Looking out over the wide expanse of Klingel Wetlands Wildlife Refuge you’ll see squiggly traces of tide channels and tracks of shorebirds, deer, and coyote. It’s hard to imagine that here once grazed cattle to feed a thriving early 20th century logging industry, or more recently that families gathered here to swim and play on land created by diking and filing saltmarsh.
With the removal of 4,600 dump-truck loads of fill, GPC’s restoration completes a much larger effort. Over three decades, an amazing 650 acres and 5.5 miles of shoreline have been conserved here, at the toe of Hood Canal.
“It is a rare restoration project, because essentially the same dirt used to fill the wetlands in 1973 is being taken out and put back where it came from — across North Shore Road from the development,” writes Christopher Dunagan in his recent article “Making Amends for Mistakes that Damaged the Natural Word” published in September 2015 in the Kitsap Sun.
Find out more about this extensive project when you read the whole article online here.