UAF photo by Eric Engman.
Dakota Keller wades through the water while taking depth measurements, checking fish traps and recording bank levels in Cripple Creek on June 13, 2024.

By Amy Loeffler

Clad in waders, Dakota Keller, a graduate student with the UAF Department of Biology and Wildlife, slips into waist-high creek water.

It’s early June, and she’s looking for a temperature logger that she and her research partner, high school student Lily Ann Reece, placed in Cripple Creek earlier in the week. Once retrieved, the device will offer a better picture of water temperature fluctuations.

That data is just one puzzle piece among many that the pair are compiling over the summer to flesh out how the waterway could better sustain wildlife as the habitat is restored there.

The access point for the creek is just west of the Tesoro gas station at the intersection of Chena Ridge and Chena Pump roads, close to a dense residential area in western Fairbanks. But to reach their research site, Keller and Reece navigate thick stands of spruce, traverse spongy ground laden with moose poop and combat the onslaught of summer mosquitoes. At the water’s edge, there is also mud the consistency of Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk enveloping their Xtratuf rubber boots in a gooey stranglehold.

Their work is to meticulously track water chemistry, fish populations and insects — barometers for the health of the stream. These efforts aid a more ambitious goal: to remake the creek into habitat for numerous species of fish, bugs and other wildlife, perhaps even rearing grounds for juvenile salmon.

A drain-damaged creek

Eighty-nine years ago, a drainage project for a gold-mining dredge upstream near Ester bypassed Cripple Creek, shunting its water into a straight ditch that didn’t foster use by fish, according to Jeff Muehlbauer, an assistant professor of fisheries and ecology at UAF.

The dredge shut down in 1964, but the drain remained.

“The drain is incised, it has this canyon aspect to it and so it’s narrow and deep, and the water just really rips right through there, and that doesn’t provide any habitat for salmon,” said Muehlbauer, who leads the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit through the UAF Institute of Arctic Biology.

However, restoration efforts during the past decade have now returned water to Cripple Creek’s original, meandering channel, he said.

“There’s water that’s moving a little more slowly, deposition is happening,” he said. “There’s hopefully food for salmon and also habitat for them to hide in.”

Hoping to help salmon

Researchers hope to gather data about the newly restored creek’s ability to protect numerous fish species. Chinook, or king, salmon are of special interest. The fish, known for their fatty and buttery flesh, have recently suffered declines so severe that even subsistence harvests were closed in many parts of the state in 2024.

The Chena River is the second-largest producer of Chinook in the U.S. portion of the Yukon River drainage, which makes restoration of Cripple Creek a potentially important contributor to the health of the overall population.

Cripple Creek flows into the lower Chena River near The Pump House, a restaurant built inside the original facility that drew water from the river to supply the dredging operation in Ester.

The creek offers the last opportunity for salmon born in the upper Chena River watershed to seek refuge in the aqueous nurseries of a small tributary before they head for the Bering Sea. Muehlbauer said the Tanana and Yukon rivers downstream of the Chena are big, tumultuous and turbid.

“It’s a totally different world for a fish,” he said.

While Chinook are among the most charismatic and newsworthy of the fish that could use Cripple Creek, a healthy waterway would also help other species, including grayling, longnose sucker and burbot, which are popular as ice-fishing catch.

Back at the traps, Keller and Reece find a sucker, which is measured and sent on its way to continue meandering through the silt-laden water.

“It’s really fun to find fish,” said Reece, a Hutchison High School rising senior who received the American Fisheries Society’s Hutton fellowship. “At the start of the season when there weren’t any, it was sort of a bummer, but now it’s something to look forward to when we check traps.”

A community effort

Keller, the UAF graduate student, said research at Cripple Creek isn’t just yielding data; it’s also galvanizing community support.

“You’re right next to elementary school, you're right next to UAF,” she said. “Even though it’s an urban stream, you’ve got a lot of opportunities to engage the public with this project and raise awareness of how stream restoration can provide community connection.”

Numerous partnerships have advanced the habitat restoration work.

Christi Buffington serves dual roles on the project as a staff education and research scientist at the UAF International Arctic Research Center. She co-leads citizen science projects through an international science and education program called Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment.

“People working here in Fairbanks — the Tanana Valley Watershed Association, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Interior Alaska Land Trust and other partners — looked at a watershed restoration action plan and asked, ‘Where do we need salmon restoration?’” she said. “In the whole Yukon River watershed, Chena is number two. Well, if you’re putting in a culvert, Cripple Creek is an obvious choice.”

From 2017 to 2020, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities replaced the culverts that allow Cripple Creek water to pass under the several roads that access neighborhoods on Chena Ridge. Advocacy from the Interior Alaska Land Trust and other entities led to culvert reconfigurations and a streamflow redirection that restored water to the old meandering creek channel. Under one road, the new culverts even have squiggly passages made just for salmon.

In addition to meandering channels, young salmon like shade. Last September, in an effort to provide shelter from the sun for future juvenile salmon and other fish species, Buffington’s students planted 130 birch seedlings at the confluence of Cripple and Happy creeks; all were grown in her neighbor's bathtub.

Owen Guthrie, president of the Interior Alaska Land Trust and the vice chancellor of student affairs and enrollment management at UAF, said the project has been an important community-building effort.

The land trust is developing a 90-acre parcel, which contains the confluence of the historic channel and the drain, into the Chinook Conservation Park. It features a trail for residents of the neighborhood to explore.

“Cripple Creek has deep roots in the community, and it’s an obvious opportunity for the university,” Guthrie said. “That redirect [of the channel] is on university property, which was given as part of its original land grant in the 1920s. It just makes so much sense to get students involved.”

And while researchers are watching Chinook salmon intensively at Cripple Creek, “it’s not about the granularity of one species,” Guthrie said. “This is a whole ecosystem approach.”