Marta Okonjo-Reyes
Came to the trust from county planning and still reads zoning code for pleasure. Answers the office phone most mornings before anyone else is in.
About the trust
Patient work in a wet corner of Washington
We are a small land trust with a long horizon: a handful of staff, a working board, and the neighbours who turn up in the rain with a shovel.
How it started
It began with a culvert nobody would fix
In 1987 a retired county road engineer named Alma Prentice began writing letters about a pipe under a logging spur on the South Fork. It was perched a foot above the water it was supposed to carry, which meant every spawning gravel above it might as well have been in another county. She wrote to the road department, then the state, then the timber company, and finally to her neighbours — and when the pipe was at last replaced she kept the mailing list.
That list became this organisation. We incorporated the following spring, took our first conservation agreement on a hayfield above Squalicum Creek, and have been doing versions of the same thing ever since: find the person who owns the ground, learn what they want for it, and build something durable around that.
We are not in a hurry. An agreement can take several winters of conversation before anybody signs. A planted bank needs a decade before it looks like anything at all. That is the pace of the work, and we made our peace with it a long time ago.
How we work
Four things we will not trade away
Landowners first
No project begins without the family that owns the ground, and none continues without them.
Permanent, or not at all
We take agreements that run with the deed. Temporary protection only moves the problem downstream and into someone else's decade.
Local knowledge counts
Somebody who has farmed the same bench since the seventies knows things our maps do not, and we would rather ask than assume.
Quiet over loud
We would rather finish a project than announce one. The creek does not read press releases.
A short chronology
What happened, in the order it happened
1987A culvert on the South ForkLetters, then a mailing list, then an organisation.
1991The first agreementA hayfield above Squalicum Creek, signed at a kitchen table in March.
1998Into the Lake Whatcom watershedDrinking water and forest cover turn out to be the same subject.
2006Crews in the creekWe stop only writing agreements and start planting banks ourselves.
2014Volunteers take the thermometersCommunity science begins, and the temperature record gets long enough to matter.
2021Downhill to the tideThe work reaches the Samish flats and the estuary edges below them.
Who does the walking
Staff
Ben Hallowell
Walks every agreement we hold at least once a year, mostly in the rain, and keeps the notebooks that make our monitoring reports possible.
Junko Reiss
Chooses the plants, sites the wood, and decides when a reach has had enough help and should be left alone.
Ellery Pratt
Trains the volunteers, calibrates the gauges, and turns a shoebox of damp data sheets into something a hydrologist will accept.
The working area
Six valleys and the water between them
We work across the Chuckanut foothills, the Nooksack valley, the Lake Whatcom watershed, the Samish flats, the South Fork corridor and the coastal estuaries of northwest Washington.
Get in touch
If you own ground with water on it, we would like to hear from you.
There is no obligation in a first conversation, and no cost. We will come and walk it with you, and if a conservation agreement is wrong for your family we will say so plainly.