By Madeline Federici

Every U.S. state has its cultural niche. Oregon loves IPAs, Idaho grows the best potatoes, California will make you a star... and Washingtonians love their salmon. When Elie Friedlob and her husband Alan moved to the Birch Bay area from Atlanta in 2002, like many others, they were enthralled by the beautiful, forested landscapes and endless opportunities for outdoor recreation the state offers.

"When we moved here, it was like discovering a new world because of the gorgeous Northwest woods and the water," Friedlob said. "Then this whole thing with salmon, it was just magical. But at that point, I hadn't even been fully introduced to the magic yet - it was just a conceptual thing to me."

A Chicago native, Friedlob lived an urban lifestyle with limited awareness of environmental issues. Several months after their move, her husband saw an announcement in local paper, The Northern Light, for a community event held by Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association (NSEA) and encouraged her to go.

"To give you a context of who I was at that time, I was a city girl. It was just kind of curiosity," Friedlob said. "By that point, we had lived here a couple of months and were falling in love with the beauty of the area, so it stimulated my particular desire to find out more about salmon restoration because I had no experience with it."

She attended the event as a total novice. Incidentally, it ended up being the first meeting of NSEA's Stream Stewards Program, coordinated by Rachel Vasak, the organization's current executive director.

Rachel Vasak (left) and Elie Friedlob (right) pictured by the first Chum remote site incubator (RSI).
// Courtesy of Elie Friedlob

When Friedlob learned that the organization needed help fundraising to complete riparian area restoration around Terrell Creek, she felt compelled to contribute her knowledge of sales and marketing to the cause.

"To me, it was a good marriage between the need that I was hearing and what I could do in terms of my experience," Friedlob said. "At the time, I thought it was a relatively short-term problem."

Her decision to attend the event that day launched the beginning of her nearly 20 years of participation and collaboration with NSEA.

"What it also kicked off simultaneously was an awareness in relationship with the community because we were new to the area," Friedlob said.

Through that initial linkage with NSEA, relationships and connections transpired that supported many other impactful environmental initiatives, especially in the Terrell Creek watershed.

Terrell Creek stretches about 9 miles through rural, residential, and agricultural areas to connect Terrell Lake to Birch Bay.

In 1999, NSEA conducted a habitat assessment that identified various factors preventing successful salmon spawning and began restoring the watershed to increase salmon populations and improve Terrell Creek fish habitat.

Elie Friedlob leading a float for Chums of Terrell Creek in the 2008 Birch Bay Discover Days Parade.
// Courtesy of Elie Friedlob

"I credit most of the success we had in the Terrell Creek watershed to Elie's contagious enthusiasm and graceful leadership," said Vasak." I learned so much about community building from her."

Friedlob assisted NSEA in fundraising for donations to help restore Terrell Creek by planning community celebrations, festivals, and parades, getting friends and neighbors involved, and networking with other organizations and local businesses.

"One of the bottom lines of my whole message in terms of working with NSEA is the importance of involving the community and how you end up with all kinds of partners that you don't necessarily know at first you're going to end up being partners with," Friedlob said. "It's essential in any environmental activism or initiative to have as deep of community roots as you can get, and you have to keep working at it."

Terrell Creek is well known by the Birch Bay community, so NSEA's programming resonated with that population. Over time, the organization's connections multiplied, deepened, and expanded - and achieved much more than was initially intended.

"There was a multiplier effect in the connection between what we were doing with the salmon restoration and then all of this other community growth and participation in managing the environment here," Friedlob said.

Later in 2003, NSEA collaborated with Chums of Terrell Creek to restore stream habitat and remove fish passage barriers.

"The Chums of Terrell Creek started as a fairly cute idea to restore one of our local riparian areas and bring salmon back, but it ended up doing way more," Friedlob said.

Together, the groups have removed four significant barriers and restored nearly five miles of stream bank habitat. Additionally, they attempted to kickstart a run of Chum that had previously disappeared.

"During the months when salmon returned, water levels were pretty low. There wasn't a lot of surface water to go into it, and there was a dam at the top," Friedlob said. "They devised a solution that would allow Fish and Wildlife to release some water during the fall months and a little bit more water in the stream system so that Chum and Coho could make it upstream."

Shortly afterward, there were sightings of Coho in Lake Terrell, Friedlob said.

As she and her husband continued their various participations, many of the connections they built through NSEA indicated concern about rapid development in their watershed and showed interest in becoming involved with protecting and restoring water resources in Birch Bay.

Subsequently, Friedlob and her husband started a group called Smart Growth Birch Bay, which channeled those collective desires into structured community involvement to address concerns about water quality and aquatic habitat loss from urban development.

Eventually, they also helped form Birch Bay Watershed and Aquatic Resources Management District (BBWARM) in 2007.

"BBWARM was an extremely successful effort. I don't think there's another initiative like it, certainly not in Whatcom County and I think not even in the state," Friedlob said. "The taxes on impervious surfaces were used on projects to improve and maintain the quality of Birch Bay."

That same year, she joined NSEA's board of directors for a brief period. Then, from 2009 to 2011, she advised a second generation of the Chums of Terrell Creek.

In 2014, she retired from her managing consulting career. Moving forward, she plans to serve on NSEA's advisory council, which will help steer the organization's future direction and advise executive decision-making.

"It's a huge issue - the restoration of not just salmon, but our whole environmental predicament on the planet. This couldn't be a more fraught and important period," Friedlob said. "It's exciting to be even nominally part of some effort, but it's a very critical time."

The most important takeaways from her experiences with NSEA so far are the importance of involving the community in environmental restoration initiatives and the value of comprehensive participation to achieve sustained investment.

"This is a time of real challenge for any organization that's interested in bringing environmental improvement. It's a critical period in humankind's history and our environment. We're right at the precipice. For NSEA, that's going to scroll down into local issues, as well as larger environmental ones. But how that will play out transcends just NSEA," Friedlob said. "Every time I'm going down Chuckanut Drive and look at those beautiful Chum working their hard way up that stream, they never give up. It's a good lesson for us. Mother Earth and humankind have all been to the edge multiple times. So, we're there again. I'm hoping we're smart enough to figure ways out of it."

By Christie Bell & Madaline Federici

Lush forests, mountain terrain, pristine glacial waters - these iconic features of Whatcom County make it easy to love. As a lifelong resident, Christy Rathjen Bell has inevitably grown a deep appreciation for and connection with the natural world. And most of all, like many other Washingtonians, she loves the salmon.

"My whole life has been with salmon. I can remember so many wonderful things about my childhood involving being in the mountains, being on the lakes, and not even thinking about how there might come a day when there's no fish or very few fish in Whatcom County," said Bell. "But here we are. And it just reminds me that we really need to take care of our natural resources, so that our future generations can enjoy what we've had the pleasure to enjoy around here."

She has been dedicated to that mission through NSEA for the past 25 years, serving on the board of directors and as a volunteer. However, the passion she has for the environment and salmon was established long before that. Early in her life, she enjoyed being immersed in natural resource work and recreation, thanks to her father, Carl Rathjen, an avid fisherman who worked in the trucking and timber industries.

"He loved to go fishing whenever he could, going up Mount Baker Highway to Nugent's Corner and catching fish for dinner," Bell said. "I would go with him quite often to do that. He was always very involved with salmon."

In 1963, her father founded the salmon barbecue held at the annual Deming Logging Show, a fundraising event to assist loggers who have been injured in Whatcom County. The Rathjen family barbecued salmon with his special recipe and served thousands of attendees for many years.

"The barbecue building at the logging show is dedicated to my dad. He unfortunately died pretty young, in 1973," Bell said. "It was so wonderful they dedicated that to him - the Carl Rathjen Memorial Barbecue Area.”

Christy Bell (fourth from left), her mother (third from left), and all her children posing with the sign for the barbeque area dedicated to their father in 1977. // Courtesy of Christy Bell

Bell's childhood was full of outdoor adventures. Her friend Kammie lived along McCormick Creek, just down the hill from her. Both of their family's seven youngest siblings were similar ages, so naturally, they all became best friends.

"We'd walk out our back door, down through the woods into their property, and play on the creek, build forts, whatever kids do, you know? I built great memories there."

Fast forward to the 90s, Bell had a family and career of her own. She first crossed paths with NSEA as a full-time volunteer coordinator for Whatcom Volunteer Center. One day, an AmeriCorps team member for the organization came to her for help recruiting volunteers. That person was Rachel Vasak, NSEA's current executive director.

"This was 25 years ago, and I was just so excited about what NSEA was doing. That's when I wanted to get my family involved," Bell said.

They went to work parties in their free time, and eventually, her husband, Rodger Bell, helped with NSEA's former pond acclimation program. He took their youngest daughter Ashley with him up Mt. Baker Highway near Glacier and Maple Falls for several years, just like Christy's father did with her. Although this time, it was to nurture the salmon rather than fish them.

In 2016, Bell retired from the human services profession. However, she found herself revisiting her natural resources roots and contacted Vasak about volunteering for NSEA. Her passion advanced her further, and she was elected to the board of directors.

“At that time, I was wanting to do something with the environment," Bell said. "Having grown up around here, it's very important to me to keep the salmon coming back and to keep our natural resources as pristine as possible."

During her five-year tenure, she introduced reorganizing the board towards governance and launched the board development committee. Since then, NSEA has proliferated - which Bell attributes to the founders of the organization, the board of directors, and their excellent staff and volunteers. With all the work NSEA does to include the community, people feel a part of a family, she said.

"It was a great time to be on the board. NSEA is dear to my heart and always will be, and I'll always continue to support them in any way I can," Bell said. "NSEA is so stable, and I do see many good things happening in the next 30 years. Maybe I'll be around to see that, I'll only be 100!"

Last fall, Bell saw her life-long connection and dedication to the salmon materialize most extraordinarily. Vasak invited her to see a restoration project NSEA had completed on the creek she played in growing up, right down the hill from where she lived on the corner of Van Wyck and Noon Road. Darrell Gray, project manager for NSEA, got permission from the owners of her friend's old property and joined her to visit the old stomping grounds.

"Here I am, going back many years later to the same property I played on as a child and created wonderful childhood memories," Bell said. "Driving into the driveway, seeing the house, and remembering all the things that I did with my friend - it was just heartwarming. It is kind of full circle for me having grown up in this area and the connection to the salmon that my family has had."

The restoration project improved the stream bed and removed a cement dam. Bell recalls never seeing salmon in the creek but catching many crawdads.

McCormick Creek tributary before restoration project. // Courtesy of NSEA

"Seeing what they did to the property and stream bed and habitat on the creek restored gave me goosebumps," Bell said. "There was a dam there when I was growing up, which built up sediment and was a muddy bog. Seeing it all restored now is just wow - it's so beautiful. They did such a good job. The creek is flowing through there, the water is clear. Man, they do miracles."

Bell's lifelong residency in the area enriches her perspective on the county and its environmental changes over time. She worries about natural resource pollution, declining returns on salmon runs for our bioregion, habitat degradation, ecosystem health, and cultural impacts of it all. But NSEA's work gives her hope for a better future.

"In the next 30 years, I do see lots of challenges. But there's opportunities also," Bell said. "I love the work that NSEA does. I'm optimistic that eventually the salmon runs will increase, especially if we can get the waters outside of Whatcom County cleaned up too. I think there are people realizing that we need to do something quickly, I just hope that everyone acts quick enough."

Although this was her final year on the board of directors, she plans to continue supporting NSEA's work to keep a healthy watershed and environment by serving on the advisory council.

"Mainly, what I want to do is continue to be an advocate for the organization," Bell said. "I talk about NSEA wherever I go and to whomever I talk to. I tell everybody how much this organization means to me, to the community, and to the future of our environment. I'll always continue to do that and always continue to support them.”