Tollgate, WCC Mountains to Sound

The wicked weather on top of Tiger Mountain drove us out early.  What to do? Call Jesse! One of the WCC Mountains to Sound crew was down in the lowlands at Tollgate doing a restoration project on the river bank.  The main enemy was blackberry. Thickets of blackberry swallowed the landscape around us.  But we must be very vigilant... lurking inside the bushes were knotweed.  Unknown to the Ultimate High Five minus Luke this tasty plant is a mean one. 

In it's early stages after the cold winter they look harmless and soft.  They are far from harmless.  The Japanese Knotweed towers above all other understory plant life and chokes out sunlight.  Each stem is fragile and breaks with the slightest bump.  Legend has it that the knowtweed can sprout from a broken piece as small as 2 inches.  A weed eater to one knotweed plant can potentially break it into 50 plants. Oh my!  Not only is it brittle the root system sucks.  When growing near a stream or river the knotweed devoid the area of all understory plants and with a weak root system destabilizes the bank and breaks into the river; spreading knotweed to new locations by floating down stream and destabilizing more banks.