TILLAMOOK WATERSHED

Tillamook Watershed
Tillamook Watershed

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Landscape

The Tillamook River is approximately 12 miles (19 km) long. It drains an oceanside valley in the foothills of the Coast Range. It is bordered by the Nehalem Watershed to the north and the Nestucca Watershed to the south.

The river rises in southern Tillamook County in the Siuslaw National Forest, approximately four miles from the ocean, due east of Cape Lookout. It flows initially east, then generally north, through a long broadening farming valley, passing west of Tillamook and entering the south end of Tillamook Bay. For its lower one mile it shares a channel with the Trask River.

The Tillamook watershed is made up of five river basins including the Miami, Kilchis, Wilson, Trask, and Tillamook, all of which drain into Tillamook Bay.

History

The name, "Tillamook", means "land of many waters". There seem to have been many different spellings of the word Tillamook over the years. In the journals of Lewis & Clark, the Indians and area known as Tillamook was referred to as "Kilamox" and "Killamuck". As with many of the Pacific Northwest towns, Tillamook was first inhabited by Indians but huge numbers died during a smallpox outbreak and the white man began to dominate the population.

Tillamook Head

Tillimook Head (Hallmark Inns and Resorts)

In 1933, huge forest fires known as the "Tillamook Burn" destroyed over 250,000 acres of timber. The Tillamook Burn was the collective name for a series of wildfires that struck the northern Oregon Coast Range mountains. The fires brought profound environmental, economic and social change to Northwest Oregon. The total economic loss was estimated to be in excess of 600 million dollars.

[Reforestation] can never compensate for that tragedy we call the Tillamook Burn, as somber a sight as to be viewed this side of the Styx. There they stand, millions of ghostly firs, now stark against the sky, which were green as the sea and twice as handsome, until an August day of 1933, when a tiny spark blew into a hurricane of fire that removed all life from 300,000 acres (1,200 km) of the finest timber even seen. It was timber, too, that had been 400 years in the making. It was wiped out in a few seething hours which Oregon will have reason to remember well past the year 2000. - Stewart Holbrook

Today's Tillamook State Forest is the product of a monumental reforestation effort undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. More than 72 million seedlings were planted by hand -- many of them by school children and volunteers -- across the blackened landscape.

Today

Tillamook, the watersheds largest town, has a population of around 6,000.

Use of the Tillamook watershed includes agriculture, forestry, and shellfish harvest practices. Land use varies within the watershed; primarily with agriculture on privately owned land in the lower watershed and forestry in publicly owned land of the upper watershed. Over 180 combined animal feeding operation (CAFO) permits have been issued in agricultural areas, while six oyster growers and two to three clam divers use the bay for shellfish harvesting.

The valley of the Tillamook south of Tillamook Bay is the primary location for the dairy farms that make up the cooperative of the world famous Tillamook Cheese Factory.

To learn more about the Wilson-Trask-Nestucca 4th field watershed, visit the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Surf Your Watershed website.

Sources

M. Constance Guardino III and Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel. Sovereigns of Themselves: A Liberating History of Oregon and Its Coast. Vol III. Abridged Online Edition. 2008. Maracon Productions.

Katherine M. Busse and Ralph J. Garono, Ph.D. A Time to Harvest: Water Quality and Shellfish Management in Tillamook Bay, Oregon. 1997. HTML document. Based on Busse, K. Water Quality and Shellfish Management in Tillamook Bay, Oregon. Coastal Management 26. 291-301.

Compiled by John Ame, Science Writer (2007)