The Eel River once flowed unobstructed from its headwaters in Mendocino County to the Pacific Ocean, supporting the third largest salmon and steelhead runs in California. Over a million fish historically spawned each year within the Eel River watershed (Source: Yoshiyama & Moyle, 2010). All that has changed over the past century, with the effects … Read more
WHAT IS THE ‘TWO-BASIN SOLUTION’ In 2017 when PG&E began relicensing the Potter Valley Project, Congressman Huffman convened a stakeholder group that agreed to work toward a ‘two-basin solution’ based on two ‘co-equal goals’. These goals broadly reflect desires to improve fish passage and habitat in the Eel River while avoiding adverse impacts to water … Read more
FOER staff and Board spent a weekend in the Upper Eel river watershed in late November. Amidst the lingering smoke of the tragic Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, we took stock of the impacts of the Mendocino Complex Fire, the largest in California’s history, that burned through the upper Eel only a … Read more
Friends of the Eel River submitted both federal ESA and CESA petitions to list Northern California Summer Steelhead as an Endangered Distinct Population Segment. Read our press release here. Both petitions are largely based on a combination of the extensive 2017 report by Moyle et al on the status of California salmonids, State of the … Read more
Tucked away among rolling green hills off the road leading up to the River Rock Casino near Geyserville, a once-beleaguered creek is springing back to life. Situated at the bottom of a slope ravaged by a landslide in the 1980s, part of the creek bed and its immediate surroundings were for years covered with asphalt … Read more
BENTON FALLS, MAINE — “Look underneath you,” commands Nate Gray, a burly biologist for the state of Maine. He reaches down to the grate floor of a steel cage perched on a dam straddling the Sebasticook River, and pulls back a board revealing the roiling river 30 feet below. “All you see is fish.” Below, undulating in … Read more