Vance Creek drains a 24 square mile area of the Olympic Mountains in western Washington. The lower 4 miles of the creek often go dry in discontinuous patches during the summer, limiting salmon rearing success. To better understand sediment transport dynamics in the creek and aid in potential restoration design, bedload and suspended-sediment concentration samples were collected for water years 2019–20 at a site about 2 miles upstream from the creek’s confluence with the South Fork Skokomish River.

Fifty bedload samples and 7 suspended-sediment concentration samples were collected over 7 sampling days. These samples were used to develop rating curves relating bedload flux or suspended-sediment concentration to discharge. Mean annual bedload flux was estimated to be 12,200 ± 2,300 tons per year for water years 1930–2020 period of record, based on application of the derived bedload rating curve to an extrapolated daily discharge record. The mean annual suspended-sediment load over the same period was estimated to be 9,000 tons per year with large, but unquantified, uncertainty. Bedload material was predominantly gravel from 0.08 to 2.5 inches (2 to 64 millimeters) in diameter. At the highest sampled discharges, approximately equivalent to a 50 percent annual exceedance probability (2-year peak-flow event), the bedload grain-size distribution was similar to that of the local channel bed. Bedload grain-size distributions generally coarsened as discharge increased. The suspended-sediment load was consistently one-half sand and one-half silt and clay, regardless of discharge. Bedload constituted about 60 percent of the total sediment flux (bedload plus suspended load). This is near the upper limit of values observed in a global compilation of long-term load partitioning data.

Sediment transport at the Vance Creek sampling site was compared with sediment-transport data from five other watersheds in the region. To facilitate comparisons, mean annual loads were divided by mean annual runoff volume to obtain an effective average sediment concentration. This normalization accounts for differences in both drainage area and mean runoff depth between the comparison watersheds. At the three comparison watershed sites with relatively complete sediment-transport data, mean bedload concentrations ranged from 44 to 109 milligrams per liter (mg/L) and mean suspended-sediment concentrations ranged from 139 to 374 mg/L; bedload constituted 21 to 29 percent of the total sediment load. The mean bedload concentration at the Vance Creek sampling site (69 mg/L) fell in the middle of the range observed in comparison watersheds, whereas the mean suspended-sediment concentration (50 mg/L) was markedly lower. Bedload samples at the Vance Creek sampling site also were generally less sand rich (sample-average sand fraction was 13 percent at Vance Creek versus 20 to 37 percent for comparison waters). Bedload transport rates at the Vance Creek sampling site appear relatively average for the region, given the drainage basin area and average runoff. In contrast, the supply and transport of finer material, both in the suspended load and the sand fraction of the bedload, are relatively low.