- Mark Smith and his family run a campsite that backs up to the North Fork Toutle River in the U.S. state of Washington, which was swamped with sediment and runoff from the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
- The fine-grained volcanic sediment smothered the waterway, making it difficult for native wildlife and vegetation to become reestablished even decades after the eruption.
- But over the past five years, the Smith family, together with natural resource experts from the Cascade Tribe, the Cascade Forest Conservancy, the Columbia Fish Recovery Group, and the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, have reintroduced beavers to the property.
- By building dams and canals, the beavers have established deeper pools and wetlands along the North Fork Toutle River, allowing native trees and fish to repopulate the area.
The Smith family referred to the back part of their property as “the wasteland.”
It opens up to the North Fork Toutle River in the U.S. state of Washington, which was swamped with volcanic sediment and runoff from the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
The sediment was further backed up when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a sediment retention structure, or SRS, in 1989, and then raised it again in 2013, less than a mile, or a kilometer and a half, downstream from the Smiths. The goal of the project was to hold back sediment that would otherwise threaten the Columbia River’s shipping routes and southwest Washington communities. But it created a backlog of volcanic material that filled the stretch of the North Fork Toutle River that ran beside the Smiths’ property and to the dam.
After the SRS was raised the first time, Mark Smith and his wife, Dawn, watched over the next few years as volcanic material accumulated for miles along the riverside portion of the Eco Park Resort: “So if you can imagine seeing a big gray sediment dune of no life, just ash, sediment from Mount St. Helens, volcanic material,” Smith told Mongabay by phone.
Smith runs the nearly 80-acre (32-hectare) resort, a lodging and campground site alongside the Spirit Lake Memorial Highway. It offers the closest overnight accommodations to the volcano, so he often hosts groups of restoration ecologists and scientists.
Through these researchers, and his family’s involvement in local environmental advocacy groups, Smith met folks working on programs to bring back beavers (Castor canadensis) throughout Cowlitz county. When they asked if Smith would be interested in seeing beavers return to his property, he said yes.
“The beaver education started for me then,” Smith said. “I never really knew … all the different things that they contribute to an ecosystem.”
Welcoming back beavers
In 2021, a group of scientists hosted a minicourse about beavers on the Smith property in collaboration with nonprofit organization River Restoration Northwest. There, they taught restoration practitioners, researchers and local environmentalists about the beaver’s role as an ecosystem engineer, how to discern beaver-suitable habitat, and how to build beaver dam analogs — structures that mimic the function of dams and create beaver-preferred habitat.
Once Smith was granted approval by the state, natural resource experts from the Cascade Tribe, the Cascade Forest Conservancy, the Columbia Fish Recovery Group, and the Cowlitz Indian Tribe began bringing beavers to his property. It “sort of became a bit of a haven” for beavers, said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, who met the Smith family while lecturing at the minicourse at the Eco Park Resort. Fairfax told Mongabay that many of the beavers brought to them were at risk of being euthanized after coming into conflict with humans in other areas.
Over the past five years, the Smith family — Mark and Dawn, their daughters Cheyenne and Kristin, and Kristin’s children — have facilitated the relocation of 58 beavers to the Eco Park Resort. Some beavers have stayed on the property, and many have moved on via connected waterways to adjacent land, where their populations have taken hold.
“It is really amazing to see how their engineering activities are essentially helping regreen this volcanic wasteland,” Jonah Piovia-Scott told Mongabay. A biology professor at Washington State University, he came to the Eco Park Resort for one of their beaver sessions.
Smith said he’s watched as the beavers’ return prompted the revegetation of willows and alders in the parts of the property most inundated with sediment. Beaver lodges and dams turned the sediment plane into a wetland and deepened existing ponds. Beaver canals began popping up — Smith said they look like “honeycombs” — creating interconnecting channels spanning acres of waterway across his family’s land.
As beaver activity increased, Smith said he’s seen ducks, geese, deer and elk begin returning to his property. What’s more, the ponds the beavers have created serve as rearing habitat for fish like rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and Coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch).
“It’s an extraordinary example of literally one person making a decision that this is worth it, figuring out how to do it, connecting with people, and being persistent,” Fairfax said. “Honestly he’s probably restored miles and miles of stream at this point and saved a lot of beavers’ lives.”
Establishing baselines
Regional experts look to relocate beavers on land like the Smiths’ because the animal’s activity has one of the greatest potential impacts for restoration.
This is especially true of montane river ecosystems, said Jesse Burgher, the Cowlitz Indian Tribe’s wildlife program manager. He works on the tribe’s beaver relocation program, which recently went viral for its “Kit Cam”: a camera livestreaming a mother beaver and her two tiny kits who were soon to be relocated.
Burgher has lectured on beavers at the Eco Park Resort, and most of the beavers brought to the Smiths’ property have come through the Cowlitz Indian Tribe’s beaver relocation program.
Burgher said that at river headwaters, beavers can store and slow water flow, decreasing sedimentation rates exacerbated by the Mount St. Helens eruption. In turn, this allows vegetation to develop stronger root systems, stabilizing weak riverbanks. Encouraging beaver activity at these higher-altitude ecosystems creates habitats that can restore degraded systems that native fish species rely on.
Furthermore, Burgher said that as climate change decreases the amount of snowpack in the Cascade Mountain Range, enhanced wetlands built by beavers could serve as an alternative solution for water storage mechanisms.
“In many ways, beavers are helping us care for the land,” Bill Iyal, chair of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, told Mongabay. “Their work benefits entire ecosystems and their presence helps create a wealthier watershed across the ancestral territory.”
But despite their efficacy, beavers’ engineering isn’t protected as a large-scale restoration solution across the wider region. Fairfax said this is due to the persistent perception among many people of beavers as nuisances, which has historically limited long-term research on their benefits in areas where populations have been restored — something local tribes have known about for a long time.
Because of this, “so much of the energy and enthusiasm for studying beavers and their impact is not coming from the scientific research community,” Piovia-Scott said. “It’s coming from [people] on the ground, like Mark, like folks who are running beaver reintroduction programs.”
The risk of a raise
Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it would once again be raising the spillway crest of the sediment retention structure by 10 feet (3 meters).
In an emailed statement to Mongabay, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the Portland district said this is a necessary flood risk mitigation strategy for communities downstream.
“If left unmanaged, that sediment could raise riverbeds, reduce river capacity, and increase the likelihood of flooding to homes, farms, roads, businesses, and public infrastructure,” the statement said.
Smith said the SRS inhibits the passage of native fish, and raising it disregards habitat that will be affected by excess sediment, such as the North Fork Toutle. He also said raising the SRS would undo all of the beavers’ completed restoration work along the river from the past five years — including destroying the habitat the beavers have created for native fish.
Smith told Mongabay he’s planning to file a lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He said his property serves as a testament to increasing nature-based solutions over human-made ones to continue dealing with excess sediment while protecting downstream areas from floods.
“I’m 67 now, and I’ve been here 35 years on this property and I’ve watched it die twice and I’m gonna have to watch it die again,” he said.
The U.S. Army Corps Engineers said in its statement to Mongabay that it has “received a copy of Mr. Smith’s Notice of Intent to Sue. Because this matter involves threatened litigation, we are unable to comment on his claims or allegations.”
With the lawsuit looming, and the threat that restoration progress on his property will be lost, Smith said he will continue “to support our furry friends and try to make sure that they have the opportunities up here to expand.”
Even if the SRS is raised and the beavers’ habitat is destroyed, Smith said his family would be the first to help them start anew.
“After the raise wipes the area out a little bit, and we turn [more beavers] loose up in here, they’re going to walk down and go ‘here we go again,’” he said. “And being a beaver, you’ll see them work with what they have, and continue to try, and do their job in nature.”
Banner image: An ecosystem engineering beaver hard at work, preparing a branch for structural or food use. Image by GrandTetonNPS via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
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Cite this article
Isabel Gil (2026). Beavers brought a volcanic wasteland back to life. Now it’s under threat. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-323058Credits
