Dear Friend, Restoring fish access to the Eel River’s headwaters by removing the Potter Valley Project dams. Protecting the rare and spectacular summer steelhead. Safeguarding public trust values. Adapting to climate change and sea level rise. At Friends of the Eel River, we are working on some huge tasks these days, and are honored to … Read more
Friends of the Eel River claims a win for Eel River salmon and steelhead and the Endangered Species Act Eureka – Friends of the Eel River (FOER) has claimed an obscure but important win in our fight to reverse the harms Pacific Gas & Electric’s two Potter Valley Project dams continue to cause critically imperiled … Read more
“When we call ourselves salmon people, that’s very literal in our purpose to take care of salmon. So that means the river and the forest, and all of these other things that create salmon habitat. So if the salmon aren’t here, I think that’s a very cosmological violence – like striping identity, striping purpose.” Scott … Read more
Under a purple pre-dawn sky, a small group of Northern Californian Indians ventured out onto the wet sand where the mighty Klamath River meets the Pacific Ocean. They had come to honor and fight for the salmon that have sustained their ancient culture for generations. Parents with their children burned sacred sage in the chilly … Read more
The Eel River is on the brink of disaster, its ocean-going fish species threatened with extinction, its nurturing estuary diked, drained and diminishing. At the same time, this massive watershed in California’s northwest corner offers the state’s best hope of ensuring a future abundance of wild anadromous fish. This paradox of the Eel, California’s third … Read more
Native American communities are bracing for a public health crisis this year in California’s misty, rugged northwestern corner. In the Pacific Ocean off the mouth of the Klamath River, record-low numbers of fall-run adult Chinook salmon are ready to make their annual migration up the river and its primary tributary, the Trinity River, to spawn. … Read more
The spring-fed water that flows through Hansen Creek in southwestern Alaska is almost always clear. Its rate and temperature stay relatively constant throughout the year. Each summer, sockeye salmon migrate through the shallow, narrow creek bed in distinct pulses, in a migration pattern common to salmon populations around the world. Why the salmon move in … Read more
When state water officials scaled back their mass dumping of water from the damaged Oroville Dam this week, they knew the riverbed below would dry up enough to allow the removal of vast piles of debris from the fractured main spillway. But they apparently did not anticipate a side effect of their decision to stop … Read more
In the mid-1990s, a scientist named Ted Sommer commuted routinely by bicycle between Davis and Sacramento, on the causeway that passes over the vast floodplain called the Yolo Bypass. At the time, state biologists had observed that numbers of Sacramento River fish increased almost every year following a wet winter. “We wondered what it was … Read more
The federal government can redirect water from a Northern California dam to prevent mass die-offs of salmon in drought years, water that otherwise would be shipped to Central Valley farmers, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had authority under a 1955 federal law to release Trinity River water from the … Read more