The Beaver Creek Fish Passage Improvement project for the City of La Grande is wrapping up construction, and we think this project is pretty darn cool. Beaver Creek was historically home to steelhead, bull trout, and Chinook salmon and is designated as critical habitat for Endangered Species Act-listed fish. For more than 100 years, the Beaver Creek Dam has impeded migratory fish’s connection to approximately 14 miles of habitat upstream. AP designed precast concrete fish ladder steps to be installed in the middle of the dam spillway to provide upstream and downstream fish passage. The design involved stacking together more than 60 precast concrete units in a vortex weir pattern that will result in a series of incremental steps allowing fish to navigate and have resting pools up to and over the dam, as well as providing ease of navigation in downstream movement. Because of the remote nature of this project, the fishpass over the dam was designed to be maintenance-free and operational in a high mountain, deep snow environment that is unattended. Some of the immediate results of this project include an increase in availability of habitat to migratory fish and the potential resulting increase in fish production.
