No cell service. No bathroom. Trudging through mud in rubber boots and climbing over downed trees. Laboring in a waterlogged valley.

That may not sound like the average American teenager’s idea of a fun Saturday. But it was for one group of high school and college students recently participating in a yearslong restoration project near Philomath, Oregon.

The student volunteers are part of the Youth Watershed Council, led by the Marys River Watershed Council. The youth program began in 2021, and for the last three years, participating students have, among other things, been restoring the environment alongside Shotpouch Creek.

The program seems mutually beneficial: The students help the environment and community, all while gaining hands-on experience and volunteer hours.

And supporters argue the watershed work has an even broader benefit: At a time when young people face increasing pressures and anxiety — from academics to social media to a deteriorating environment — finding their own community and taking small steps to improve the world around them gives them something positive and productive to do.

“I think this generation, we lay a lot on them, like, ‘Oh, it’s your job to fix this,’” said Nina Dominici, the education program director for the Marys River council.

“And there’s a lot of scary, difficult, challenging things,” she said. “They hear a lot about climate change, and it can feel overwhelming. But this is, like, this space of hope that we’re working within to make a difference in this corner of the world.”

Students offer hands-on help to restore river system

The Marys River council brought together 15 landowners over the past 15 years in hopes of returning key areas to their historic ecological functions.

Kathleen Westly recently retired as the restoration program director for the Marys River council. She was the education coordinator before Dominici and has been involved with the restoration projects from the start.

After decades of cattle grazing and logging years ago, Westly said the stream system was degraded. But the council has worked with the landowners since to change that.

Workers in recent years have installed livestock fencing to keep cows out, planted new trees, and made it easier for fish to pass through. All of these efforts keep the water colder, raises and slows its flow, allows the stream to reconnect with historic floodplains, and creates a thriving habitat for native fish and other wildlife.

Dominici said the idea is to help the land return to what it would have looked like before colonization.

“We would have had massive trees everywhere, and they would have been falling in creeks, creating a lot of complexity. Rivers had room to move around,” Dominici explained. “Humans have been … tidying up rivers for generations, and so we’re kind of trying to step in and push the creeks towards more of their original ecological process.”

Nine students worked along Shotpouch Creek late last month to plant nearly 300 willow trees. These trees completed an effort to add about 1,200 willows across a three-acre riparian area owned by the nonprofit forest management company, Pacific Forest Trust.

The site looked messy as the students climbed and clambered over countless downed trees across the tributary.

But the disarray is an intentional step in the restoration process.

First, workers built beaver dams to help slow and spread out the water in different directions. Next, they cut down the aging alder trees that block too much sun and don’t like wet terrain. Then, on days like one recent Saturday, they replaced that shade with something a bit more friendly to the beavers that ecologists want to inhabit this space — willow trees.

“Hopefully, eventually, the beavers will find that,” Dominici explained. “We got the work started, but they’re better engineers than we are.”

The students paired off and went in search of soft enough ground — sometimes in the flowing water itself — to dig into and insert cut willow branches.

Sullivan Montfort, a Corvallis High School junior, spoke about the day with a smile. “It was like if I was a little kid playing on a play structure,” he said.

Outdoor experience provides mentorship, career pathways

Montforth has been part of the youth council for three years.

About 15-20 high school students at a time participate in the youth council. They apply, and they’re eligible as long as they’re in high school. The program starts with a summer workshop and includes regular activities throughout the school year to involve them in restoration and community education.

The youth council has done lots of hands-on work, such as building small dams and removing invasive plants and animals. The older students have also guided younger students not yet in the program, passing along knowledge of river ecosystems and native wildlife.

“I observed from early on how powerful that model is for older youth being mentors, teaching younger youth,” former restoration director Westley said. “The younger ones just look up to them; they respond so much differently to kids that are a little bit older than them, than they do to old fogies like me, right?” she laughed.

Montfort first heard about the council when Dominici spoke to his Spanish class and handed out flyers.

In addition to hands-on projects, the youth participate in many outreach events, such as tabling at festivals. It’s helpful then to have Spanish speakers on the team.

“I’m not involved in any sports, so I was just looking for something to do,” Montfort said.

“That year, after the summer program, everyone went kayaking, and I wanted to go kayaking,” he said. “So I was like, ‘Yeah, this seems fun.’”

Once he joined, he didn’t want to stop.

“I get to see places that I wouldn’t normally, like here. Do things that I wouldn’t normally,” Montfort said. “I like being outdoors, and I like helping out, so, it’s kind of a good fit.”

He said some outings, like a mushroom hike Montfort remembered, are “just for funsies.” One of his favorite activities was helping build beaver dam analogs, or BDAs, which are human-made versions of the dams meant to help rebuild a river’s ecosystem and biodiversity.

“I definitely think I get more out of it than I put in,” Montfort said, laughing a little.

Working with the youth council has introduced possibilities to Montfort as he thinks about his future. Maybe he’ll become a park ranger, so he can be outside every day, he mused. Or maybe he’ll do something more technical, like hydrology.

“I mean, yeah,” he said, “I’m still figuring it out.”

Philomath High School senior Kaitlyn Mesta is newer to the council. She’s been involved for about a year after learning about it from her Advanced Placement Environmental Science teacher.

“I just really like nature, and I think restoration work is really important, especially since, like, with climate change, it doesn’t seem to be going away on its own,” she laughed.

Mesta acknowledged that the work they do may seem counterintuitive at times — how does chopping down trees actually restore the forest?

“We’re speeding up a natural process that would have happened by planting these willow trees afterwards and giving the soil a chance to get the nutrients from these trees, to improve the quality and make it so that the plants can grow even healthier,” she said. “It matters. It really matters what we do.”

Mesta said her favorite outing with the youth council was catching a highly invasive species of bullfrogs in the McDonald-Dunn forest.

“They have a specific call they do that sounds almost like a fart,” she said with a smile. “So, you’d go to try to catch them, and they’d fart at you as they jump away.”

Mesta said she likes seeing the improvements she’s made to the environment through her work. One day, the willow branches they planted will be big, towering trees.

“Really, it’s beautiful,” she said. “And some of these animals are dying out, and that was because of things humans have done.

“If we can try to right that, I think that it’s really important to do so.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/03/24/youth-watershed-council-shotpouch-creek/