The Homer Soil and Water Conservation District works with its partners to accomplish watershed management goals across the Lower Kenai Peninsula. The District provides technical and financial assistance to accomplish community goals. The following programs are the District’s priorities for 2007-08

Landscape Hydrology Diagrams

Download "Western Kenai Peninsula: Landscape Level Groundwater Flow Diagrams" (Adobe PDF - 5.37 MB). Section diagrams available upon request.

Lower Kenai Peninsula Watershed Health Project

Download the Deep Creek Waterhsed Action Plan (Adobe PDF - 1.2Mb)

Download the Anchor River Waterhsed Action Plan (Adobe PDF - 1.3Mb)

Download the Ninilchik River Waterhsed Action Plan (Adobe PDF - 1Mb)

Sustainable ATV Trail Design for Aquatic Habitat Protection; Deep Creek and Anchor River Watersheds

HSWCD, with funding from Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation ACWA program, is continuing to work on a planned reroute along the Hole Trail in the Caribou Hills Recreational Area.  Selected trail segments will be relocated to areas with higher drainage capacity to decrease sedimentation into Deep Creek due ATV use.  We have a trail hardening project schedule for this summer where 2,700 ft of porous payment will be installed at the Deep Creek crossing.  It is important to ensure that trail upgrades scheduled for the summer of 2008 are modified as needed in response to environmental changes caused by last summer’s Caribou Hills fire.

The HSWCD has been awarded an ACWA Grant to do trial work along the Watermelon Trail, located in the Anchor River watershed.  We will be upgrading and rerouting the trail to redirect ATV traffic upstream from the current crossing on Beaver Creek to a location suitable for the installation of a clear span bridge. Beaver Creek is a tributary of the Anchor River and an anadromous fish stream important for Chinook and Coho salmon and Dolly Varden in its own right. The current Beaver Creek crossing has been identified in ADF&G’s Deep Creek and Anchor River Off-Road-Vehicle Trails Assessment as detrimental to stream morphology, causing increased stream width and decreased channel depth, with concomitant impacts on fish habitat and water quality, particularly temperature and sedimentation

Turbidity Monitoring Stations

Snow Surveys with NRCS

Download the Bartlett/Hohe Rehab Water Quality Monitoring Report (Adobe PDF - 6.2Mb)

Download the East End Road Construction Water Quality Monitoring Report (Adobe PDF - 1.3Mb)

Watershed Education and Project WET
See the Education Page for info.

The HSWCD installed 50-feet each of Geoblock and Geoblock II porous pavement trail hardening along the Water Hole trail in the summer of  2007 in an effort to determine the durability of this material for ATV trails.