Chelsea Schneider on the Bend Whitewater Park

**Skuyler Herzog** (0:00)
Welcome to The Watercourse. I'm your host, Skuyler Herzog. This is episode 3, featuring Chelsea Schneider. Chelsea is a landscape architect in Bend, Oregon, and she's one of the designers of the Bend Whitewater Park. Personally, I'm fascinated by Whitewater Parks, because they're at the interface of recreation and restoration. Here we talk about the technical details of the park and how it works, but also some of the value judgments that went into the designs. Now, I really appreciate Chelsea's willingness to explore these issues. I've found that many people are uncomfortable discussing value judgments, and in fact, I've accidentally offended several people by asking them too many questions about why they made the restoration decisions that they did. That's not to critique them, but just to understand them.
It's so important to articulate the specific goals of a project and the values behind them, otherwise we'll never achieve those goals.
As always, if you want a primer or refresher on Whitewater Parks, pause this podcast now and check out the pre-listening links in the description. There's also a link to some great drone footage of the park, so you can get a better sense of what we're discussing. And one last thing, this podcast will always be free, but if you enjoy it and want to help support it, I now have a Patreon account linked in the description. All proceeds will be divided between supporting my time on the podcast and supporting undergraduate research, both hourly pay and equipment. I'm really excited about the opportunity to give back to undergrad research. So again, if you like this podcast, please share it and consider supporting it.
Welcome to The Watercourse, this is your host, Skuyler Herzog, and I'm interviewing Chelsea Schneider. She's the principal landscape architect at LOCI Studio, and a former landscape architect with Bend Parks and Rec during the time of a Whitewater Park construction. So I'm excited to talk with her today about some of those things. But before we dive into the Whitewater Park and some of the technical designs, Chelsea, can you talk about what the Deschutes River means to you and to Bend at large?

**Chelsea Schneider** (2:05)
Sure thing. Early on, Bend developed as a timber town, and so they utilized the river extensively for logging, for transportation.
And over time, Bend has evolved to transition out of timber and into recreation. And so the river has continued to be the backbone of what draws people to the area. It's a recreation opportunity. It's a beautiful stretch of river that the city wraps itself around.

**Skuyler Herzog** (2:40)
Yeah, it seems like, you know, it's such an important cultural piece for modern citizens of Bend. And it's interesting to look at how the new ethic of environmental protection and conservation and recreation compares with the past in terms of extraction and really manipulation of the environment for human use. And in some ways, we still do that. We just do it differently.
We're now floating inner tubes instead of logs on that pond, right?

**Chelsea Schneider** (3:09)
That is, that is very true. Yeah, it's an interesting way to look at it that, as you mentioned, a lot of people are coming to Bend and are bringing that expectation that what they see when they first encounter the river, that's its natural state. That's the way it should be. And it's kind of, it's an interesting dialogue anytime any of these types of projects occur, where part of the dialogue, part of the discussion is an education of what a river is, what our river is, but also what its truly natural state would be and why it's challenging to try to restore it to that truly natural state.

**Skuyler Herzog** (3:55)
It seems to me that it's almost an identity crisis right now, where, you know, historically it was used and the entire system was manipulated for irrigation and timber. And now we are trying to restore it, but as you said, that requires knowing and understanding the history and the current state and how we got to the current state and then working within that framework to envision what it can and should be. Obviously, many of these things are specific to the Deschutes River, but it's really a case study. It's a very intensely managed river.
So in some ways, I think it's like many other rivers, but more so, as they say. There's a lot packed into this very small little river in central Oregon.

**Chelsea Schneider** (4:34)
I think that's an interesting observation that it's kind of a case study of everything that could be unusual about a river in the high desert. Using irrigation as an example, you're well aware that the river is highly controlled in that basically every drop of water that runs through the river system is accounted for in the irrigation system.