have this complete conversion of a very diverse plant community to no diversity, just a couple of plants, the species.

Miller: What can you do about that?

Livingston: Well, there’s a lot of effort. After fires, you can come in and seed. Sometimes you have to apply herbicide to combat the non-natives first. Then you can come in and seed, you can plant plugs, which are just bare-root plants that you stick in the ground. But it’s a challenge. And in some cases, we have examples where we’ve been successful, in other places it’s been very much a struggle. And the biggest challenge is when fires return at an interval that’s way too frequent. That’s what we’re seeing, where this landscape historically probably experienced fires from 25 to 100 years frequency. Now, it’s five to 10 in some cases.

Miller: What are your hopes for this land going forward?

Livingston: Well, the protection is gonna continue, and we think that’s an awesome thing. I think that our ability to increase our knowledge on how to do restoration following fire is only increasing, and I think folks will figure it out. And then we need to figure out a way to slow down the fire cycle so that it’s not returning so quickly. There’s a lot of great minds working on that. So I’m hopeful that we have opportunity to figure that out.

Miller: Do any stories come to mind about this place?

Livingston: So this river fluctuates quite a bit from when they’re releasing water out of the Priest Rapids Dam. And I was on a survey where I was trying to identify and count blue heron rookeries. And I was actually on the central Hanford portion, I was walking over to the river, and I had my GPS unit telling me the tree should have been right in front of me. And I could not figure out what the heck happened to him. Like somebody must have cut it down, but there was no evidence of roots or anything. And then I realized the river is pretty high, and I looked down, and I’m looking at the top of the tree underneath the surface of the water; the river was that high. And this was a spring where there was just a ton of snow up in British Columbia, and so the river was just reacting to that. And the dams above the Hanford Reach, they were just releasing as much water as they could. So this place can really fluctuate on flows.

Miller: So that’s something that’s at least a 10-foot difference.

Livingston: Oh, it was probably 25 feet, because that tree was 10 feet to 12 feet itself and then it was over top of that. So, yeah, it was pretty impressive.

Miller: Do you have a favorite season here?

Livingston: This time of year. September, October, into November, is about the best. The temperatures are moderating. The sun angle is such that the shadows are nice and long, and it’s beautiful. But it’s hard to argue with the springtime when the plants are blooming; it’s just an absolutely gorgeous place. When the shrub-steppe is in bloom, it’s a hard place to beat.

Miller: Mike Livingston, thanks very much.

Livingston: Yeah, of course.

Miller: Mike Livingston is a regional director for South Central Washington for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. We talked yesterday.

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