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more photosHunter Hassell is all smiles as he sees his Eagle Scout project — the installation of a cattle trough on forestland near Mitchell. Grazing cows had been drinking from and damaging a small spring that feeds into Jackson Creek a tributary of Deep Creek which feeds into the Crooked River.
Submitted photos
Earning an Eagle by stopping cattle
Local teen's Scout project aims to preserve natural spring near Crooked River tributary
By David Jasper / The Bulletin
Published: November 07. 2009 4:00AM PSTWhen Hunter Hassell of Bend was a fifth-grader at Lava Ridge Elementary, his teacher, Ryan Shaffer, taught the class about the importance of watersheds and clean water.
So when it came time for Hunter, now 13 and a seventh-grader at Sky View Middle School, to earn his Eagle Scout Badge, “I didn't want to do something that's just sort of ordinary, like putting up a flagpole,” he said Tuesday. Recalling Shaffer's lessons, he decided he wanted to earn his badge doing something water-related.
Hunter called Trout Unlimited and learned about a remote natural spring near Mitchell, located northeast of Prineville. “Basically, cattle had been getting into this spring and making the water dirty with their fecal material, and they'd been punching holes in the bottom of the spring by stepping in it,” he explains.
The spring is located about 50 feet from the headwaters of Jackson Creek, which feeds into Deep Creek, a tributary of the North Fork Crooked River. The holes around the spring caused the water temperature to creep upward, affecting the ability of redband trout to spawn there, “so it's also making it harder for them,” he adds.
Hunter planned the project, which entailed placing a box over the spring and running a pipe to a large trough, with the help of Paul Smith and Bob Lightley of the Paulina Ranger District of the Ochoco National Forest.
Cattle graze on a lot of the forestland in the area, explains Smith.
One of the ways the Forest Service is trying to strike a balance among its multiple uses “is to do these off-site water developments to keep the cows off the creeks,” he says. “We did a large restoration, environmental assessment a few years back in the Deep Creek Watershed,” where the spring in question burbles from the ground.
“The objective of the whole thing was to develop springs to keep livestock away from the edges of the stream. This was one of the ones that was in that document.
“Hunter and the Scouts came out and did a great job,” he says.
Hunter led the restoration project with the help of about nine other Scouts from his troop, LDS Troop 120, and their Scout master, Matthew McFarland, over a two-day period in mid-September.
Hunter is a straight-A student and started as a Cub Scout at age 8 and switched to Boy Scouts at age 11, as is the norm. However, at age 13, he's young to have already become an Eagle Scout, Scouting's highest level.
“We come from a long tradition of Eagle Scouts,” says his mother, Melissa Hassell. “He has seven uncles who are Eagle Scouts, his dad's an Eagle Scout. So, yeah, it's been an expectation that he'd just do it. And we were afraid that once he got into high school, he'd just be too busy.”
Eagle Scout project proposals must be vetted and approved by the leaders before being undertaken, and the planning may have been more work than the project itself, Hunter says.
“You have to have a full notebook telling what the project is, how it's going to help, all the service hours, all the materials needed, who helped, what it's going to do,” he says. According to his records, the project took 31 hours of planning, whereas the physical work took about 15 hours.
Hunter would like to become a dentist when he grows up, “which is kind of interesting, I think,” he says.
If not a dentist, he might like to become an engineer. Working on the Jackson Creek spring was a good learning experience, adds Hunter, who, with help from his father, Darren, built an animal escape ramp in the event small critters fall in the trough while trying to get a drink.
“It's basically a piece of chicken wire on a little piece of wood,” Hunter says. “You just tie it in, so if they're swimming around, trying to get out, they just walk up it, and jump out.”
He also led the fundraising, raising close to $800 for the project, and “learned how to organize myself a lot. I learned how to be a leader, and I learned how to get some things done without giving up,” he says.
“And what about calling adults on the phone?” his mom whispers to him. Among the calls he made was to Big R Stores, which sold the Scouts the needed 500-gallon trough at a discount, he says.
“At first, he's ‘Will you do it for me?'” mother Melissa explains.
However, after about 50 calls, he says, “You get used to it.”
Says scoutmaster McFarland, “The thing that impressed me about his project is how well-organized it was. He's done the best I've ever seen of any Eagle Scout as far as organizing the project.”
“I've seen a lot of them go poorly, and this one went very, very well. I was quite impressed, actually,” he says. “He's a lot younger than most kids” tackling an Eagle Scout Badge. “They say only 2 or 3 percent of people who start in Scouting earn their Eagle Scout.”
The cut-off for earning it is 18; the majority of those who do earn one do so at age 17.
“Hunter did it when he was 13, and he did a better job,” McFarland says. “It's been actually amazing to see the growth in Hunter just over the last year and a half that I've known him.”
David Jasper can be reached at 541-383-0349 or at djasper@bendbulletin.com.
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