Log Drives and Splash Dams

My friend Becky was featured on OPB this week on Oregon Field Guide! She just finished her Master's Thesis on splash-dams. Splash-dams were used in the late 1880s-1950s in Oregon as a way to transport logs downstream to mills. The Dams would hold back the water and logs and then it would be released and all the logs would go downstream, but this would cause major damage to the river banks and river beds destroying salmon habitat. Becky's thesis was a study on the rivers today to see if they recovered from these splash-dams. Spoiler alert, the damage is still present in streams today.

The segment is 9 mins, but it's interesting.