By Kurt Reidinger

Part I.

Before white settlement, the westernmost areas of Clover Creek near what’s called Parkland were anthropogenic prairie. Native people maintained these areas along with a portion of the land east of SR-7 using fire, probably for thousands of years.

After the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the open character of the landscape attracted the earliest American settlers who appropriated the land under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. [See BLM file ‘t190n030e_001RED.jpg’. ]

The land further east near upper Clover Creek was heavily timbered and likely didn’t have many farming types early on, but it did attract the logging companies such as Weyerhaeuser, Electric Logging Co., Scott & Howe, etc.

Clover Creek headwaters was also appropriated by the City of Tacoma for part of its water supply. [See annotated 1928 White’s Atlas map composite & stump photo from Richard Osness’ book on the history of Parkland.]

The loggers abandoned the area after the best timber was taken out. Tacoma abandoned Clover Creek as a water source in favor of the Green River around 1912. Farming continued in the Clover Creek valley at least up through WWII.

The attached aerial photos from 1941 show a relatively thinly settled landscape with Clover Creek, devoid of riparian vegetation and straightened in spots, flowing west through the farmlands towards Parkland. Canyon Road and 176th Street hadn’t been extended yet. The Tacoma Sportsmen’s Club was not built until around 1942. The Clover Creek valley was a dedicated farming area. I even remember seeing Clover Creek farm produce displayed at the Puyallup Fair in the 1960’s. The big wells owned by Parkland Light & Water as well as others hadn’t yet been installed.

On Wed, Oct 7, 2026 at 7:57 AM Kim Underwood <sunnyfurdays1@gmail.com> wrote: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/washington-landowners-county-owned-beaver-035000678.html

Part II.

Post-WWII agriculture was abandoned in the Clover Creek valley. Various County governments then promoted suburban sprawl and the extensive expansion of the petroleum-based car & road system (attached aerial images). Water companies were able to slake the thirst of the burgeoning human population given the very generous allocations from state government agencies (predecessors to today’s Ecology). These allocations were generally in isolation, i.e., they didn’t take into account impacts to the surface waters such as creeks, springs, wetlands, etc., nor cumulative effects of all these water withdrawals.

The consequence is a drastic drawdown in groundwater levels, which in turn was translated upward to deficits in surface waters we see today. The main Clover Creek in the Parkland area now flows rarely, even in winter. There’s some runoff from the North Fork, probably because it has a different underlying geology and an impoundment on the plateau. This is partly due to the long-term drought we’re experiencing, but it’s also excessive usage.

The figure excerpt from the recent USGS Southeast Sound Groundwater Model shows the effect of turning off all groundwater withdrawal in the aquifer below the topmost one, i.e., A3. Most of the increased groundwater level was around 10 ft, but in some areas near municipal wells it was over 100 feet (the dark concentric circles in the figure) near the Clover Creek channel. This is based on the model’s calibrated steady-state, a mix of drought and non-drought years. And it doesn’t even depict groundwater in the uppermost aquifer (A1) that holds the creek.

The abandonment of agriculture in the Clover Creek area resulted in a hybrid ecosystem in an unstable state. Highly invasive non-native plants ranging from reed canary grass, to Himalayan blackberry, to numerous others took over the landscape and riparian areas. Some native woody trees such as willows allowed beavers to move in. In some areas, there isn’t even a recognizable stream channel any more. Restoring some semblance of a native stream and riparian zone would likely take a lot of work.

Part III.

In my opinion, the imbalance in surface and groundwater quantities between streams like Clover and Sequalitchew Creeks on one hand and all the other users on the other, is a question of water rights.

Washington focuses on prior appropriation of water rights (as opposed to riparian rights), and a governing principle is contained in the phrase “First in time, first in right” (https://www.openchannelflow.com/blog/different-types-of-water-rights). The first entity to use the water has the most senior right, and those who come afterwards are junior rights holders. The latter are generally entitled to water only after the senior rights holders are satisfied.

When local tribes signed treaties with the US government in the 1850’s, they essentially relinquished their rights to the land, but retained their rights to the water. Water rights are ordered by priority date, and their dates go back to the 1850’s when those treaties were signed. Subsequent users, including the federal government, are more junior users.

But the streams themselves have even more senior dates. Their priority dates may be expressed as “time immemorial”, i.e., there is no fixed date marking the beginning of their right to the water.

The process of determining the order and water quantity (and also timing) contained in specific water rights is called adjudication. In Washington it is typically carried out by the superior courts.

When surface water rights were adjudicated in the Yakima basin, the Acquavella case, the court published a Final Schedule of Rights containing over 2000 pages.

Attached are a handful of pages from the final schedule of rights that illustrate how the water rights are handled.

Note that the US Forest Service, a department of the federal government, has a water right with a priority date of February 20, 1893. The federal government is included in the adjudication under the provisions of the McCarran Amendment, a law passed in the early 1950’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarran_Amendment).

So other federal departments, such as the Department of the Army, would likely be included in an adjudication of water rights on Sequalitchew Creek where it exploits Sequalitchew Springs, and also appropriates surface waters to divert them into Puget Sound. Before Camp Lewis was founded, the Army held annual exercises in the area around American Lake and they may have used the water from Sequalitchew early on (late 19th century), so they probably have one of the earlier rights.

The Army should be planning to switch to wells and abandon the spring system anyway. That would likely allow them to abandon that wasteful diversion canal. The move by the gravel mining companies to de-water the stream’s aquifers could also be seen as an oblique attempt to permanently usurp the stream’s water rights.

Ecology is currently working on adjudicating water rights in WRIA 1, the Nooksack system: https://ecology.wa.gov/water-shorelines/water-supply/water-rights/adjudications/nooksack

They published a report in 2020 identifying Lake Roosevelt and the Middle Tributaries (WRIA 58) as an area in urgent need of adjudication. They also listed the Spokane River system (WRIA’s 54-57) and Walla Walla (WRIA 32) as future adjudication areas, but their status is unclear. See https://apps.ecology.wa.gov/publications/SummaryPages/2011084.html

Water rights adjudication is an expensive, hence politically fraught, process. My sense is that the legislature would have to be persuaded to tackle the budgetary and logistical obstacles in the way of a WRIA 12 water rights adjudication.

Part IV.

Regarding surface water quality, I recommend reading the recent article “The Origin Story for 6PPD-quinone in Ecotoxicology” (https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.6c00205), along with some of the open access articles referenced in it.

It’s a grim picture, and describes how the petroleum-based transportation network of roads, parking lots, etc. has led to the destruction of freshwater ecosystems in the Puget Sound basin and elsewhere. It’s not just that one chemical 6PPD-quinone, although it’s extremely toxic, but a bunch of chemicals contained in stormwater runoff. That pollution chemistry is killing some of the animals directly but also indirectly as the invertebrate animals that are food for fishes are also wiped out. And that chemistry is still partly unknown.

Intermittent pulses of these chemical ‘cocktails’ have been washed into the streams for years. I suspect animals like coho salmon and steelhead are essentially locally extinct in this watershed, i.e., there are no self-sustaining populations in the watershed. There are varying numbers of coho observed at the Chambers Creek trap in recent years. But they could in fact be strays from other South Sound populations that find their way into the trap system and are retained. I don’t see significant numbers of coho in their spawning ground records, but unfortunately that could also be a function of low sampling effort (see attached table). But maybe I overlooked something. Tribal biologists may have better records.

[You may see an adult coho record for Spanaway Creek in 1978 as well as some for Ponce de Leon Creek the same year. I was a habitat biologist in the area back then. One day a hatchery guy called me up and explained they had a sizable coho surplus to deal with and asked if I had any recommendations. I told him to release some in Steilacoom Lake and also in Spanaway Creek above the lake. A few days later I walked along Spanaway Creek downstream of Bresemann Forest to check whether they trucked the fish upstream and saw a fish on a redd. So I recorded it on a survey card and gave the card to a guy in the office who handled such records.]

Adult coho were observed in the 1960’s & 1970’s, notably in Leach Creek, and also Flett. But Tacoma followed Pierce County’s lead and trashed those creeks, too. Some of the observations in Chambers Creek were made at a time when the state may have had a coho hatchery program, so there may not be a way to separate out hatchery strays from those early counts.

The presence of non-Chambers hatchery coho at the trap is a clue. They’ve arbitrarily labeled the non-hatchery fish as “Chambers wild” but they could also be strays from other systems. The migration timing overlap between Chinook and coho allows varying numbers of the latter to enter the system each year. It could be the case that wild coho have a more variable timing than hatchery fish, hence are more likely to encounter the trap in some years (table of Garrison Hatchery adult coho attached).

Even if coho and steelhead were able to successfully spawn, stormwater chemicals would likely eventually kill many of the juveniles as these species typically remain in freshwater for a year. The juveniles are also susceptible to these toxic chemicals. See, for example, the articles “Acute cerebrovascular effects in juvenile coho salmon exposed to roadway runoff” (https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfas-2020-0240) and “Pulsed Exposure to Environmentally Relevant Concentrations of 6PPD-Q Elicits Concentration-Dependent Delayed Mortality and Prolonged Behavioral Impairment in Rainbow Trout” (abstract only; https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.6c00717).

Municipal & county governments heavily promoted petroleum-based transportation. Their extensive road network collects sizable quantities of contaminated stormwater, and they dump it into streams and other surface waters with deadly effect (photos attached). I and others walked along Spanaway Creek in the Bresemann Forest area recently. The stream looked dead. I didn’t see any sign of fishes. Or other animals for that matter aside from the shells of invasive clams. That creek and the distributary Morey Creek further downstream were full of non-salmonid fishes in the late 1950’s when I first saw them. That past condition was backed up by an internal 1950’s Fisheries memo I found in the archives. Those biologists saw many fish by simply walking the streams. Fish and other aquatic animals are basically rare now.

Stormwater from these “pollution-generating surfaces” needs to be treated using AKART principles (see WAC 173-218-030). The literature repeatedly tells us that filtering out the pollutants and contaminants is the solution to this pollution. Governments at all levels, especially the counties and cities, are responsible for this problem. They created it. They need to fix it. If it means condemning the land through eminent domain so that treatment facilities can be built, then that’s what they need to do.