Fort Bragg Advocate-News Staff Writer
Eighth grade math teacher Nick Tedesco left his Arizona classroom to join Americorps and make a difference in the environment.
Sunday he led a daylong Americorps workday project at the City of Fort Bragg”s Otis Johnson Wilderness Park. He enjoyed the cool sunny weather and admired the improvements to the park with about two dozen others, including Fort Bragg City Councilman Dan Gjerde, soon to be a member of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors.
“This is one of the most beautiful city parks I have ever seen,” said Tedesco. “A lot of people have accomplished a whole lot here.”
Among the accomplishments are two new bridges, a new staircase, three new picnic tables, eight new benches, interpretative panels all around the 7-acre park, kiosks at both the Cedar and Laurel street entrances, bike racks at each entry, dog potty bag stations and new trash cans.
Hundreds of cubic yards of invasive English ivy, holly, Himalayan blackberries and blackwood acacia trees have been cleared and thousands of natives planted.
The now concluding grant effort was funded by more than $400,000 in state and local grants to the City of Fort Bragg.
The Salmon Restoration Association (SRA), which puts on the World”s Largest Salmon Barbecue on the first Saturday after the Fourth of July spent $11,464 in the city park over the past three years. The SRA plans to feature the park in publicity and events this year.
That money was used for a Jug Handle Creek Farm program that pays mostly Fort Bragg Middle School students in the Math Engineering and Science Achievement program (MESA) to do watershed restoration, especially clearing invasives and planting natives. The students, who excel at science and come from lower income environments learn about the entire cycle of restoration, gathering seeds in the park, planting them at Jughandle Farms and then watching them grow in the park.
The City held a ceremony at the end of the workday. Teri Jo Barber, who has run the grant program along with Crystal Prairie, accepted on behalf of the City a framed photograph taken in the park by Ken Van Der Wende. The photograph won the most public votes at a competitive photography contest at the Mendocino Coast Photographer Guild and Gallery on Main Street in downtown Fort Bragg.
Ruth Sparks of Native Daughters of the Golden West and the Fort Bragg Garden Club presented the donation, which shows sunlight beams dancing among redwood trees. The large photo will hang in City Hall.
State grants paid for most of the amenities, such as three new picnic tables, one of which is wheelchair accessible. Akeff Construction, a local contractor, installed two new bridges and replaced two failed retaining walls. The new walls have state of the art modern drainage to prevent water build up and rot; the old walls lasted more than 40 years. A new, wider staircase was built connecting the Cedar and Laurel street ends of the park.
Campbell Timberland Management installed a tall informational kiosk at each park entry and created a laminated park map to post inside each. Campbell also provided its staff for one workday in the park and helped middle school students learn about forestry on several occasions. The company brought in more than 15 large trees, which were used to help make the restoration more natural. For example, water that flows from a large pipe falls not into a concrete channel but into a creek with an gigantic fir tree lining the bottom and acting as a more natural erosion break.
Fort Bragg High sophomores Amber Ramirez and Kaden Rowan chose the sunny Sunday when festivities and work were happening in Otis Johnson Wilderness Park to have their Senior Ball pictures taken. There were no photos this year at the Fort Bragg High Senior Ball, so some parents hired photographer Lynette May to take pictures of couples.
“It”s really beautiful in here and the picnic tables and benches make it a really nice spot to come to,” said Rowan, as the couple sat on the new staircase.
Ramirez said she would like to come back for a picnic on the new tables.
“It”s really amazing and a lot of people don”t even know this is here,” said May.
From Sacramento, for the city ceremony, came Linda Smith, California River Parkways Grant Administrator. Smith was impressed by the community participation and the framed photograph, which she suggested be reproduced for inclusion in the new park kiosk.
“I remember coming here, going down in there and feeling like I was taking my life into my hands ?.crossing the streams on tipping logs. The work is amazing and beautiful,” Smith said.
The project got started in 2008 when the City won a competitive Prop 50 California River Parkways Grants. Funds were frozen more than once due to the volcanic annual upheavals of the state budget. The City also snared Caltrans money for Otis Johnson Wilderness Park, part of nearly a quarter-million in Ten Mile Bridge remediation funds.
Prisoner crews from Parlin Fork and Chamberlain Creek did much of the hardest labor in the process, such as removing towering stands of invasive Himalayan blackberries from several hillsides, clearing trails and building the new stairs.
Erosion has been curtailed in several areas, which is a key goal of the Salmon Restoration Association, along with educating local students. Acacia trees removed as invasives were used to construct a stairs-like grid that covers an entire hillside. Previously the area had been a slide for youth and a vertical path that turned into an erosion fountain in winter.
Tedesco is working with Americorps Watershed Stewards Program assigned to the California Department of Fish and Game office in Fort Bragg. The program is making a major effort to restore Pacific watersheds where migratory fish, especially salmon, have suffered great declines. Old timers remember salmon in the two streams in Otis Johnson Wilderness Park, which flow into the Pudding Creek watershed, which has seen a significant improvement in its numbers of coho salmon this year.
Otis Johnson Park was purchased by the city in the late 1960s, with money from the widow of Otis Johnson, a member of the Johnson timber family that helped found Fort Bragg. It was donated on the condition it be kept wild and that it not be developed.
Big redwood trees in the park date from 1900-1920, when the park was logged. The seven acres of forest that start at the back of Fort Bragg Middle School continue into timberland along the Skunk Train tracks. The native forest consists of big redwoods, towering old growth bishop pines, some fir and hemlock trees, along with alder in riparian areas. The park has suffered serious vandalism in past years, but with more public use this year, that problem is not as serious at present.
The restoration has opened up new trails behind this caretaker”s enclosure off Cedar Street, a new riparian corridor off the Laurel Street entrance and half a dozen new higher trails in a large loop, which can be found by crossing the second new bridge, then climbing the old stairway.
