Prichard Creek is a tributary to the North Fork Coeur d’Alene River in Shoshone County. Prichard Creek was the first place that gold was discovered in the Coeur d’Alene Basin and kicked off the mining boom that built the communities of the Silver Valley. Starting in the later 1800s, the Prichard basin hosted over a dozen hard rock mines, multiple mill sites, and about five miles of the channel and floodplain were placer mined using a floating bucket dredge. These activities paired with aggressive timber removal have left significant and ongoing impacts on the drainage.
Watch this video about the Prichard Creek project.
Trout Unlimited has worked with the primary landowner, Idaho Forest Group (IFG), since 2020 to help restore the ecologic value of this stream. In 2023, using funding provided by The Restoration Partnership, 82 large wood structures were placed and thousands of plants were planted over four miles of the stream corridor. This work aims to increase the diversity of in-stream habitat for fish; create more stable vegetated banks and islands; improve sorting of the sediments and increase connection with the rich floodplain habitat.
In 2024 IFG put the entire project area, including 1,023 acres of riparian area and 921 acres of forestland, into a conservation easement held by Kaniksu Land Trust. This easement will protect Prichard Creek from future mining and development, as well as protecting the restoration investment made into this watershed.
Project
- Restoration & Reconnection
Partners
- Idaho Forest Group
- Idaho Dept. of Environment Quality
- The Restoration Partnership
Focus
- Subsurface Flows
- Stabilization of Banks
- Diversified Habitat
This project employed process-based restoration which means that the benefits of the work should grow as time goes on, and more runoff events help to shape the stream.
But even so, many animals including fish, beavers and waterfowl were benefitting from the work in the months immediately following construction. The next phase of the Prichard Creek is right upstream of Phase 1, where the dredge left miles of rock piles and subsurface streamflow each summer which blocks fish migration upstream to the cold headwater habitat in the most critical time of the year. Phase 2 is currently in planning with the hopes of having a design completed by the end of 2025.
