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Growing Up on the Eel River

By Dave Hope
On our property in Berry Creek, I remember the strong smell of rotting salmon carcasses emanating from Tomki Creek in the 1960s. We hoped that winds would shift so we could get a break, but I had no idea how hard that shift would be. I stopped fishing my favorite hole in 1973 as I sensed that the river did not have enough fish to spare. How great it would be to smell again what I once thought was a foul odor, to fish without regret, and to feel that energy once again that comes over you when huge salmon returns are imminent.
From my world it was pretty obvious what had happened. I walked the washed-out roads with my father after the 1964 floods. I had seen the old road failures from the 1955 floods, so it took a lot to impress me. For the Eel River basin we could not have tortured a more fragile landscape in a more effective way. It was as if they wiped all the trees off the river bank overnight. All the creek crossings and many road fills had failed, delivering roads to rivers. But this was only the half of it; many crossings plugged and diverted water out of its natural channel, delivering huge flood flows across the landscape to places that never had running water over them, gouging out colossal gullies through once-beautiful meadowsmeadows that used to stay green, delivering spring flows during the summer. Now drained of groundwater, they only deliver mud during the winter.
During the 1964 flood, the Eel River carried more than 100 million tons of bedload (liquefied landslides, roads, and gullies) as it flowed past Scotia in three days, compared to 85 million tons in the previous eight years (Brown and Ritter, 1971). With this sediment load many reaches of the river blew out of their banks and wiped out fragile, slow-to-develop riparian zones. Damage unparalleled, this flood ranks among some of the worlds great recorded floods for a basin of this size (Wolman and Gerson, 1978).
So yes, I was now impressed and wondered what to do. Would fixing up those roads help? For the next 35 years I became a professional in road fixes, restoration of landscapes, and other ways to control erosion and sediment discharges off disturbed lands; and the answer was yes, it can help but its only a part of the puzzle, no silver bullet. I also wondered about the bad logging. It was all around, and I grew up intimately aware of the menacing problem, as our lands east of Willits were cut once for old growth and twice for poles in three years (prior to our ownership). Maybe better logging practices would help, I thought. So for those same 35 years I set chokers, skinned cat, and became a Registered Professional Forester working to improve all aspects of logging. We were really making a difference but not enough to turn it around. It was obvious that humans had impacted the world of salmon in so many ways, probably every way that we could. It was becoming clear that to heal the Eel, it would take a full repertoire of knowledge and skills.
The root problem lay in the fact that the sediment was still in the river from 1955 and 1964, and all sediment inputs since then (manmade and natural) were causing ongoing impacts. We made rivers without water, without habitats, and somehow we figured out how to make a river disappear by damming it (strange how we could think this was ok). As a continuing insult we added commercial hatcheries as mitigation for the dams (salmon without rivers), which breed virulent diseases and poorly adapted fish that muscle food and habitat away from our wild fish and dont return to spawn in percentages anywhere near those of the wild fish. Blocked rivers, sick nurseries, and degraded overfished oceans and nonnative pikeminnow devouring everythingEEEECH!!!! It is amazing that salmon are still alive. You have to love anything that fights that hard to persevere.
Now I do see many landscapes in much better shape than when I was a kid, but still we dont have that feeling that salmon are coming in great numbers. In the 1960s all the forests within view were replaced with skid trails and stumps, all trees removed except a few seed trees per acre. Now those logged lands are showing great recovery. Newly logged lands benefit from improved forest practices, but clearcutting with better roads is still not good for the river. However, that is another article.
Humans and salmon both need high-quality water. Salmon tell us if we have it, and that canary has sung and somehow it was ignored for way too long. What is great is the potential of the Eel River; what is sad is that the damage has gone unaddressed for so long. A daunting challenge, but a river with great potential. Now we have only a few thousand salmon in 3600 square miles of watershednot many for a river that once supported millionsbut there is the potential, a possibility of an exciting future. Growing up with the Eel, you feel like fighting for it, and bucking a tide makes you feel like fighting your way home like the salmon.