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Signs of the Yakoun’s power

Shifting logs along the Golden Spruce Trail are almost certainly signs of powerful flooding
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Part of a massive Sitka spruce log got dragged through the soil just beyond the Yakoun River at the end of the Golden Spruce Trail, which trail walkers noticed in December. Noel Wotten, who maintained the trail over 25 years and often fly-fishes the river, said he doubts it was a machine, but almost certainly the force of the Yakoun bursting its banks and flooding the nearby forest. (Andrew Hudson/Haida Gwaii Observer)

When the Yakoun River bursts its banks, Noel Wotten goes with a pail to the nearby woods in search of stranded fish.

“A lot of people don’t know just how much the Yakoun River can flood,” said Wotten, who often fly-fishes the river.

The land beyond the Yakoun riverbanks is quite flat, Wotten said, so the flooding can reach about half a kilometre into the surrounding forest.

“When it drops out, there are little pools here and there — they’re often filled with all kinds of fish,” he said. Once he found young cutthroat trout, steelhead, and pink, coho, and chinook salmon all in the same day.

“Every year, I go with my pail and go along and scoop them out, and take them to the river,” he said. The fish are just fine and swim off — otherwise the drying pools are a certain death.

“It’s something that’s probably always happened and always will.”

Wotten spoke with the Observer after reading a story about walkers on the Golden Spruce Trail who recently noticed that the top of the fallen Golden Spruce / Kiidk’yaas had gone — the top six to nine metres of its trunk had been jutting out over the west bank of the Yakoun.

Curiously, just before the trail reaches the east bank, it also seemed that a machine had been used to shift a large Sitka spruce log.

Now a painter and co-owner of the Sitka Studio gallery in Tlell, Wotten used to work in forestry, and for about 25 years one of the jobs his company had was maintaining the Golden Spruce Trail.

After surveying the shifted log by the trail’s end and seeing no sign of machine tracks, Wotten said both it and the missing Golden Spruce top were almost certainly the Yakoun at work.

“I was actually surprised the Golden Spruce stayed as long as it did,” he said, remembering how in the late 1970s, the river ran strong enough to take out a bridge on the mainline forestry road.

“There is a lot of power there.”

Draining some 477 km2 of land, the flow of the Yakoun River usually peaks after heavy rains in October, November and December.

Data from a hydrometer in the river show its level rose to a dramatic peak on Oct. 25 of last year, a day after rainstorms set off landslides across Haida Gwaii, including one that shut the highway between Skidegate and Queen Charlotte.

Wotten said even people with mixed feelings about “catch and release” would enjoy going out with their own fish pail the next time the Yakoun floods.

“Usually they’re small ones,” he said.

“But they’re all very valuable wild fish that it would be very sad to have lost.”