Sep13
Autumn field walk: the Chuckanut benches
Three unhurried hours on the lower benches, watching how water leaves a hillside in the first serious rain of the year.
Land and watershed conservancy
We look after the water where it begins.
Evening on the South Fork, looking east toward the ridge the creeks come off. Nooksack valley
The trust has worked in the creeks and foothills above Bellingham since the late nineteen-eighties. We hold conservation agreements with families who want their ground to stay as it is, we plant the banks back into shade, and we walk every place we protect, in every kind of weather, for as long as we hold it.
Founded1987
OfficeBellingham, WA
In the fieldMon–Fri 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
What we are for
We protect the ground that holds water — the seeps and shaded creeks, the wet meadows, the last unploughed benches and the tidal edge — so the rivers below them stay cold, clean and full of fish, and the people who live along them can stay put.
That is the whole of it. Everything else we do is a way of getting there: agreements with landowners, plantings that take a decade to look like anything, and a monitoring record kept by neighbours with clipboards.
How we hold it
Held in trust, permanentlyOur agreements run with the deed, so they outlast the people who sign them.
Creek by creek, bench by benchWe work at the pace the ground sets rather than the pace of a calendar year.
The landowner comes firstNothing begins on a property without the family that owns it, and nothing continues without them.
Open to walkMost of what we help protect can be visited on a Saturday morning with a guide.
From the field
Prentice Creek · South Fork corridor
The winter the alder finally closed over Prentice Creek
Prentice Creek ran open to the sky for most of a century — bright, warm and empty by August. The lower bank belonged to two families who were willing to try something slow.
We planted alder and willow in the rain, came back to weed it, came back again, and then one winter the canopy met over the water and the thermometers started reading the way we hoped they would.
On the calendar
Walks and work parties coming up
Sep27
Fall planting party
Willow stakes and alder whips along the lower bank. Bring boots and a lunch; we bring everything else.
Oct18
Estuary morning
Tide tables, spotting scopes and an hour of not talking very much.
From a landowner
“We were never looking to sell anything. We were looking for someone who would still be here in forty years, asking after the same creek.”
The Vandermeer family · South Fork corridor
Support the land
What we protect now is what remains.
Every agreement we hold started with a phone call from someone who loved a piece of ground and wanted it to outlast them. Yours would be a good one to take.