Ecosystem resilience looks like healthy creeks running through our communities

In Bishop, water is never far away. It runs through creeks and ditches behind homes on Mumy Lane, along Underwood Lane and Reata Road, and past the picnic tables at People’s Park. Wherever water flows, green follows: towering cottonwoods, native willows, wild rose, and thick stands of rushes and sedges.

Ask anyone who has taken an after-work swim at Artesian Wells or spent an afternoon fly-fishing the upper Owens River: our connection to this water runs deep.

These green ribbons are among the richest habitat in the Owens Valley. The valley’s waterways are home to birds, wildlife and native fish found nowhere else, including the endangered Owens pupfish and the Owens speckled dace. And this habitat isn’t tucked away in remote places. It runs straight through town.

Where fire and water meet

Riparian corridors are the lush strips of plant life along streams. They feed and shelter wildlife and keep creeks shaded and cool. Seasonal floods once reshaped streambanks and cleared out old growth. Today, with water diversions and managed channels, many of these waterways run through neighborhoods without that natural reset.

Dead wood and dense brush build up along the banks. Eastern Sierra wind, slopes and dry summers can then carry fire along these corridors like a fuse. Fire managers call it riparian wicking. In Bishop, that fuse runs past homes, local businesses, roads and power lines.

The gap in fuel work

For years, fuel reduction crews worked around riparian areas instead of in them. Working near water means sensitive habitat, layers of permitting and careful methods, and many corridors cross land owned by different agencies and utilities. So the corridors were left out, and the fuel kept building.

Whitebark’s planning team calls it the treatment gap. The Bishop Riparian Resilience Project is designed to close it, and both the Inyo and Mono County Community Wildfire Protection Plans name riparian fuel work as a top priority.

Five partners at one table

A single creek in Bishop can pass through land owned by a water utility, under a power line and beside a county road, all within a few blocks. No one agency could plan this work alone. This year, Whitebark brought five partners together around the same map:

• Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), owner of the riparian corridors where the work will happen
• CAL FIRE, the state’s fire agency
• Eastern Sierra Council of Governments (ESCOG), the regional partnership of local governments
• Inyo-Mono Resource Conservation District
• Southern California Edison, the utility running power lines through the area

92 acres, planned with water in mind

The project covers 92 acres of riparian corridor and roadside in and around Bishop, along Mumy Lane, Reata Road, Underwood Lane and South 3rd Street, and at People’s Park. The goal is strategic fuel breaks that slow fire down while keeping the watershed working.

Every rule in the plan is built around the creek:

• Hand crews near waterPeople, not machines, clear dead wood and non-native ladder fuels in sensitive areas.
• Equipment buffersNo machinery within 100 feet of flowing streams, or 50 feet of seasonal ones.
• Canopy staysAt least 75% of native trees and 50% of native understory are kept within 100 feet of streams.
• Channels untouchedNo material is removed from the stream channels themselves.
• Clean burningChips are spread no more than 2 inches deep on average, and any pile burning happens away from water under an approved smoke plan.

The result: corridors that still shade the water and shelter wildlife, with far less fuel to carry a fire into town.

Bishop is the biggest of five

Bishop is the biggest piece of a larger riparian effort across Inyo and Mono Counties. Working with the Eastern Sierra Wildfire Alliance, ESCOG, the Fort Independence Tribe, CAL FIRE, Mono County and the Riparian Resilience Working Group, Whitebark has five riparian projects planned on about 258 acres:

• Bishop, 92 acres along town corridors
• Walker, 66 acres along the West Walker River
• Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory, 35 acres along Convict Creek
• Fort Independence, 33 acres along water diversions from Oak Creek
• Sunny Slopes, 32 acres along Rock Creek and Lower Rock Creek

Each one uses the same careful approach. Together they give the Eastern Sierra a working model for fuel work along its creeks and rivers.