Ryan Brennecke / The BulletinRon Bussard, left, and Jim Ray, both U.S. Forest Service workers, carefully remove a section of the last remaining concrete dam on Whychus Creek south of Sisters on Monday. The Pine Meadow Ranch dam removal is part of a long-term effort to restore native fisheries in the creek.

SISTERS — A pair of excavators put the first cracks in the last concrete dam on Whychus Creek on Monday, carrying out a plan built over five years of negotiations.

The heavy equipment started tearing down the Pine Meadow Ranch dam Monday just south of Sisters off the road to Three Creeks Lake. Removing the dam should take about two weeks and will contribute to the restoration of 13 miles of fish habitat along the creek, said Mathias Perle, project manager for the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council.

“It was pretty powerful to see,” he said.

The 6-foot dam will be the last of about a half-dozen concrete dams to be removed from Whychus Creek and its tributaries in recent years. Removing the dam and restoring the creek around it will cost about $2 million, with the Pelton-Round Butte Mitigation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Reser Family Foundation, Patagonia and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation all contributing money to the project.

There is a downed old-growth tree used as a diversion dam upstream a couple of miles that Perle also would like to see removed. Negotiations about a way to move fish around the tree dam are just beginning, with the diversion involving about 30 water rights holders compared with one for the Pine Meadow Ranch dam.

The Watershed Council, a Bend-based restoration group; the Deschutes River Conservancy, a Bend-based nonprofit focused on restoring flows to the Deschutes and its tributaries; and the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees the land where the dam sits, all took part in the talks about removing it.

For nearly three decades the concrete dam provided irrigation water for Pine Meadow Ranch, a working ranch with about 200 irrigated acres near Sisters. The dam diverted water from the creek into a mile-long canal that brought the water to the ranch. The ranch has already switched to a pump-fed pivot irrigation system, which pulls water from Whychus Creek downstream of the dam.

“We feel actually very lucky to have this work out this way,” said Dorro Sokol, 88, president of the ranch.

Relying on the pump rather than a diversion, she’ll no longer have to worry about annual maintenance on the canal.

Finding a plan all of the groups involved could agree on took five years of talks, with Perle saying they considered eight possibilities, including installing a fish ladder. Along with removing the dam, the final plan will leave an extra 1 cubic foot per second of water in the stream, because the ranch switched to a more efficient water source.

Since the late 1800s, a dam of some type blocked and diverted water from Whychus Creek to the ranch, said Ryan Houston, executive director of the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council. The dam sits in a flood plain, where the creek used to fan out and switch channels depending on the year and how much water was pouring down from the nearby mountains. Removing the dam helps restart this process.

“It is really allowing this flood plain to act like a flood plain again,” Houston said.

As the river spreads out, it should offer habitat for steelhead and salmon. The ocean-going fish are returning to Whychus Creek following the 2009 completion of a submerged fish tower in Lake Billy Chinook by Portland General Electric and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Whychus Creek feeds into the Deschutes River, which flows into Lake Billy Chinook. The power company and tribes co-own the dams, which for decades blocked downstream migration for the fish, until the tower was finished.

Doug Sokol, Dorro Sokol’s son, built Pine Meadow Ranch dam in the late 1980s, replacing a log diversion dam with concrete. In all, he poured about 120 cubic yards of concrete. The start of the removal Monday revealed that Sokol put the concrete over a metal frame, making for a strong dam.

“He never did anything halfway,” said Cris Converse, 62, Dorro Sokol’s daughter. Converse, who lives on the ranch, said it was sad Monday to see some of her late brother’s work go, but she was glad the changes to the creek should help fish.

“It feels like the right thing to do,” Converse said.

— Reporter: 541-617-7812, ddarling@bendbulletin.com