DULUTH, Minn. _ On a sunny March morning, the Knife River comes hustling around a shaded bend and emerges into full sunlight. It is far above Lake Superior, the river's ultimate destination, at this point. This bend is several miles above the runs where steelhead anglers hope to hook powerful rainbows on their spring spawning runs.
This is where many steelhead _ Lake Superior's migratory rainbows _ come to spawn. These narrow upper reaches of the Knife and its tentacled tributaries are where baby steelhead spend the first year or two of their lives before down-migrating to the lake.
And this particular corner on the river bears all the signs of man's touches. An eroding clay bank has been reshaped and stabilized with mesh mats. The rooty stubs of Norway pines placed horizontally along the outside of the bend can be seen beneath a grassy floodplain. Elsewhere along the banks, sapling dogwoods, snowberry, red maples, red oaks and high-bush cranberry plantings reach for the sun.
All of those elements are part of a habitat project completed last summer along 2,200 feet of the upper Knife River, a cooperative project of the Lake Superior Steelhead Association _ an angling group _ along with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and several other agencies. The money came from state sales tax revenue through the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment and the Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council. The improvements on that portion of the river represented $500,000 of an overall $1.4 million grant.
Kevin Bovee, secretary of the steelhead association, stands in the sun and watches the river make its turn.
"I've been with the club since '84 or '85," Bovee said. "This has the potential to be the best thing this club has ever done."
Jeff Tillma, a stream habitat specialist with the Minnesota DNR at Grand Rapids, worked closely with the association and its cooperators on the project.
"It's a two-pronged approach," Tillma said. "One of biggest things is reducing the sediment load that's going into river. You had that big, steep eroding bank causing excessive sediment and erosion. The (steelhead) club has its own second set of values _ trying to improve fish habitat in a localized reach. They're looking at creating holding cover for steelhead fry and smolts (juvenile fish) and deeper pools for overwinter habitat."
One of the goals of the project was to create habitat that might hold juvenile steelhead in the river for two years instead of just one, said Craig Wilson, who until recently was president of the Lake Superior Steelhead Association.
When young steelhead leave the river after just one year, they are less likely to survive in Lake Superior and return as adults to spawn.
"We really assessed the river and found the best project we could do," Wilson said. "We're looking at landscape issues, water quality issues and trout habitat."
