By Topf Wells
Jim Hess is the best thing since beer. He organized another great workday and the Sugar River is looking the better for it. Jim spent hours of effort making this one happen. He first chose the worksite with Sara Rigelman and then mowed a trail into the site for his UTV and all our participants.

About a dozen folks showed up and they did amazing work in cutting, hauling and installing. I was slowed by back troubles and did not show up until 10:30. My jaw dropped by how big a brush bundle was already in place! Amazing also is how quickly the brush bundles start to work. The creek was a tad bit on the muddy side, and you could immediately see the currents start to eddy along the edges. All the honeysuckle and buckthorn leaves and branches were collecting the sediment.

Huge thanks to all, with apologies to those I miss. Bob Brewer and Kalthleen Falk were in the stream shoving branches in, weaving them, tying, etc. Ted Swenson again led several folks from the Nohr Chapter to help us out; we’ll delight in returning this favor someday. The Lawtons of Madison, Tagatz Creek and the Wolf River made their first appearance at a work day and showed the skills they had developed on their streams. The Lawtons are the son and daughter-in-law of John Lawton, a great Wisconsin conservationist wonderfully depicted in Bill Stokes’ “Trout Friends.” (Please buy and read this book. You might consider fishing Tagatz. Thousands of wild brook trout and millions of wild mosquitos. The former make the latter bearable, most of the time.)

Bob Harrison demonstrated he is equally adept at wrestling large box elders as large smallmouth.

Tom Krauskopf, Zach Oluf, and I just want to remind you: Take back troubles seriously. DO WHATEVER YOUR PHYSICAL THERAPIST TELLS YOU. Really, don’t skip a day.

In addition to helping the stream out, Jim and the team have created a nice angler’s trail and access point. Todd pointed out that the stream looked great downstream of the new brush bundle.

Tarzan?? We put in so much brush that we ran out of hemp rope to tie everything in. Our enterprising groups remembered the movies of their youth began pulling down grapevines and using those. Cheetah, Jane and Boy would have been proud and maybe helped.

By the way, many in the group walked by this spring’s brush bundle and it looked great (see the photos below from Jim Hess). I also stopped by to look at our first-ever bundle on the Tom Sarbacker easement just north of Paoli. It’s disappeared because it’s turned into a full-fledged stream bank. Amazing.

Jim and all, thanks and fabulous work.

Workday photos – Courtesy Jim Beecher

Many thanks to Jim for capturing the action! Please also see the full photo album.

Brush Bundles Work – by Jim Hess

I had a chance to inspect the bundle we installed on 6.19.20, which was an extension of the brush bundle we installed on 6.15.19. The picture on the left shows what one looks like after 3 months and the other shows what one looks like after 2 years, 3 months. You have to look closely, you can easily see the brush from 6.19.20, which appears to dead end into an existing stream bank. That existing stream bank is the brush bundle from 2019 with dirt, grasses, and plants growing – extending the eroded stream bank out.