DISCOVERY BAY — Three or four decades from now, a morning’s labor will have turned into a forest.
“We’re looking at the long game here,” said Nate Roberts, one of the leaders of a three-hour tree planting effort alongside U.S. Highway 101 on Saturday.
As motorists hurtled past, some 20 volunteers from across the North Olympic Peninsula dug in with shovels and hands, making places for some 500 trees and shrubs, ranging from snowberry and Nootka rose to Sitka spruce and red cedar.
As they mature, the trees benefit the land, water, fish and the people, Roberts said.
“A lot of the insects and bugs that reside in these trees get blown into the bay and become food for juvenile salmon,” as they migrate, said Roberts, the North Olympic Salmon Coalition (NOSC) stewardship coordinator.
Then all the foliage provides shade to keep Discovery Bay cool, which is crucial for the fish that must have those cold Pacific temperatures, Roberts added.
The trees’ roots hold the soil in place, another key benefit amid rising tides and erosion, he said.
Eventually, this grove will grow so dense that it will trap trash from the highway, stopping it from going into the bay “and then going who knows where,” he said.
Federal and state grants provide much of the funding for NOSC’s tree plantings. And volunteers such as Bradi Jacobson of Port Angeles and sisters Fern and Cedar French of Port Townsend supply the human resources.
Fern, 12, expertly planted seedlings on Saturday while Cedar, 8, alternated between running across the job site and standing up on the shovel blade to drive it into the mulch.
This small parcel, just south of Discovery Bay Cannabis, is called the Lucky Deer parcel for the Lucky Deer Trading Co., the store that once stood alongside the highway. After owner Karen Blessing retired in 2018, no one came along to buy the business, and the Jefferson Land Trust ultimately became the land’s steward.
The Lucky Deer building was leaning into the end of its life, said NOSC senior project manager Kevin Long. It took him nearly a year to secure the permits to demolish it last fall.
On Saturday, as tree-planting volunteers got to work, no evidence remained of the store. The parcel was covered with mulch and dotted with young trees, in buckets and in the ground.
Jacobson, an experienced NOSC volunteer, arrived a little late, having driven from Agnew with a small grove of Douglas firs in the bed of her pickup. They had seeded themselves in an open field on her family’s property, so she dug them up, put them in buckets and donated them to the organization.
Seeing these evergreens planted here is a big deal to Jacobson, who said she feels a strong connection to the trees of her native Northwest. When she moved from Woodinville to the Peninsula, she brought some of the trees that grew at her former residence and built a small nursery at her current residence.
After she and Roberts unloaded the trees from her truck, Jacobson got planting, expertly freeing the firs from their buckets and settling them in.
“I am thrilled as can be,” she said. “This means so much to me.”
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Jefferson County senior reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidela paz@peninsuladailynews.com.
Fern French of Port Townsend, 12, joined the North Olympic Salmon Coalition’s effort to plant a roadside forest of conifers at Discovery Bay on Saturday. (Diane Urbani de la Paz/Peninsula Daily News)
