PORT ANGELES — A talk on Elwha River restoration will be the next installment of the Perspectives Winter Speakers Series from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 9.
“Free at Last: Elwha River Through Three Years of Dam Removal” will be presented by Olympic National Park geomorphologist Andrew Ritchie at the Olympic National Park Visitor Center, 3002 Mount Angeles Road.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
The last three years have seen dramatic changes in the Elwha Valley as millions of tons of sediment are released from behind the dams.
Ritchie will discuss how the river has responded to the shift from a sediment-starved to sediment-rich system.
From the disappearance of the Mills and Aldwell reservoirs and the sediment wave moving downstream to the growth of logjams and river bars and the growing beach at the mouth of the Elwha on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the program will illustrate these changes and the tools used to measure them.
Time-lapse videos and fly-throughs will be the highlights of the evening.
For more information, phone Dean Butterworth at 360-565-3146, email dean_butterworth@nps.gov or visit www.nps.gov/olym.
