Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains [1 ed.] 9780520933798, 9780520251250

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Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for

Copyright © 2007. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

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Steward’s Fork

Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

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Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

Steward’s Fork A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains

Copyright © 2007. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

James K. Agee

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley

· Los Angeles

· London

Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Agee, James K. Steward’s Fork: a sustainable future for the Klamath Mountains/James K. Agee. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-25125-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Natural history—Klamath Mountains Region (Calif. and Or.) 2. Conservation of natural resources—Klamath Mountains Region (Calif. and Or.) 3. Sustainable development—Klamath Mountains Region (Calif. and Or.) I. Title. QH104.5.K55A34 2007 508.794—dc22 2007004255 Manufactured in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/ASTM D5634–01 (Permanence of Paper).

Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

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To my partner, Wendy, who has loved the Trinities along with me across five wonderful decades

Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

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Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

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Contents

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Figures and Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction The Physical World Forest Mélange A Rose by Any Name My Botanical Contest with Miss Alice Eastwood Wild Creatures of the Klamaths Change Is the Only Constant First Peoples of the Rivers Gold Is Where You Find It Green Grass and Green Gold Dam the World Modern Myths and Monsters Principles of Future Sustainability Hard Times for Hardrock Forests for the Future Restoring the Rivers Steward’s Fork

1 9 19 31 41 56 71 106 124 145 164 180 198 206 215 233 246

Appendix: Biota Mentioned in the Text

255

References and Further Reading

261

Index

277

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Figures and Tables

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figures 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

The Klamath Mountains The central Klamaths Annual precipitation in the Klamath region Geologic map of the Klamath province Mount Shasta life zones Vegetation of the Klamaths Vegetation change over 9,000 years Distribution of major tree species Monkeyflower pollination Carnivorous California pitcher plant Life cycle of Pacific salmon Lightning fires in the Salmon River drainage Fires on Thompson Ridge Morris Meadows, 1960 and 2004 Alluvial deposits at Eagle Creek Native American groups of the Klamath Mountains Yurok idea of the world Gold-bearing gravels, Weaverville basin Typical dredge configuration Arc pattern of gravel deposited from a dredge Suction dredge and the Modern Gold Mine

4 5 12 16 21 23 28 29 35 37 69 75 81 86 92 107 109 128 132 133 136

ix

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x

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Figures and Tables

Dredge spoils in Scott Valley Snags near today’s Shasta Lake Vegetation and stream changes at Butter’s Dam Worldview from Hayfork Brown Bear Quartz Mill at Deadwood Lumber production in Siskiyou and Trinity counties, 1948–2001 Sediment in Redwood Creek, 1947, 1964, and 1980 Trinity Dam above Lewiston Upper Coffee Creek stream pirating Proposed dams, 1957 Plan for northwestern California rivers, 1967 Foot impression at Cecil Lake Restored stability at the Siskon Mine Fitness of habitat for the northern spotted owl Douglas-fir stand ten years after burning Trinity Dam channel morphology Berms downstream of Trinity Dam Restored floodplain Rush Creek delta

140 142 143 150 159 160 162 165 171 174 177 185 212 220 222 235 236 239 240

tables Life histories of the three major salmonids Bark thickness of mature coniferous trees Plants used by the Karuk people Grazing in the Klamath National Forest

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1. 2. 3. 4.

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68 77 114 149

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following individuals and organizations who provided resources or inspiration that helped in the writing of this book: Trinity County Historical Society, Jake Jackson Memorial Museum and its History Center, Siskiyou County Museum, U.S. Forest Service (Klamath and Shasta-Trinity National Forests), Save-the-Redwoods League, Trinity Alps Resort and my many friends there, the University of Washington libraries and librarian Carol Green, Trinity County Library, Don Elder, Polly Haessig, Midge Hall, Michael Hendryx, Al Hodgson, Paul H. Kinkade, David Laffranchini of the Trinity County Sheriff’s Office, Rich Lorenz, Howard May, Kathleen McCovey, Ray McKidney, James T. Rock, Gisela and Jerry Rohde, Carl N. Skinner, Alan H. Taylor, Betty Toth, Jim Villaponteaux, and G. James West. The University of Washington graciously granted me a sabbatical leave to work on the manuscript, and the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Endowed Professorship helped defray certain of its costs. I would also like to thank all the people who have helped create a new future for Klamath region ecosystems. Cathy Schwartz and Jack DeLap of the University of Washington took my rough drafts of illustrations and artwork and magically turned them into effective and readable figures. Thanks to you both. I offer special thanks to the individuals who critically read the earlier versions of the entire draft: Howard May, Cliff Pierce, Jerry Rohde, and Carl Skinner. Jerry also provided extraordinary help for chapter 8. Carl introduced me to the far eastern Klamaths that I had previously xi

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xii

Acknowledgments

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underappreciated, and his love for the region appears to exceed even mine. Of course, I accept responsibility for any interpretations and errors that may have squeezed themselves into the published version. A final set of thanks is due my editor, Jenny Wapner, and the editorial and publication staff at the University of California Press. Dore Brown kept the production on schedule, and Adrienne Harris, my copyeditor, gently reminded me that I was writing in the English language.

Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

chapter 1

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Introduction

My introduction to the Trinity Alps of California came in 1950 when I was five years old. My only memories of the entire year are from that first summer visit. My family stayed at a resort, rustic even then, appropriately named Trinity Alps Resort, on the Stuart Fork of the Trinity River within the rugged and beautiful Klamath mountain region of northwestern California. Some neighbors had visited the resort the previous year and invited our family to come along the following year. We drove from the San Francisco Bay Area up Highway 99, spent the night in Red Bluff, and the next morning drove up to Redding through the conical burner smoke of the lumber mills and across Highway 299 to Weaverville. I sat in the back seat alongside my sister, Linda, and had a great view out the side window of our 1948 Chevrolet as we crested Buckhorn Summit. The Trinity River, in July, was a roaring, cascading whitewater. From Weaverville, we traveled over a succession of dirt roads, thick with red dust and filled with immense logging trucks. I could feel my parents’ tension whenever we confronted a huge Peterbilt truck and had to dodge to the side to avoid being crushed like a bug. My mom clutched my three-month-old brother, Mark, as we swerved through the footthick dust; my youngest brother, Richard, would not appear on the scene for another three years. We finally entered a long, broad meadow just downstream of the resort, now drowned by Trinity Lake behind massive Trinity Dam; the green expanse was dotted with contented 1

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2

Introduction

cattle. One more turn, and we pulled into the resort and headed to our assigned cabin, one of many named for counties in California. We were there only a week, but as we left under the Good Luck Come Again sign, I knew that my life had been forever changed and that I would count the weeks each year until I could return. I still do. Each year now, as I leave the mountains, I feel like a salmon smolt being swept downstream, head pointed upstream in a futile attempt to stay. One evening during that first visit, as Mom was preparing dinner in the cabin, Dad took me on a short hike into the woods. I remember being awed by the large trees, although I didn’t know they had names like Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine. The understory was quite lush and tall (to my five-year-old self). We hiked along an old trail up the side of the mountain for about fifteen minutes and stopped to rest. At this age, I was certain my Dad knew everything about everything. He was the handiest man I knew, able to fix cars and add rooms to our house as well as to do the more fatherly things dads do. He suggested we sit on a somewhat decayed log that was next to the trail. As we plopped down, we heard a slight buzzing in the air. Soon the buzz had escalated to a roar, notifying us that the log was home to a yellow-jacket nest. Dad’s advice was to sit tight: as long as we didn’t move, we wouldn’t be stung. My experience with bees was with honeybees, which stung once and died. We weren’t prepared for these more aggressive wasps that could sting multiple times. The yellow jackets began to land and sting, and after enduring about five stings, we began to rethink our strategy. Dad yelled to get up and run down the trail, and as we did, the angry swarm of yellow jackets followed us, slowly dispersing as we left them in the dust. This occasion was the first time my Dad had been wrong about anything, as far as I knew, and though I didn’t lose my confidence in him, I knew then that the forests of the Trinity Alps held many surprises. For the first ten years that my family went to Trinity, the trip from the Bay Area took the better part of two days. Once we arrived, we might travel to Weaverville once for groceries, but we largely stayed at the resort, because the drive, which today takes fifteen minutes, then took an hour and a half along dusty red dirt roads. However, surrounded by ridges, we felt as if we were in the middle of the universe. And today, wherever I am in the Klamath Mountains, I’m in the middle of things, surrounded by ridges that define one’s world as necessarily provincial. More than fifty years later, with annual visits to the resort and the surrounding Klamath Mountains, my wonder has grown at the beauty

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Introduction

3

and majesty of this landscape. The area’s human history has largely been extractive since the gold-rush days, whether the desired resource was gold, water, or timber. I have seen some promising signs in recent years that we are paying more attention to what we leave behind as well as what we take, but the choices are always difficult in a landscape of change. We need to more forcefully embrace principles of sustainable management if we are to effectively steward our future landscapes. Stewardship is the ethical treatment of the land, which Aldo Leopold succinctly called a “land ethic.” The title of this book refers to a fork of the Trinity River, the Stuart Fork, which I know more intimately than any other river. Its initial name, according to Isaac Cox, the first biographer of the region, was Steward’s Fork (even Isaac’s name has alternate spellings, as Isaac and Issac). The name later changed to Stewart’s Fork, and sometime in the twentieth century, became known as the Stuart Fork. Like the many forks of a river, a steward’s fork represents different pathways toward sustainable futures for these landscapes. Some people believe that we have only two choices for the future—exploitation or preservation—but their “either/or” approach is out of tune with reality. Many forks lie before us, with no single “right” fork and no certainty that following any fork will be successful. We must learn as we go and apply our learning in intelligent management decisions, creating new forks along the way. I define my region of interest as the Klamath Mountains, although I make a few forays to other places. The Klamath Mountains are not specific mountains but a collection of mountain ranges, no single one of which is named Klamath. The Klamaths include a number of major ranges, including the Yolla Bolly Mountains, Trinity Mountains, Trinity Alps, Scott Mountains, Salmon Mountains, Marble Mountains, and Siskiyou Mountains. Although the boundaries of the Klamaths can be defined in several ways, I’ve chosen my eastern boundary just east of Shasta Lake where the Pit River forms a clear geological boundary, with Highway 36 as the southern boundary (although the Klamaths do extend somewhat south geologically), Highway 199 as the northern boundary (and the Klamath terrane does extend a bit north of there), and a sloppy western boundary that extends toward the coast to allow inclusion of the redwood (see figures 1 and 2). At times, I expand the region a bit and other times, I shrink it, depending on the story I wish to tell. As a forest ecologist, I emphasize a forest theme here somewhat above others. But the stewardship of natural resources requires attention

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4

Introduction

Figure 1. The Klamath Mountains in northwestern California. A rough boundary can be defined by Highway 199 on the north, Interstate 5 on the east, Highway 36 on the south, and a northwest-trending line east of Redwood Creek. The region is surrounded by midsized towns, with few large congregations of people in its core. (Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

to all resources, not just to forests. Management of these multiple resources has become increasingly complex and contentious during the past decade. Attempts to produce consensus have stumbled as scientists and policy makers have debated how best to achieve and sustain landscapes that meet the needs of people and natural organisms, including plants, fish, and wildlife. One theme that has drawn considerable consensus is that in these ecosystems of the Klamath Mountains, the only

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Introduction

5

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Figure 2. The central Klamaths, with many of the features mentioned in following chapters. (Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

constant is change. Natural disturbances have been common historically and have affected resources in various ways. Floods have caused much damage, but they have also cleaned out riparian vegetation and created slow-water areas where small Chinook salmon could later be reared. Forest fires have burned across portions of the Klamaths annually but have often left most of the big trees alive and prevented more catastrophic fires. These natural disturbances have been the backbone of ecological sustainability. We have tried to remove flooding by dam building and to remove fire by suppression, but our efforts have decimated the anadromous fishery and only created more destructive fires.

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6

Introduction

We tend to want the same stability in nature that we hope for in our personal lives, but there is no balance in nature. Nature is a constantly changing kaleidoscope of events and rarely remains static for long. Fires change the face of the vegetation, floods scour river bars, and insects and windstorms remove trees of different sizes and species, including some that are quite old. An appreciation of place is essential to understand both nature and culture. Modern ecology is essentially a science of place. Various physical principles apply, but we must interpret them in terms of the interactions of local biotic and abiotic (climate, geology, and the like) elements. The Klamath Mountains are little like the Cascades or the Olympics or the Sierra Nevada. Common tree species act out different ecological roles in different places. The Douglas-fir, for example, is a pioneer species that regenerates after fire in a wet place like the Olympic Mountains in Washington. Its presence is a marker of a severe disturbance at some time in the past. It can play the same role in certain places in the Klamaths, but more commonly here, the Douglas-fir indicates the absence of recent disturbance, because it is more tolerant of shade in the Klamaths than some of its competitors are. Scientists usually define the region by its unique and diverse geology, again an issue of place. From the vantage point of almost any ridgetop, wave after wave of forested crests disappear into the distance around the horizon, broken only by an occasional glimpse to the east of youthful Mount Shasta or Mount Lassen, parts of another world: the Cascades. The rugged physiography of the region has also had a defining influence on human culture. The remote Klamaths have imposed provincialism because of the constraining influence of geography. This statement is as true of modern cultures as it was for early cultures. My favorite place book for the region is Traveling the Trinity Highway, edited by Ben Bannion and Jerry Rohde. It began as a geography-class project at Humboldt State University and evolved into a series of short stories chronicling the history of the Highway 299 corridor. It is a wonderful integration of nature and culture and is as true to place as a book can be. A place is partly defined by its native rocks, trees, flowers, and animals. In describing place, one must be true to these elements. I recently read a short modern novel set in the upper Trinity River basin, in which the characters observe steelhead, burn tanoak for firewood, and lead a school walk during which they identify various forest conifers, including spruce. These characters might well do these things in Fortuna along the redwood coast, or even at Willow Creek, at the western edge of the

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Introduction

7

Klamaths, but not in the Coffee Creek area where the novella is set. Steelhead haven’t inhabited the upper reaches of the Trinity since Trinity Dam permanently blocked their passage forty years ago, although landlocked kokanee salmon do spawn upstream. Tanoak, although native to the region and common on the coast, is rare, if not altogether absent, in the upper Trinity basin. A visitor would have to search hard to find a stand with a tree-sized tanoak, although the shrub variety of tanoak does occur there. Plenty of California black oak, Oregon white oak, and Pacific madrone grow nearby that burn just as well and are much easier to obtain. The coastal Sitka spruce doesn’t occur there, and although Brewer spruce and Engelmann spruce do occur in the Trinity Alps, they are not low-elevation species and would not be found on a walk there next to the river. If the book’s setting were a generic western conifer forest, these mistakes might not be so onerous, but for a novel of place, they are egregious. Nonfiction accounts of the Klamaths fare no better. The credit for a photo in one forest-ecology book provides a table of forest data from the “South Fork of the Trinity River, Siskiyou County,” yet the South Fork never gets within 25 miles of Siskiyou County. My favorite Bigfoot book has Bluff Creek, the site of the famous Bigfoot film, in the Trinity Alps, some 30 miles southwest of its confluence with the Klamath River. Under some of the dam proposals that floated around for decades (which I discuss later), this feat might eventually have been possible, but without such diversion, Bluff Creek flows into the Klamath River. Another book that emphasizes the importance of place has Highway 199 crossing the Siskiyous from Happy Camp to Cave Junction. Though a road does cover that terrain, it is a local Forest Service road over Little Grayback Mountain that is closed in the winter and is definitely not a U.S. highway. Highway 199 heads southwest from Grants Pass through Cave Junction to the coast at Crescent City. Even the official Trinity County website seems to be confused about where the county is, proclaiming proudly that it is located in the “lower reaches of the Cascade Range in California.” The lower Cascades are confined to eastern Shasta County. I think these mistakes happen because of the complex geography of the Klamaths’ enclosed landscape. Place tends to be described locally and often repetitively because of this provincialism. For this reason, we see two Cedar Gulches within 2 miles of each other, and within 25 miles are two Big Flats, two Cherry Flats, and two Oak Flats—all of which the local populace seems to navigate without much confusion.

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8

Introduction

Little Crater Lake is bigger than Crater Lake, which is a couple drainages away, and both are but a small fraction of the size of the famous, volcanically formed Crater Lake in Oregon. They wouldn’t even fill the area occupied by Wizard Island. Within a 12-mile stretch of the upper Trinity River lies Boulder Lake, plus six variants: Little Boulder, Lower Boulder, East Boulder, Upper Boulder, Middle Boulder, and West Boulder. Either the area has a lot of rocks, or someone didn’t have much imagination. Many early Native Americans remained within a 20-mile radius of their birthplace for their entire lives. The “tribes” (most Native Americans in this area had more of a community-based political structure than a tribal one) defined their world most clearly as a local place, viewing more distant areas in less-defined, more mythological terms. Sustaining their world depended on sustaining their environment. The succeeding white culture came from other places and exploited both the Indians and the environment. Many of these visitors stayed only briefly, but those who remained seem to have evolved this same sense of place. Culture affects place, but place just as surely affects culture. I have attempted to mesh three important themes in the following pages. The first is a multithreaded attempt to explain the ecosystem dynamics of the Klamath Mountains, with their complex geologic history and diverse flora and fauna. Second, I note that for millennia, people have used and more recently abused these ecosystems. Separating nature from culture, even in the large wilderness areas of the region, is not possible. People are inextricably linked with the problems and solutions in the natural environment, from logging and mining to alterations in salmon habitat and global climate change. The native ecosystem dynamics, together with this history of land use, have resulted in the conditions we have today: some good, some not so good. The third theme is the most contentious, but it logically follows the other themes: given that people will continue to have a close tie to these landscapes, how can we effectively steward the land? I provide some principles of stewardship that reflect my beliefs about where the Klamath Mountains should be headed. Sustainability is a value-laden concept, with multiple “right” choices. This philosophical debate about landscape futures is indeed a “steward’s fork.”

Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

chapter 2

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The Physical World

The physical world of the Klamath Mountains is the template upon which its biological diversity has been built. The physiography of the Klamaths is very rugged but less uplifted than the Sierra Nevada. Whereas the peaks of the Sierra Nevada rise to over 14,000 feet, the highest peak in the Klamath Mountains, Mount Eddy, is a whopping 9,025 feet. Thompson Peak, at 9,002 feet, is a close second, but anyone who has climbed it (I’ve only come close, never having been much of a rock climber) knows that it is more challenging than many peaks thousands of feet higher. Thompson Peak protects the only glaciers left in the range, which are more properly described as glacierets, being not much more than permanent snowfields. Most of the ridgelines across the region range from 5,000 to 7,000 feet, forming a relatively level series of ridges that geologists call accordant summits. This formation helps to center visitors: one always feels in the middle, and usually in the middle of steep country. One finds very little flat country in the Klamaths, which is why the people of the Klamaths have always been and will always be people of the rivers. The alluvial land adjacent to streams has not only provided resources but offered a flat place to establish villages. Typical upriver tributary settlements, such as Sawyer’s Bar and Cecilville, cling to the flatter ground next to the river’s edge. The only four broad valleys of note within the Klamath region are Hayfork and Scott Valleys, both primarily agricultural centers; the upper Trinity River, now the bed of Trinity Lake; and Hoopa Valley, on the west edge of the Klamath Mountains. 9

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The Physical World

The rugged terrain is so difficult to navigate that significant landscape features are still being discovered. In summer 2005, Superintendent Jim Milestone of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area announced the discovery of a 400-foot cataract along Crystal Creek that was not on any U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps and was known to only a few individuals. The cataract had been hidden by steep terrain and thick vegetation, although the Indians and early gold miners likely knew about it. It is such a spectacular falls, clearly among the largest in the entire Klamath range, that a trail has now been constructed to it. The major rivers of the Klamath Mountains flow transverse to the orientation of the geology. Whereas the major geological formations are oriented north-south, Clear Creek, which flows into Whiskeytown Lake, eventually empties east into the Sacramento River; the Klamath and Trinity rivers generally flow westerly in a convoluted serpentine to the Pacific; and the Applegate River flows into the westerly trending Rogue River in southern Oregon. This “flow to nowhere” has meant little protection, until recently, for the Klamath and Trinity rivers, as natural river flows have been considered a waste of water. Hydraulic mining was not curtailed here, as in the Sierra Nevada, because the Klamaths had few downstream farmers. The sheer volume of water being wasted to the west had water engineers yearning for dams for most of the twentieth century. The abundant, clear water has created complex drainage patterns and equally complex names. Poor McClaron had his gold mine on the East Branch of the East Fork of the North Fork of the Trinity River. The water knows where it’s going, but the miners probably had a tough time getting their directions right. We know the country was tough because of all the “gulches” knifing into steep mountains: it is the real West. Some names are repetitive (two Bear Gulches lie within 7 miles of each other east of Trinity Lake), some are hopeful (Rich Gulch), and some are rueful (Drunken Gulch). We can be grateful that not a single “brook” appears in the Klamath Mountains, except the obvious nonnative interloper, the eastern brook trout. The region has plenty of creeks, and they are pronounced the way they are spelled, eschewing the pseudotough “crick” of the Rocky Mountains. Scientists typically describe the climate of the Klamath Mountains as Mediterranean, but like many classifications, this one is not a totally accurate. Watching the sunset in the Trinity Alps, one is not struck by a climatic resemblance to true Mediterranean regions like Barcelona or

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The Physical World

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Los Angeles, although on my last trip to Barcelona, I was greeted by a foot of snow, so maybe the classification isn’t so bad after all. A Mediterranean climate offers cool, wet winters and warm, dry summers, with a pronounced summer drought. These elements the Klamath Mountains have. But there is a lot of variation across the region, and the higher elevations have a much shorter growing season and cooler summer temperatures than do other parts of the region. A montane Mediterranean climate is perhaps the most accurate descriptor. At the coast, summer fog mediates the warmth, and the trees intercept the fog and turn it into rain, a phenomenon called fog drip. Fog drip can actually increase annual precipitation 10 to 20 inches in locations where fog is common in the summer, such as the redwood belt along the coast. Interior warming essentially sucks marine air up the coastal valleys, and until the valleys warm sufficiently late in the day to evaporate the fog, the mist keeps the valleys cool and moist. Mark Twain reportedly said that the worst winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, because of the fog. The coast also tends to be wet. Honeydew, along the southern coast of Humboldt County, is the wettest place in California, averaging over 104 inches of precipitation per year. But the rain doesn’t come all at once; instead it drips in day by drippy day, a quarter inch here, and a half inch there. Even in flood times, only 5 to 8 inches fall in a day. But if the rain is warm and falls on snow, world-class floods can result. The state record for one day of precipitation is elsewhere: in Southern California, where a whopping 26 inches fell in one wet January day at Hoegees Camp in 1943. No one keeps weather records there anymore, so perhaps the station washed away. The Klamaths do have the state record for number of consecutive days with measurable precipitation: in 1998, Gasquet Ranger Station had 63 straight days with enough rain to record in a rain gauge. Inland a few miles, the climate is more typically Mediterranean, except that the winters tend to receive more precipitation than is typically Mediterranean (see figure 3). Willow Creek, Orleans, and Happy Camp all receive over 50 inches a year, mostly as rain. Annual precipitation tends to decrease as one moves inland. Weed, Yreka, and Callahan, for example, receive only 20 to 25 inches a year, because they are in the rain shadow of mountains to the southwest, where most of the storms come from. They are also colder in the winter, so some of this precipitation comes as snow, as it does in higher mountainous areas. In the eastern Klamaths is an “island” of higher precipitation that bucks the

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12

The Physical World

Figure 3. Annual precipitation in the Klamath region. Rainfall varies over an order of magnitude, from about 10 inches inland to over 100 inches at the western edge. (Source: Western Region Climate Center. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

trend of decreasing precipitation to the east. Storm masses coming from the northern Sacramento Valley hit the mountains, are pushed up in elevation, cool, and are then less able to hold moisture, so the moisture drops as rain or snow. Weaverville, in the center of the Klamaths, receives only about 35 inches of annual precipitation, but Whiskeytown, at the edge of the Sacramento Valley, receives over 60 inches. The higher

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The Physical World

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elevations in the mountains receive much more precipitation than do the valleys, where all the permanent weather stations reside, and snowpacks as deep as 80 inches are not uncommon by the end of the major snow season in April. The Klamaths tend to have warm, dry summers away from the coast. This situation makes for an ideal tourist climate but also is an ideal fire climate. Thunderstorms start many lightning fires, and a typical historical summer was probably much smokier than today’s typical summer. Average July temperatures across the region exceed 86oF, with record highs topping 118oF. Climate has not always been so warm in the Klamaths. Like the rest of North America, the Klamaths have been subject to wide swings in climate due to many factors, including oscillations in solar radiation in response to the orientation of the earth’s axis. Historically, these changes in the earth’s heating led to cycles of glaciation, filling many of the upper valleys of today’s rivers with glaciers. In the Trinity Alps, repeated glaciation reached as far down as Deep Creek on the Stuart Fork, the North Fork on Swift Creek, and Dedrick on Canyon Creek. The most recent glacial cycle was about 14oF colder on average than typical temperatures today and had major effects on the roughly thirty glaciers active at the time and on the distribution of plants and animals that were adapted to the cooler climate. The last glacial maximum here was about 22,000 years ago, and it was followed by an abrupt (in geological time) increase in temperature to conditions much like today’s. This past 10,000 years or so is known as the Holocene. The midHolocene, 8,500 to 4,500 years ago, appears to have been warmer and drier than present conditions, with perhaps as much as 20 inches less annual precipitation, affecting river flow, forest fires, and other natural phenomena. A reasonably stable climate similar to today’s has persisted for the past several thousand years. These climatic shifts have had significant effects on the distribution of vegetation and animals and have resulted in remarkable biodiversity in the region. Of course, even earlier, 30 million to 40 million years ago, magnolias and bald cypress grew along the swamps here. Weaverville’s La Grange Café, known for offering unusual entrées such as wild boar and venison on recent menus, could have added local ground sloths and mammoths to the menu had it been operating a couple of million years ago in the Pleistocene. Global warming is no longer a wild theory: it is here. But it will interact with the same natural agents that have forced short- and long-term climate change in the past. Most people are now aware of the El Niño

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The Physical World

phenomenon, a tropical sea-surface temperature anomaly that tends to push tropical storms farther north than usual. In the American Southwest, El Niño is associated with increases in annual precipitation, and the reversed pattern, La Niña, is associated with drier years. This pattern repeats every few years. In the Pacific Northwest, a longer-phase pattern known as the PDO, or Pacific Decadal Oscillation, brings multiple decadal cooler-wetter or warmer-drier conditions. The Klamath Mountains are likely to be affected by both El Niño and PDO, but probably less strongly by either than are places much farther north or south. Arriving at the Stuart Fork each summer, I always head first to the river and its rocks. Most of the rocks have been rounded by the action of the stream, but that feature is about all they have in common. Gold, green, black, blue, and white, they are usually framed by a stunning rock outcrop that temporarily holds them in place on their journey downstream. The diversity in rocks is a symptom of geological diversity and is one of the characters that defines the Klamath region. Its geology is responsible for some of the most diverse plant communities in the western United States. Klamath geology was responsible for the major cultural shift that occurred when Indian cultures were overwhelmed by whites in search of gold. And, like the white man, the rocks came from somewhere else. Anyone seeking a specific rock in the Klamaths doesn’t have to go far to find it, or a version of it that has metamorphosed in response to heat and pressure. Limestone? It’s here. Hall City Cave is a spooky limestone cave, once said to contain treasure, although explorers hoping to strike it rich found only a few animal carcasses. Natural Bridge is another limestone feature, although it should probably be called “Natural Tunnel,” because water didn’t so much build a bridge as excavate a tunnel through it. To find metamorphosed limestone, one can try the Marble Mountains (although they are mostly granite). Sandstone and its metamorphosed form, schist, are both plentiful in the Trinity River canyon west of Junction City. To find granite, one can climb into the Trinity Alps or scout out the decomposed form at Buckhorn Summit. Serpentine? The Klamaths have more concentrated serpentine country than does anywhere else in North America. The Klamaths are a geologist’s candy store, although several geologists likely went mad trying to explain the convoluted geological “knot.” We usually think of the land we walk on as stable and unchanging. People who anchor companies are known as the “bedrock.” But in geological time, change has been the hallmark. Terranes, as geologists call

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these large complexes of rocks, have floated around the earth as large plates, in a process known as continental drift. The westward-moving North American plate is responsible for scraping off and piling up terranes at the western edge of the continent. That most of the mountaintops of the Klamaths are former sea bottom comes as no surprise to any geologist, but an explanation of how they got there has become widely accepted only in the past few decades. Serpentine, the state rock of California, forms from peridotite, probably the most common mantle rock within the earth. Deposits above the serpentine are commonly pillow lavas that formed from basalt that erupted under ancient seas. Above that layer are radiolarian cherts, originally deep-ocean sediment. The island of Cyprus, the Apennines and the Swiss Alps of Europe, and the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco all contain this same threerock ordered sequence, known as the Steinmann Trinity, which formed the basis of the theory of continental drift and plate tectonics. The Steinmann Trinity is also found in the Klamath Trinities. Most fifth-grade kids can look at a globe and see how South America and Africa seemingly fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When I did this as a fifth grader, my friends considered it a crazy idea, even though such theories first appeared early in the twentieth century, not only because of the jigsaw puzzle fit but because of resemblances between rocks and fossils from different continents. That continents are flexible and capable of floating and crashing (the most impressive example being India’s crashing into Asia and forming the Himalayas, which explains why the top of Mount Everest is marine limestone) is now well accepted and has given us a much better understanding of how the Klamath terranes evolved. J. S. Diller, perhaps the best-known Klamath-Shasta geologist, courageously tried to explain the geology of the Klamath Mountains in 1914 but was hampered by the profession’s then-static view of the underlying landscape. Geologists define four major groups of complex rocks, or terranes, in the Klamaths (see figure 4). Each terrane is oriented somewhat north to south, and as one moves east to west across the terranes, they transition from oldest to youngest. The oldest is the Eastern Klamath Belt, created perhaps 450 million years ago, which contains sedimentary and volcanic rocks and old ocean floor. The old ocean floor, on land, is called an ophiolite and often contains serpentinite, which forms when hot peridotite comes in contact with water. Outcrops of serpentinite on land have very unique plant communities, and in road cuts, the rocks often appear quite green and glassy. The Central Metamorphic Belt to the

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Figure 4. Generalized geologic map of the Klamath province. The map does not show granitic intrusions. The inset shows the relation of the Klamaths to the Sierra Nevada of California and the Blue Mountains of Oregon. Ages of these terranes from east to west range from 450 million years for the Eastern Klamath Belt to 150 million to 200 million years for the Western Jurassic Belt. (Source: Adapted from David Alt and Donald W. Hyndman, Roadside Geology of Northern and Central California. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 2000. Used with permission. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

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The Physical World

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west of the Eastern Klamath Belt is younger and separated from it by a thrust fault. It’s a much narrower belt that is composed of gneiss, marble, schist, and likely the same rocks as in the Eastern Klamath Belt, only more metamorphosed because they were dragged under the Eastern Klamath Belt. Large domes of granitic rocks, batholiths, intruded under these rocks and emerged as Shasta Bally and the Canyon Creek pluton that forms the central Trinity Alps (although they do not appear individually in figure 4). The next terrane to the west is the Western Paleozoic and Triassic Belt, which contains mostly dark rocks of oceanic origin and sedimentary rocks, and farthest west is the Western Jurassic Belt, a slightly metamorphosed group of oceanic crust and sediments that is only 150 million to 200 million years old. It contains the Josephine ophiolite, one of the best preserved chunks of old ocean crust in North America and one of the most widespread sets of serpentinite plant communities anywhere. Serpentinite forms soils with very low calcium and very high magnesium content, and the plants that can tolerate such conditions form unique plant communities, including species that are found nowhere else (endemics) and stunted individuals of species that are more widely distributed. The Klamath Mountains appear to have once been part of the northern Sierra Nevada (figure 4, inset). They somehow migrated about 60 miles to the west perhaps 100 million years ago, and the sequence of terranes matches those in the Sierra Nevada and the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon very well. Deposits of gold are as common in the Klamaths as in the Sierra Nevada for this reason. They formed within dikes of quartz, mostly in slate but some in metamorphosed volcanic rocks. Some of this gold became entrained in stream gravel deposits. Many of the gold deposits are on ridges that are uplifted ancient streambeds, created 50 million years ago when they drained a low-lying, coastal, tropical landscape. These ancient river deposits became known as auriferous gravels because of their gold content. The largest one in the Klamaths forms a broad crescent several miles wide that parallels the west side of present Trinity Lake, beginning at the East Fork of the Stuart Fork and continuing southwesterly to Weaverville and Oregon Mountain, where its southern terminus became famous as the La Grange hydraulic mine. The coastal Franciscan terrane later formed on the western edge of the Klamath terranes, eventually shaping the landscape we know today. South Fork Mountain serves as the boundary between the coastal Franciscan complex and the Klamath terranes. Geologist David

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Alt describes the Franciscan complex as “one of the world’s grand messes” (Alt and Hyndman 2000, 117). The rocks are so scrambled that geologists describe them as a “mélange,” a word more common to vintners today, who use it to describe wines that mix many varietal grapes (of course, the southern mélange country in Napa and Sonoma is also the original California wine country). Sandstones and schists are the most common rocks of the Franciscan terrane, and they are often pulverized along active northwest-trending earthquake faults. The Franciscan terrane is unusually unstable; erosion from natural landslides and conditionally unstable hillslopes is often accelerated by activities like road building and logging. Berry Summit along Highway 299 is the dividing line between the Franciscan and Klamath terranes. Mount Shasta borders the eastern edge of the Klamath Mountains and is the youngest large feature on the landscape. It and the other Cascade volcanoes are the surface expression of the thrust of an oceanic plate under the North American plate. The sinking oceanic plate is the source of the magma, or molten rock, that erupts and has built the stratovolcanoes that line the crest of the Cascades. Whereas the rocks to the south and west range from 200 million to 400 million years old, Shasta is less than 1 million years old. Shastina, the small cone just west of the summit, formed less than 10,000 years ago, and hot pyroclastic flows buried forests where Weed and Mount Shasta City sit today. Mount Shasta was not active in the twentieth century, but its southerly neighbor Mount Lassen erupted violently in 1915. About five small earthquakes occur each year within the mountain, providing evidence of continuing volcanic life. With ten eruptions in the past 3,500 years and three in the past 750 years, future eruptions are likely to occur, sending streams of superheated rocks or mudflows toward neighboring towns. The Klamaths are essentially old terranes surrounded by much younger ones. They have been inundated, uplifted, eroded, intruded upon by great granite domes, and carved by glacial action. Because of their geological diversity and age, they have supported a degree of biodiversity unknown elsewhere in the western United States. Even at a semicontinental scale, the Klamaths are recognized as “central,” in the middle of things—as they should be.

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chapter 3

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Forest Mélange

The forests of the Klamath Mountains are the most complex in western North America. Although a mélange is a mixture, medley, or a motley assortment of items, the seeming forest mélange of the Klamaths does have order, a sense of place. As a forest ecologist, I define place by its forest. If I were to be dropped off, blindfolded, in the Klamaths, I would know where I was just from the vegetation, much like basketball players know where they are on the court from a single glimpse of a sideline. Far from being a random combination of overstory and understory species, the vegetation pattern reflects the ancient age of the land, the diversity of the geology, topographic complexity, a history of changing climate, and a plethora of disturbances that favored some species and discouraged others. Like the geology of the Klamaths, the vegetation has also shifted over time, altering the landscape in response to these factors. Describing the factors influencing vegetation is much like describing a favorite piece of music. The integrated sound may be unique, but it can be deconstructed into component parts that are easier to understand. One of the most famous naturalists of his era was C. Hart Merriam: zoologist, botanist, and ethnologist. In 1889, working for the Department of Agriculture, he traveled to northern Arizona to study the distribution of vegetation in the San Francisco Peaks area. Very little was known at the time about the area’s vegetation pattern. Merriam classified the vegetation largely by the influence of temperature and moisture, and 19

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called his scheme the “life-zone” concept in his classic 1890 monograph. As one moved up the San Francisco Peaks, temperatures became cooler and annual precipitation increased, and the vegetation changed from desert to forest and eventually to treeless alpine meadows. He suggested that this progression was similar to walking a line from Arizona to the North Pole, and he named his life zones after that latitudinal transect. The hottest, driest zone was the Lower Sonoran, which contained hot desert vegetation. Next up in elevation was the Upper Sonoran zone, with twoneedle pinyon and Utah juniper. The next-highest zone was the Transition, dominated by pure ponderosa pine. Above that level was the Canadian zone, with a variety of conifers, including Douglasfir and ponderosa pine. This zone graded into the Hudsonian zone, consisting of Engelmann spruce and fir, and then a higher treeless zone called the Arctic-Alpine. This classification scheme is analogous to a layer cake, with each layer being relatively level and representing one zone. It offered a simple way to describe vegetation, and although we know that most simple solutions to complex problems are flawed, the zonal concept, with refinements, is still widely used today. By the time Merriam, with his walrus mustache, arrived at Mount Shasta in 1898, he had already refined his life-zone concept, taking into account aspect (the direction a slope faces), slope (steepness of the land), and disturbance. This revision conceived the layers of the cake as wavy rather than flat. Merriam recognized that the direction a slope faces influences the amount of solar radiation it receives, making a northfacing aspect cooler and moister at a given elevation than its corresponding south aspect. Therefore, the boundary between any two zones would be at lower elevation on the north aspect. Yet mountains are generally not smooth cones; they are dissected by ridges and valleys with a variety of aspects. Therefore, just taking into account elevation and aspect, the boundaries between zones begin to fluctuate quite a bit. Furthermore, relative to some average condition, steep slopes tend to be warmer and drier, and often have shallower soils than do gentle slopes, which often accumulate soil from the steeper slopes. Ridgelines have shallower soils than do valleys and have greater exposure to winds. Valleys, in contrast, tend to concentrate the drainage of cold air at night. The interaction of climate and topography creates complex patterns of local climate, or microclimates, which affect the zonal vegetation boundaries. The boundaries between zones tend to be at higher elevation on ridges, steep slopes, and south aspects, and at lower elevation in valleys and on north aspects, in a fairly predictable pattern.

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Figure 5. Merriam’s life zones for Mount Shasta, showing elevations (feet) for major zones. (Source: Merriam 1899. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

When geology enters the mix, things get even more complex, particularly in the Klamath Mountains. The biggest influence is the widespread presence of “ultramafic” rocks, primarily serpentine, which produce soils that are very low in calcium, very high in magnesium, and also high in a variety of heavy metals that are often toxic to plants. The parent rock is often glassy and green, and the soils are brick red. These landscapes support a unique flora adapted to the harsh conditions, and are often sparsely treed. They contain many species, called endemics, that appear nowhere else in the region or the world. More subtle differences are evident in the vegetation on soils of other geologic origins (soils derived from gabbro, diorite, and schist, for example), but they pale in comparison to the differences between the ultramafic soils and soils of all other substrates. Merriam defined three tree zones on the volcanic slopes of Mount Shasta: the Transition zone, with ponderosa pine; the Canadian zone, with Shasta red fir; and the Hudsonian zone, with whitebark pine (see figure 5). Just below the mountain slopes is the Upper Sonoran zone. In 1898, he and others hiked west to the coast through the Klamaths via Scott Valley and Salmon Summit, making a list of plants he found. Because this journey was quick, he apparently did not identify or classify vegetation zones there as he had on Mount Shasta. Botanist Alice Eastwood, from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, helped Merriam identify many of the plants he collected at Mount Shasta. She later made an expedition into Canyon Creek north of Junction City and identified three vegetation zones on her trip from Redding to the glacial cirques of

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Forest Mélange

the Trinity Alps: a digger pine (now called gray or ghost pine) zone, a sugar pine zone, and a mountain pine (western white pine) zone. These zones are roughly synonymous with the Upper Sonoran, Transition, and Canadian zones in Merriam’s classification. She also hiked through the Hudsonian and Arctic-Alpine zones in the headwaters of Canyon Creek. The fact that she named her zones differently from Merriam’s illustrates a key concept in vegetation classification: all schemes are artificial. They are simply means of pigeonholing and communicating information about ecosystems. The two most common zonal-classification systems today use either the current dominant vegetation, called cover type (see figure 6), or the vegetation that would dominate in the absence of disturbance, called potential vegetation. Cover types are usually named for the tree or trees that have the most canopy cover or cross-sectional stem area (called basal area). For example, any stand currently dominated by Douglas-fir is called a Douglas-fir cover type. However, potential vegetation is defined by the most shade-tolerant species present there (even in small amounts) and is useful in projecting how the vegetation will change if it is not disturbed for a long time. A shade-tolerant species is one that can regenerate and persist in the understory of a forest, although it may not grow very fast there. The most shade-tolerant species may exist only in limited amounts in the understory of the current stand. For example, in the low to intermediate elevations of the eastern Klamaths, we can identify three major species with increasing shade tolerances: ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, and white fir. In the driest places, where ponderosa pine is the only tree species present, this tree will be defined as the potential vegetation. Slightly moister areas will also have Douglas-fir, which, because it can persist in the understory in this environment, will eventually dominate the overstory if the site is not disturbed. Douglas-fir is defined as the potential vegetation here even if it is not currently dominant in the overstory. Similarly, where white fir joins the mix, it will be defined as the potential vegetation, and will itself be replaced by Shasta red fir at even higher elevation. We can use the concept of potential vegetation to project forest change over time. Let’s look at three forests, all with ponderosa pine as the cover type, in three zones: one each in the ponderosa pine, Douglasfir, and white fir zones. Over time, without disturbance, the forest in the ponderosa pine zone will remain dominated by ponderosa pine, although the architecture, or structure, of the forest may change. In the Douglas-fir zone, Douglas-fir will begin to share dominance with the

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Figure 6. Current vegetation of the Klamath Mountains. Because of the map scale, these zones are more generalized than the forest types discussed in the text. (Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

pine over time and will eventually become the dominant vegetation if enough time passes without major disturbance. In the white fir zone, the pine will eventually decline in favor of Douglas-fir and white fir, with white fir eventually becoming the dominant vegetation. Other species,

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of course, will also be present, and their ecological fate also depends on their tolerance to shade in the absence of disturbance. The potential-vegetation concept is, of course, only a theoretical trajectory for two major reasons. The tree species in the Klamath Mountains, like those across much of the West, are long-lived, so replacement will take many centuries. Even more significant is the common occurrence of natural or human-caused disturbances: fires, windstorms, ice storms, floods, and more recently, logging and mining. These events often discriminate against the late-successional, more shade-tolerant species. They occur at the scale of years to decades and are important influences on forest composition. Resistance or resilience in response to disturbance is also important, which we’ll see in a later chapter. Within the broad vegetation zones are finer classifications that are usually defined by the relative dominance of understory species. A simple way to think about this is that the zones are broadly controlled by temperature or elevation, and the finer classifications recognize a gradient of moisture from dry to moist within the zone. John Sawyer and Dale Thornburgh, from Humboldt State University, have developed a classification system for the higher-elevation forests of the Klamath Mountains, beginning where white fir is a zonal dominant. Their communities include white fir/Pacific trillium, white fir/American vetch, white fir/prince’s pine, white fir/Oregon grape, and white fir/mahala mat, along a gradient from moist to dry. Analyzing these communities can then help scientists predict the occurrence of other species with similar environmental requirements or tolerances. These classifications have a clear yin and yang: environment can be used to define plant communities, but plant communities are excellent indicators of environment, too. At lower elevation, the complex mixed Douglas-fir and hardwood forests are not so easily classified. Often, more than one tree species is added to the zonal name to recognize complex codominance patterns between conifers, or between conifers and hardwoods. The great diversity of tree species and frequent disturbances from forest fires make for a tangled classification problem. Because of the diversity of climate in the Klamath Mountains, different zonal sequences occur in the western and eastern portions, particularly at low elevation. The coast receives more precipitation than do inland regions and has a general maritime climate. Inland areas have a more continental climate: they are drier and see greater temperature fluctuations in both summer and winter. Communities dominated by Sitka

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spruce and redwood occur only along the coast and up the coastal valleys that receive summer fog. Farther inland, the low-elevation forests are Douglas-fir/hardwood, with the hardwoods forming a tall layer of mostly thick-leaved evergreen species (tanoak, giant chinquapin, and Pacific madrone). As one continues inland, and as elevation increases, one encounters montane and subalpine zones dominated by white fir, Shasta red fir, mountain hemlock, and whitebark pine. To the east, as elevation decreases, the same subalpine and montane zones appear, below which is a Douglas-fir zone, a ponderosa pine and black oak zone, then juniper woodland or chaparral in the eastern valleys such as Scott and Shasta valleys. The current vegetation is essentially a snapshot in time. Just as the rare Brewer spruce has not occupied the upper Stuart Fork forever, neither has redwood always grown along the coast. Geology, topography, climate—in short, the entire environment—has ebbed and flowed, creating a similarly diverse set of places for various plant species to grow. William Cooper, one of a pioneering group of ecologists in the early twentieth century, likened the temporal evolution of vegetation to the flow of a braided stream that is choked with sediment. The various “stream” channels, representing vegetation communities, move downstream in time and merge, diverge, and coalesce once again as environmental conditions change. Various species may increase or decrease in importance, and some will disappear if conditions are not suitable for establishment and growth. This stream concept is a relevant metaphor for the vegetation of the Klamaths and helps explain the diversity of species there today. Remnants of early vegetation are evident in sedimentary deposits, as fruits and leaves of the ancient vegetation became covered in mud and left identifiable impressions, or fossils, when the deposits solidified into rocks. Few known fossils in the Klamaths are older than about 35 million years, but the geologic epoch of that time, the Oligocene, created a series of fossilized beds now called the Weaverville formation. These layered deposits of old muds are in the Hyampom Valley, Hayfork Valley and north to Hayfork Summit, Reading Creek, Big Bar, and the auriferous (gold-bearing) gravel beds that sweep north from Weaverville to Trinity Center. The fossils of these times represent a swampy, lowelevation environment that was dominated by hardwoods rather than conifers. The Sierra Nevada would not rise for another 30 million years, and the Cascade volcanoes we know today did not form until the most recent 2 million years. The Coast Ranges were not yet present either.

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The primary Klamath conifer was bald cypress, and its angiosperm associates (plants that have seeds in a closed ovary, like a rose) included fig, holly, walnut, tupelo, basswood, and bay. The species that are most similar to these fossil species today are in Japan, China, and the gulf states of the southeastern United States. The climate then was warmer than today, with more summer rain. Because the lowlands’ swampy nature allowed them to preserve only the lowland species, little is known of the more montane floras of the time. Scientists assume that species related to the current regional dominants were there, including Douglas-fir, redwood, the true firs, tanoak, and white alder. The region has been clothed with vegetation since that time, although the species mixes have radically changed. Between 35 million and 25 million years ago, temperatures decreased and the subtropical flora of the lowlands began to move south, displaced by cooler temperate forest types from the north. Redwood forests (both Sequoia sempervirens, the redwood, and the deciduous Metasequoia, or dawn redwood, which is now only in China) occurred throughout the West, with a variety of other evergreen and deciduous species. As climate continued to cool between 25 million and 5 million years ago, during the Miocene era, the subtropical flora continued to retreat, and a drying trend restricted the mesic redwood-mixed forests closer to the coast. Some dry vegetation types, such as oak woodland and chaparral, moved north into the eastern Klamaths, whereas the central Klamaths remained a mixed-evergreen forest with conifers and evergreen hardwoods. Over the past 2 million years, essentially modern vegetation types have existed in the region, but their distribution has been strongly influenced by continued shifts in topography, geology, and climate. Mount Shasta has grown only in the past million years, and Shastina is only 10,000 years old. As many as twenty ice ages have occurred in the past 2 million years, carving and recarving the high mountain terrain and pushing debris down the valleys. Many areas covered with forest today have been repeatedly overrun by ice, although only a few little glacierets remain in the Trinity Alps. During these times of cooling and warming, the tree species in the Klamaths have migrated, some rapidly and some not so rapidly, as the climate has changed. Tree species did not move as a group but as a function of their ability either to tolerate the new environmental conditions by changing growth rates or to disperse by vegetative growth or by seed. This process created combinations of species, or plant communities, unlike any we see today. Some species were extirpated, and others found

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small niches, or refugia, where they could persist. These migrations might be compared to a marathon, in which all the runners start as a single community but are widely spread across the course by the time the winner has crossed the finish line; in tree migrations, some species have stopped at refugia (water stops), and some have dropped from the race completely. We have a good picture of the past 10,000 to 15,000 years of vegetation change from pollen records. Each year, trees produce pollen, and some of this pollen ends up in bogs or ponds where it sinks to form thin layers on the bottom. Over time, a record of the pollen accumulates, because pollen is decay resistant. The grains of different species are usually distinct, so that by sorting any given layer, one can identify the proportions of the contributing species. Ecologists called palynologists take soil cores from these areas, which resemble frozen cookie dough, though they are not frozen. They slice the core into thin “cookies,” label the position of each one, and then sample the pollen composition of each slice. By radiocarbon-dating of organic matter in the core, they can determine ages across the length of the core and use any distinctive layers of volcanic ash from past known eruptions to establish reference dates within the core. From this process emerges a profile of changing species composition over time in the vicinity of the sample. This analysis sounds relatively simple, but it is actually complex and tedious. Though some species are easily identifiable, others have pollen so similar to that of related species that one can identify only their subgenus (“hard pines” like ponderosa and lodgepole pine versus “soft pines” like sugar pine and whitebark pine), genus (all the true firs in Abies), or family (Cupressaceae: juniper, cypress, Alaska cedar, incense-cedar). Pollen records are available in scattered locations of the Klamath Mountains (see figure 7) and allow us to reconstruct postglacial vegetation change. The four sites in the figure are arranged in order of increasing elevation, with today’s vegetation type at the top of each column and representation of historical changes over the Holocene (the past 9,000 years) for each elevation. The two leftmost, low-elevation sequences are from the western Klamaths, and the two high-elevation sites on the right are from the eastern Klamaths. If C. Hart Merriam were to visit today’s vegetation, he would classify the four sites as Lower Transition, Transition, Canadian, and Hudsonian. All sites show substantial change over the period, with a shift toward vegetation characteristic of a warmer, drier environment between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago, and vegetation similar to today’s for the past 2,000 to 3,000 years.

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Figure 7. Vegetation change over the past 9,000 years in the Klamath Mountains along an elevational gradient (from left to right). The vertical axis is time before the present. (Data sources: West 1993 and Mohr, Whitlock, and Skinner 2000. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

The lowest-elevation record (approximately 3,100 feet) shows that Douglas-fir has joined pine (most likely ponderosa pine) and oak (California black oak or Oregon white oak) as the environment has become cooler and wetter over the past several thousand years. Due to climate change, an Upper Sonoran zone 5,000 years ago has become a Transition zone. At Clear Lake, well south of the Klamath Mountains, the temperature was some 3°F higher during the mid-Holocene, with about half the current annual precipitation of 30 inches. The core at approximately 4,100 feet shows a similar trend, except that the available record is a bit shorter. A conifer-dominated record with some oak has shifted to one of a mixed-evergreen forest dominated by Douglas-fir and true fir (probably white or grand fir). The core at approximately 6,300 feet likely represents different species over time. The pine-Cupressaceae-oak 5,000 years or more before the present was likely Jeffrey pine, western juniper, and incense cedar, and the shrubby huckleberry oak. Between 5,000 and 2,000 years before the present, although pine and oak remained dominant, true fir pollen began to increase, and in the past 2,000 years, true firs (white and red fir, with some subalpine fir) have become the dominant conifer-pollen source.

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Forest Mélange

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Figure 8. Gradient position of the major tree species in the Klamath Mountains. The gray ellipse shows the range of the white fir. Other species will have range ellipses of different shapes and sizes. (Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

At the highest-elevation site (some 7,500 feet), the earliest vegetation had a dominant soft-pine component (foxtail, whitebark, or western white pine), with huckleberry oak and alder. True fir (probably Shasta red fir) increased about 5,000 years before present, with the pines still dominant, and mountain hemlock has become increasingly important in the past several thousand years. These sites show similar responses to regional changes in climate, although the timing of the changes varies somewhat from site to site. The species mixes are different as elevation increases, just as they are today, and the species have reacted individually to climate change, not as a coherent group or zone. These principles are likely to play out in the future and allow us to speculate on the effects of global warming, except that the projected changes in climate are more rapid than at any previous time in the historical record. Clearly, sustainable management of the forests of the future will require adapting to such global change. Another tool for understanding today’s “forest mélange” is gradient analysis (see figure 8). This technique defines important environmental

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gradients, such as temperature and moisture, and then arranges the species in the resulting two-dimensional space. Species listed close to one another usually grow together. In figure 8, the position of the species is based on their general ranges rather than specific plot data. From left to right, the graph represents a transect across the Klamath Mountains from the coast to the interior valleys along Interstate 5. For simplicity, the wetter areas of the easternmost Klamaths are omitted here, but one can locate the species of this area by moving from the right edge of the figure back slightly to the left. The ellipse represents the range of just one species, white fir. Each species would have a similar circle or ellipse (but of unique shape and size) representing most of its range, although the figure would become very noisy if it showed all the ranges. The wettest, low-elevation sites on the coast are dominated by spruce and redwood, and as one moves inland and up in elevation, other species are more dominant. At dry, low-elevation sites in the interior, one finds oak and juniper woodlands. Some species, such as Jeffrey pine, have a wide range, growing both at low elevation on serpentines and on a variety of substrates at higher elevation. Any place on a real landscape can be represented by a point on this graph, and all the species whose ellipses on the graph overlap at that point can be found there. Those species are the “players” that will compete for dominance on the site in the absence or presence of disturbance.

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chapter 4

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A Rose by Any Name

The Klamath Mountains owe the rich diversity of their plant life to the shifting of species across the landscape in response to environmental change. The great age of the Klamath terranes, and the existence of some nonglaciated land throughout that period, has allowed some species that were dominant in past eras to persist in small areas when climate changes favored new species. These “relict” species enrich the flora, and the Klamath Mountains contain the richest conifer diversity in the world, including several conifers found nowhere else in the world. The Klamaths contain the only populations of weeping spruce, known for their droopy branches. Most of the range of Port Orford cedar and Baker cypress is in the Klamaths. The mountains hold isolated stands of foxtail pine at the most northerly range of the species. This pine is so called because its foliage resembles the tail of a fox. Like foxtail pine, gray or ghost pine does not grow farther north, and knobcone pine goes only as far north as the southern Cascades of Oregon. Just as these species that are more common to the south have pushed north into the Klamaths during climatic warming, other species more common to the north have gradually pushed south during cool periods. The southernmost populations of subalpine fir, noble fir, Pacific silver fir, and Alaska cedar are found here. None of these four species are currently widely distributed across the region; they are relicts of past climates and once-broader distribution. The southernmost population of Engelmann spruce lies in the Russian Wilderness of the Klamaths. In total, 31

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A Rose by Any Name

twenty-nine conifer species reside today in the Klamath Mountains. John Sawyer of Humboldt State University has counted seventeen conifers in 1 square mile of the Russian Wilderness, a somewhat incredible number in the West, where a typical square mile might contain three or four species and where the existence of seven species is considered remarkable. One day in the early 1990s when Glen Clifton and Dean Taylor were driving along Highway 299 east of Redding, Clifton noticed an unusual shrub growing along a low limestone outcrop near the river. They stopped and could not identify the plant, and it was later taken to Humboldt State University. Botanists there puzzled over it, until a geologist remarked that it was similar to fossils found in Miocene deposits in the John Day Fossil Beds of eastern Oregon. It turned out to be the same plant as the fossilized ones and is now named the Shasta snow-wreath (Neviusia cliftonii), a species that looks superficially like the widely distributed ninebark (Physocarpus capitatus). This ancient member of the rose family has very short petals, but it is a rose by any name. Its range has since been extended within the Klamath province, but it is still quite rare, apparently growing only in moist soils derived from limestone. This and other finds explain why the Klamath-Siskiyou region has been defined as an area of globally outstanding biodiversity. Plant names are often mysteries intended to throw the average person off the track and maintain a professional niche for taxonomists. The Latin name for Douglas-fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii, indicates correctly that the tree is not a true fir (Abies); to confuse matters, the tree is also not literally its generic names, Pseudotsuga, or “false hemlock.” Its southern neighbor, Pseudotsuga macrocarpa, has the common name of bigcone spruce, but these two species are not spruces, firs, or hemlocks. Moreover, neither tanoak nor poison oak is an oak, although tanoak is at least in the same family as the oaks. Among the oaks are three subsections of the genus Quercus: red oaks, white oaks, and live oaks. Although one might expect red and white oaks to be dead oaks, given that they are not live oaks, the “live oak” designation just means that they are evergreen species rather than the deciduous ones that lose their leaves each winter. So where does the California black oak, the most common deciduous oak of the eastern Klamath forests, fit in? Why, it is a member of the red oak group, identified by its sharper leaf margins, in contrast to the smoother leaf margins of the white oaks. No wonder people get confused. If one is willing to wait a few years, the Latin names will also change. Douglas-fir used to be Pseudotsuga taxifolia. Port Orford cedar has

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A Rose by Any Name

33

recently changed from Chamaecyparis lawsoniana to Cupressus lawsoniana: at least the new version is easier to spell. Incense cedar used to be Libocedrus decurrens but is now Calocedrus decurrens. All three species once had a hyphen in the common name to recognize they are not true members of that group: Douglas-fir is not a fir, and Port Orford cedar and incense cedar are not true cedars, but that convention now applies only to Douglas-fir. The plant-taxonomy bible for California, The Jepson Manual (J. C. Hickman, editor), does use the hyphen for Douglas-fir; the more northerly plant bible, Hitchcock and Cronquist’s Flora of the Pacific Northwest, doesn’t. Giant chinquapin’s Latin name has changed from Castanopsis chrysophylla to Chrysolepis chrysophylla, a change that is bound to confuse those familiar with canyon live oak (Quercus chrysolepis). “Chrysolepis” means golden scaled and refers to the yellowish underside of the leaf; the color is much more pronounced in chinquapin but is present in both species. At least this change makes some sense. The pines, in general, are well named. Knobcone pine has knobby cones that stay closed on the branch and conserve seed until a fire comes along and opens the cone. Whitebark pine has white bark, but in its younger stages it is easy to confuse with western white pine, another five-needled white pine. Digger pine has recently been renamed, because its common name was considered pejorative for the ill-named Digger Indians, a “tribe” that never existed. It has gone through a succession of other names: “foothill pine,” “bull pine,” and now the apparently stable name “gray pine,” which describes its foliage color well. However, although The Jepson Manual notes only the change from “digger pine” to “foothill” or “gray pine,” John Stuart and John Sawyer, in their more recent Trees and Shrubs of California, and Sawyer in his Northwest California (2006), have replaced “gray pine” with the name “ghost pine,” which represents the rather translucent appearance of the crown and apparently is also an Anglicized version of the Indian name for the tree. This renaming is the work of a mélange of regional botanists and geographers who really don’t like the dull name “gray pine.” The war of names continues. A species can, of course, have different common names in different areas, which can cause a lot of confusion. One gripe of mine is Oregon botanists’ tendency to embrace every species as their own. This practice is particularly irritating given that no one is sure of the origin of the name “Oregon.” Some think the word derives from the candlefish, or smelt, known as “oorigan” to the Western Cree Indians and praised for its high fat content. Others think it may derive from the French word

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A Rose by Any Name

for storm (ouragan) or the Spanish word for wild marjoram (orégano). But the chutzpah of this place of unknown lineage is unsurpassed in the West. “Garry oak,” native from British Columbia to southern California, abruptly changes to “Oregon white oak” south of the Columbia River. “California bay” miraculously becomes “Oregon myrtle” north of the California border (of course, Californians have their own problems, unable to decide whether to call it “California bay,” or “California laurel,” or “pepperwood”). Even Douglas-fir, timber king of the Northwest, is marketed as “Oregon pine” in Australia. I love Oregonians, or perhaps I should say “Oorigonians,” but their penchant for co-opting common names is nothing short of criminal. Why is the northwest ash common to creeksides called “Oregon ash” instead of “Washington ash”? Why is “Oregon grape” not “California grape”? (This one is somewhat understandable, because people might confuse it with the chardonnay or cabernet sauvignon grape.) Recently, the rest of us got our revenge when the ground-nesting bird the “Oregon junco” became the “dark-eyed junco” (Junco hyemalis). Maybe Lewis and Clark had the right idea: on their visit to the Oregon coast, they simply named the conifers “fir #1” to “fir #9.” Who can argue with such simplicity? To make matters worse, different species can have the same common name. Buckbrush is a shrub that is preferred by deer, but in the Klamaths, it can refer to three kinds of ceanothus (Ceanothus) shrub: deerbrush (C. integerrimus), buckbrush (C. cuneatus), and tobacco brush or snowbrush (C. velutinus), giving the latter species three possible common names! And one must not confuse snowbrush with creeping snowberry (Symphoricarpos). Nor should one look for nine types of bark on ninebark: it has only one. Plant names are only part of the problem. Although we conveniently classify plants and animals into distinct species based on the inability to produce fertile offspring, ecologically distinct species with different morphologies may not really be different species. Monkeyflowers are an excellent example of how to throw a monkey wrench into the concept of speciation. The Klamath Mountains are home to a number of distinctive species of monkeyflower (Mimulus). Their color ranges from gold to scarlet, and they occupy a variety of habitats, but most occur in moist areas. Two such species are the low-elevation scarlet monkeyflower (Mimulus cardinalis) and the higher-elevation Lewis’ monkeyflower (Mimulus lewisii; see figure 9). They are morphologically quite distinct, with the scarlet monkeyflower having red to orange flowers, a narrow tubular corolla, and anthers and stigma that protrude from the flower

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Figure 9. The pink Lewis’ monkeyflower (top) is pollinated by bees, the aptly named scarlet monkeyflower (bottom) is pollinated by hummingbirds, and a hybrid of the two (middle), which is intermediate in color and shape, is favored by neither bees nor hummingbirds. (Photographs supplied courtesy H. D. “Toby” Bradshaw, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.)

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A Rose by Any Name

(bottom, figure 9). Scarlet monkeyflower is pollinated by hummingbirds and has a large nectar reward, which the bird obtains by touching the anthers and stigma with its head. In contrast, Lewis’ monkeyflower (top, figure 9) has pink flowers, a wide corolla, and petals flexed forward to act as a landing platform for bees, which pollinate that species. The reproductive isolation of the two species arises from the attraction they have for different pollinators and the different elevations they occupy, with some overlap. In fact, they produce fertile hybrids (middle, figure 9) quite easily if artificially pollinated. Doug Schemske and Toby Bradshaw from the University of Washington experimented with the two species in a common garden in the Sierra Nevada and found that hummingbirds strongly favor scarlet monkeyflower, bees strongly favor Lewis’ monkeyflower, and both (59 percent bees, 41 percent hummingbirds) favor first-generation hybrids of intermediate morphology. Second-generation hybrids, produced from first-generation hybrids, possessed a wide range of morphologies and attracted pollinators in proportion to the degree that the hybrid resembled one or the other species. Hybrids with increased levels of petal anthocyanins and carotenoids, which intensify the redness of the flowers, discouraged bee pollination. Wider landing platforms on the hybrids tended to encourage bee visitation. Hummingbirds were not as selective for color but selected strongly for nectar volume. These striking differences in flower preference suggest that bees and hummingbirds may influence flower traits by selective pollination and that the flower traits for these two species are under relatively simple genetic control. Schemske and Bradshaw argue that one can still consider these species to be separate because of their distinctive ecological niches. In the process of reproduction isolation and the development of new species, pollinators may play critical roles. Perhaps the most unusual plant in the Klamaths is the carnivorous California pitcher plant (see figure 10). This insect-devouring plant is an innocuous-looking part of midelevation wet meadows, particularly on serpentine substrates, where it competes with much showier wetmeadow flowers. It has a cobralike hood that emits a rather putrid smell and attracts various flies, yellow jackets, and the like. Because of the hood, it is sometimes called “cobra lily,” although it is not a member of the lily family. Once inside the hood, insects find themselves trapped and drop to the bottom of the trap, where they drown. As bacteria decompose them, adding to the rotten odor, the plant absorbs the nutrients. We usually classify organisms as producers (most plants that photosynthesize)

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A Rose by Any Name

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Figure 10. The carnivorous California pitcher plant (Darlingtonia californica). This one is from the vicinity of Lake Eleanor near Trinity Lake.

or consumers (herbivores like deer or carnivores like mountain lions). The pitcher plant is both. Michael Pollan, in The Botany of Desire, argues that such adaptive traits are so clever that the plant appears to have developed them purposely. The seeming miracle of purpose in monkeyflowers and pitcher plants is the process of natural selection at work. Selection has also been important for plants growing on ultrabasic substrates. Soils developed on serpentine, dunite, and peridotite tend to be very low in calcium, high in magnesium, and high in heavy metals. The vegetation on such sites usually has an open canopy, rather stunted growth of the trees and shrubs, and a shrub/herb layer that ranges from well developed to sparse. At low elevations, Jeffrey pine replaces ponderosa pine on serpentine soils and can be easily differentiated by the cones. The larger Jeffrey pinecones have the prickles oriented inward, whereas the prickles on the smaller cones of ponderosa pine face outward. At higher elevations, Jeffrey pines are not restricted to serpentine. The usual zonal relations of vegetation tend to be relaxed in serpentine areas, with a broader elevational range for most of the conifers. These areas have a high number of rare or endemic species, so botanically they are quite interesting. Experiments have shown that some species such as jewel flower (Streptanthus) and phacelia (Phacelia) that

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A Rose by Any Name

grow on both serpentine and nonserpentine soils have different ecotypes in the two areas. The serpentine populations can absorb higher amounts of calcium, which helps them survive in a calcium-poor environment. Typically, they are not good competitors, so they grow well in the competition-free serpentine but cannot compete well with other plants on neighboring soils. Conversely, the nonserpentine populations do not grow well when planted in serpentine. Botanists hypothesize that over time, some species that have adapted well to serpentine have lost their nonserpentine cohorts because of competition from other plants on the more productive soils, so they now grow only on serpentine and have become serpentine endemic, persisting only there. When new species enter the ecosystem, they can upset any quasi equilibrium at work and often result in simpler, unstable plant communities. These so-called exotics are from other places, do not belong where they are growing, and are rarely as romantic as the word exotic implies. Today, we call them “alien” plants, and many of them are invasive or have the ability to spread aggressively in their new environment. Many aliens have been here for a long time and have essentially become thoroughly naturalized. Indian informers told early twentieth-century ethnographers that wild oats (Avena fatua) had always grown in central California, but we know that the species came from Europe during the Franciscan mission period. Some alien plants are noxious and are injurious to human or animal health. Few are easily eradicated once they are established. Many of today’s common California grasses come from the Mediterranean area and are also common in western Australia. When I visited western Australia in the 1990s, I was struck by the similarity of the grass-species composition to that of California, and the place reminded me of the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up: tall eucalyptus (native to Australia but widely planted in California), short eucalyptus that, from a distance, resemble the native live oaks of California, and rolling hills of grass that are just like those of California, dominated by species native to neither place but to Europe. While the resemblance stirred some nostalgia, it also was disturbing. We are homogenizing the natural world, piece by piece, much as we’ve homogenized the cultural world with Wal-Marts and Burger Kings. We are losing our sense of place, which is in part defined by native flora and fauna. Though introduced herbs like cheatgrass, Dalmatian toadflax, and yellow star-thistle have likely had a much more negative impact on the Klamath Mountains than have introduced trees, alien trees impart a

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A Rose by Any Name

39

false sense of place. When I hitchhiked to the Trinity Alps up Highway 299 in the 1960s, the tree of heaven (Ailanthus), native to eastern Asia, was actively invading the road corridor. Introduced by the Chinese gold miners in the mid-1800s, tree of heaven has become common below 3,000 feet elevation in the eastern Klamaths and radiates out from the old gold-mining settlements where it was originally planted. But perhaps the most egregious alien presence is that of giant sequoia trees along Highway 3 north of Weaverville. Giant sequoias, cousins of the redwood, grow naturally in a series of disjunct groves in the middle to southern Sierra Nevada, where they form magnificent groves of towering trees that can be thousands of years old. Sequoias are the largest trees by volume in the world, joining in the record books their relative the redwood, the tallest plant in the world. In their native habitat, they are spectacular. By 1960, when Highway 3 was rerouted because of the construction of Trinity Dam, foresters had recognized the fast growth of giant sequoia, and plantings were common outside of the species’ natural range. Someone decided to plant giant sequoias in the disturbed areas adjacent to the new Highway 3 right-of-way, and today populations of this beautiful species grow in places where they do not belong. As one drives north on Highway 3 over Buckeye Ridge and begins descending along Slate Creek, the road winds through a minigrove of giant sequoias. The trees are also found at the “Osprey” turnoff amid a patch of French broom, another alien likely planted there. Attempts to remove the broom have been unsuccessful to date; it is persistent with a longlived seed bank, so new plants will germinate following any disturbance created by cutting or pulling the mature plants. The sequoia is also planted north of the Trinity Lake Bridge near Mule Creek and the Long Canyon road. At first, the range of tree sizes suggests that the first planted sequoias are the largest and that smaller ones are much younger, perhaps either planted later or regenerated from seed on-site. However, age analysis of these trees with increment borers indicates that the largest ones, which are up to 20 inches in diameter, and the smallest ones, 3 to 5 inches in diameter, all are the same age, having been planted somewhere in the mid- to late 1960s. I will be the first to extol the beauty of the giant sequoia: both my master’s thesis and doctoral work were on giant sequoias and their associated species, and I have one growing in my backyard in Seattle. As an ornamental tree, or as a wildland tree in its place, it is a very beautiful conifer. But in a wildland setting where it does not belong, it is a weed. It steals from the

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beauty of the Klamaths and imparts a Sierra Nevada image where it does not belong. The sequoias appear to pose little threat of expanding away from the roadside, unless the upslope areas are disturbed by logging or fire, but the ones that are there will become more visually imposing over time. We should be showcasing the Pacific yew, the sugar pine, the ponderosa pine, the Douglas-fir, the incense cedar, and other native plants of the area. If I were king, or even prince, for a day, I would command that a few of these sequoias be removed each year until they are gone. In the Klamaths, native plants deserve to rule!

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chapter 5

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My Botanical Contest with Miss Alice Eastwood

Alice Eastwood, a famous California botanist, conducted a botanical survey in 1900 of Canyon Creek, a tributary stream that joins the Trinity River at Junction City. She listed all the trees and shrubs she found along her journey, including those she spied on a 20-mile trek up Canyon Creek. I thought it would be fun to challenge her expertise with a survey of my own, but in many respects, the contest was unfair. Miss Eastwood died half a century ago, after being curator of the herbarium at the California Academy of Sciences for the previous half century. She, therefore, was unaware of the contest, which, I thought, gave me a significant advantage. Miss Eastwood was an accomplished botanist, better respected in her day than even Willis Linn Jepson, who wrote the classic Manual of the Flowering Plants of California in 1923. Born in 1859 in eastern Canada, she was a self-taught scientist whose formal education was limited to a high school degree from East Denver High School in Colorado. Her mother died when she was young, and she moved to her uncle’s estate in the Canadian countryside, where her interest in botany flowered. After living for six years in a convent, she reunited with her family in Denver and discovered the mountain meadows of the Rockies west of the city. After graduating from high school, she became a teacher, longing for the freedom of the summers so that she could roam freely in the mountains. Her growing botanical expertise led her to an audience with Professor Asa Gray of Harvard, author of Gray’s Botany, and to work 41

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My Contest with Miss Alice Eastwood

as a Rocky Mountain guide for English naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who had designated the still-famous “Wallace’s line” that biogeographically separates Asian and Australian biota. Before long, she had traveled to California and moved there in 1892, becoming curator of botany at the California Academy in 1893, as well as editor of the botanical journal Zoë. One of her first treks was to Mount Shasta, where she made a “hasty trip” to the summit in August 1893. Her Canyon Creek expedition of 1900 grew out of a meeting with C. Hart Merriam, who had surveyed the plants and animals of the Mount Shasta region in 1898 as chief of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Division of Biological Survey. Merriam had spent most of the summer of 1898 around Mount Shasta, but toward the end of the summer, he and several others had trekked to the coast directly through the Klamath range. Merriam, a stout fellow with a Teddy Roosevelt walrus mustache, took along an assistant and Henry Gannett, geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey. Gannett was in charge of mapping the forests of Oregon and Washington and produced some of the first maps of forest types and the extent of forest fires. The group collected some plants along the ridges heading west, some of which they could not identify. Merriam, who was internationally known for his “lifezone” concept of biotic-community distribution, then traveled to San Francisco to meet with Eastwood in the hope of obtaining positive identification of unknown species that he had sent to her. She was able to identify about twenty-five of the unknowns, and while Merriam was there, he extolled the virtues of the Klamaths. Eastwood was convinced that an expedition was critical: “It seemed as if life would lose its zest if these mountains could not be reached, their rugged peaks climbed, their botanical treasures collected, and their dangers and difficulties overcome” (39). Miss Eastwood’s army for the 1900 expedition consisted of three traveling companions and a string of broken-down horses that the group obtained in Redding, thinking that they could not secure any stock at the end of the road if they traveled by stage. One of their objectives was to obtain a list of trees and shrubs en route from Redding to the snow-clad peaks of the Klamaths. They chose not to focus on herbs, because by July, when they departed on foot with their pack stock from Redding, many of the herbs of the lower elevations were far past flowering stage. They headed for Canyon Creek, likely because Merriam had told them of this spectacular alpine area topped by the 9,000-foottall Thompson Peak.

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My Contest with Miss Alice Eastwood

43

Miss Eastwood was robust and could hike a steady 4 miles per hour all day, which is a pretty fast walk for a person of her small stature. The first night the group camped at Whiskeytown, the second they stopped off between Tower House and Lewiston, and they reached Lewiston the third day. One of their horses gave out on this first leg of the trip and was replaced in Lewiston. The troupe reached Weaverville more than a day later than expected and continued on past the La Grange Mine, which was in full operation. Miss Eastwood noted, “It is desolation and ruination of the natural features of the country, and the result on the landscape is typical of the effect on humanity of the greed for gold” (44). Later that day, they reached Anderson’s Ranch near Junction City, and on July 7, began their journey up “Cañon Creek,” which is now Canyon Creek. The lower part of the canyon had been heavily mined for placer gold, and some operations were continuing. Deserted ranches were everywhere, marked by fruit trees, and the remaining miners “seemed like the driftwood of humanity left behind on the great tide that swept over the country in the days of 49” (44–45). Once at Dedrick, a bustling town that was the “terminus of civilization,” after 60 miles on foot, the team began exploring in earnest (45). Few people in the town knew much about the upper canyon, so Eastwood and her crew headed upstream with scant knowledge of what was ahead of them. On the journey to the first waterfall, Hound’s-Head Fall (now Lower Canyon Creek Falls), she remarked on the “rare and lovely” flowers that grew in the shade of the mixed-evergreen coniferous forest. Surprisingly, she made no note of the “sinks,” a section of the stream that flows underground, at least during the dry part of the year. This omission was likely due to her focus on the destination: the subalpine and alpine terminus of the trip, Twin Lakes (now Lower and Upper Canyon Creek Lakes). The group took two days to travel the 8 miles from Dedrick to Twin Lakes. The trail was obscure, and they took dead ends, cutting new trail along several sections of the stream. Miss Eastwood couldn’t help but admire the shrubs that were making progress so difficult. She observed that the fragrance of snowbrush’s foliage and flowers made it attractive even though it was a “great obstacle” to their progress (47). The group had to ford Canyon Creek seven times during the journey, with the animals crossing among the rocks and Miss Eastwood walking across on logs. Hound’s-Head Fall is also near a major geological boundary. Below the falls, the geology is a mix of complex, distorted remnants of the Mesozoic and Paleozoic ages, containing jagged slates, schists, and

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44

My Contest with Miss Alice Eastwood

other rocks best exposed along the streams. Granite boulders rounded by glaciation and stream action over the past several thousand years represent small pieces of the upper watershed that were carried downstream. The upper basin of Canyon Creek is in one of a number of granitic plutons that intruded into these older rocks, like a large boil, during Late Jurassic or Early Cretaceous times. The largest pluton in the Klamath Mountains is the Canyon Creek stock, covering about 30 square miles and forming the southeastern portion of the Trinity Alps. The granite was pushed up in molten form from the deep and slowly solidified into a mix of quartz, plagioclase, biotite, and hornblende. The particular chemical composition of the Canyon Creek stock is called tonalite, which sounds more like a health food than a type of rock. Before the light-colored tonalite (as “white as snow,” according to Eastwood) cooled and consolidated, a dark, iron-rich igneous material called lamprophyre intruded along its cracks, creating a series of eastwest dikes that average a couple of feet in width (51). Thompson Peak, Sawtooth Ridge, and other jagged features of the Trinity Alps are all composed of tonalite. The spectacular scenery of the upper Canyon Creek area is a result of this geological history, sculpted by more recent glaciers. Glacial till deposits that are named after these local features describe continental glaciation that occurred during the past million years. Maximum ice advances, known as the Swift Creek till, occurred about 400,000 years b.p. (before the present). Later glacial advances occurred at 130,000 years b.p. (Alpine Lake till), 60,000–75,000 years b.p. (Rush Creek till), 45,000 years b.p. (no name), and 20,000 years b.p. (Morris Meadows till). A series of terminal and lateral moraines, unsorted rock debris left by receding glaciers that filled the valley and pushed down some 10 miles from the headwaters, lie along Canyon Creek, particularly in the area below Hound’s-Head Fall. This glaciated high country was one of the main attractions for the Eastwood party. As the party began to enter the high country, the ponderosa pines began to yield to western white pine, and white and Shasta red fir began to replace Douglas-fir as the dominant species. Eastwood recorded her first sighting of the rare Brewer spruce (also called weeping spruce), a species found only in the Klamath-Siskiyou country and one of the rarest trees in California. Its pendulous branches and small stature suggest a tree in mourning, thus the “weeping” spruce. Shasta red fir and mountain hemlock were the dominant trees around the lakes, with a beautiful subalpine flora of shrubs and herbs. Miss Eastwood marveled

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at the granite slopes polished by glacial action. Glaciers had “scratched” the granite as they moved boulders along, eroded holes later filled by lakes, and created meadows at lower elevations as areas behind moraines filled with sediment. Ice had etched the high cliffs into jagged ridges and peaks, creating a “regular Sierra” (48), as Eastwood described them. The Sierra Nevada had to be the standard of grandeur and beauty, if only because the account was to be published in the Sierra Club Bulletin. More than any other place in California, the night sky in the Trinity Alps is clear, and Miss Eastwood remarked on the “great distinctness” of the constellations in the summer sky (49). At daybreak, the party began a series of expeditions ascending the ridges and peaks that surrounded Twin Lakes. The first, an ascent of Thompson Peak, was unsuccessful. The group apparently reached the ridge looking down onto Mirror Lake and the headwaters of the Stuart Fork, only to face a series of “cliffs, pinnacles, and knife-edges” that convinced them to return back to camp (49). Other ascents were more successful, including an ascent of a peak they named Sunset Peak, very likely the unnamed peak that looks over Papoose Lake on the North Fork of the Trinity River. Permanent snowbanks even now clothe the eastern flank of the peak. The travelers kept to the talus as much as possible, and Miss Eastwood marveled at the profusion of flowers: arnicas, asters, columbines, penstemons, and monkeyflowers. White heather was in full bloom along the ridgetop. From the peak, she was treated to a “most beautiful view of Mt. Shasta” to the east, which she noted that one must see from neither too close nor too far for maximum effect (50). She could imagine C. Hart Merriam plowing his way across the pumice fields of Shasta, and she must have had a grand view of Diller Canyon on the west slope. Merriam named the canyon after J. S. Diller of the U.S. Geological Survey, who did much early geological exploration on Shasta, as well as work on the gold fields of the Weaverville area. In the next few days, the party explored the area above the lakes, found alpine laurel in bloom with pink flowers, and managed a few potshots with a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson at an unsuspecting cinnamon-colored black bear. Eastwood shrugged off a successful hit as “probably no more than the sting of an insect” to the bear (52). Miss Eastwood and her group were able to return to Dedrick in a day’s time, aided by the trail they had cut and the knowledge they had gained on the trip up the canyon. Eastwood published a list of the shrubs and trees she had noted throughout the trip from Redding to the

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My Contest with Miss Alice Eastwood

high country. It was after reading this list that I decided to challenge the indomitable Miss Eastwood. I was determined to find all her shrubs and trees and to tack a few more onto the list. But I would need to make an expedition of my own to outdo Miss Eastwood. Any expedition requires planning, so I began to compile a list of wilderness gear that I would require, some of which I had and some of which I needed to buy. The camping landscape has changed so much over the years that I thought that use of too much advanced gear would be unfair to Miss Eastwood. First of all, I didn’t have to wear a dress, the proper attire for a lady in the backcountry of a century ago. My predecessor had at least designed and worn a functional denim affair. I decided to shorten my trip to a few days rather than duplicate the extended week that Eastwood and company spent in Canyon Creek. I wisely cut out the walking trip from Redding to Dedrick, although back in 1962, on my second backpacking trip into the Trinity Alps, my pal Bill Weston and I did walk much of the way along Highway 299 from Redding to Shasta before successfully hitching rides the rest of the way. Even in 1962, we had many advantages over Miss Eastwood: 1:62,500-scale maps, whereas she likely had no maps at all. Tang, the early astronauts’ powdered orange drink of choice, had been invented; we had aluminum-frame backpacks, slightly lighter sleeping bags, and awful-tasting water-purifier tablets. For the Canyon Creek adventure in 2003, I was prepared, although not completely. I owned no cell phone, a handy bailout device for today’s wilderness, but even if I had had one, it would not have worked in the deep canyons of the Trinity Alps. I had a form-fit backpack, a global-positioning unit, lightweight titanium pots, a fancy little camp stove, a small digital camera, good maps (1:24,000 scale), a small headlamp, a water-purification pump, a soft pad for sleeping, a new sleeping bag, and freeze-dried food. I later discovered that the last item was not really an advantage over my 1960s trips or probably over Miss Eastwood’s, either. I also had a secret weapon: whereas she edited the journal Zoë, I was bringing my Australian shepherd, Zoe. As I proudly marched out of REI with my new gear and a lighter wallet, I was sure this challenge would be no contest. And I was right. I planned my trip for early September, after Labor Day, when the backcountry crowds might be thinner than in midsummer. Although I was a month behind Eastwood’s visit, the timing was not critical. Trees and shrubs would be easy to identify by leaf characters, and flowers would not be needed. My plan was to have my wife, Wendy, drop Zoe

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and me at the trailhead on a Monday morning and pick us up Wednesday morning. In Weaverville the previous Friday, I dutifully filled out the backcountry permit, which is simply a way for the Forest Service to monitor use. No limits on access are currently in place for this wilderness area, although the Canyon Creek trailhead is the busiest of all those in the Trinity Alps Wilderness. The trail, once it passes the Bear Creek intersection just up from the trailhead, heads due north up the stream with few opportunities to branch out until Boulder Creek at mile 6. Canyon Creek Lakes is at mile 8, and from there, bushwhacking is in order, although most of the bushes are quite low. In fact, Eastwood described them as a help rather than a hindrance in climbing around the amphitheater of upper Canyon Creek. Unfortunately, an axiom of backcountry travel is that if the trailhead parking lot is full of cars, one is likely to meet most of the occupants somewhere upstream. The Wilderness Act of 1964 defined wilderness as a place with “outstanding opportunities for solitude.” On the Canyon Creek trail, the hiker will find many people “out standing,” or perhaps sitting or even hiking, during most of the summer, so the trail is not a prime entry to the wilderness unless one really likes to meet people. On holiday weekends, it hosts two hundred to three hundred backpackers, with vehicles parked all the way down from the trailhead parking lot a mile or so to Ripstein Campground. But I did not have the choice of hiking up another, less-traveled watershed, such as the North Fork, because the trees and shrubs I was hunting were up Canyon Creek. At least I was late in the season, and with the crowds gone, I could hear Miss Eastwood calling. The day of challenge arrived. I awoke early that cloudy morning in the neighboring Stuart Fork at Trinity Alps Resort, and we packed up, drove south to Weaverville, west on Highway 299 across recently firescarred Oregon Mountain, past the hydraulically mined hills of the La Grange Mine, and into Junction City, the portal to Canyon Creek. During Miss Eastwood’s visit, gold mining was still very active in Canyon Creek: hydraulic mining in the lower watershed and lode mining on the slopes above Dedrick. As we turned up the creek, I was reminded of Miss Eastwood’s comment on the residents and looked in vain for the “driftwood of humanity” as we drove up the road. Along the lower watershed, mining claims are still posted, fences abound, and one gets the feeling that this is not a very friendly place. At Dedrick, the Eastwood group saw a bustling community: stores, hotels, homes, and of course, three saloons. Today, not a single building is left standing,

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My Contest with Miss Alice Eastwood

and all one sees is a lonely plaque, dedicated in the 1990s, noting “Dedrick faded.” We arrived at the most dangerous place of the entire trip: the trailhead parking lot. In the previous month, at least two cars had been burglarized, according to the Trinity Journal. Hikers often leave valuables in their cars, and with no campground nearby, the trailhead parking lot is a lonely place at night and is attractive to the criminal element. Canyon Creek is not the only problem spot in the Trinity Alps; all wilderness trailheads have the same problem. In the late 1960s, the Stuart Fork trailhead was targeted by gang members who camped in a remote upstream gulch so that no vehicles would be spotted coming down the road after a burglary. Authorities were baffled, and the depredations continued for months. One evening, my Mom and Dad went fishing there after parking at the trailhead (which was then at Cherry Flat, but since then, the upper mile of road above Bridge Camp has been gated, available only to the single landowner above Bridge Camp). Mom spotted a lifeless leg and boot behind a log, which, after her initial horror, turned out to be an officer in hiding. Several days later, despite the officer’s inability to effectively conceal himself, he successfully surprised the gang breaking into a car, and the arrests temporarily ended the burgling of cars at the Stuart Fork trailhead. Forest rangers do patrol the trailheads and keep the areas clean, but they can’t be there all the time. At a wilderness trailhead in the Cascades of Washington some years ago, cars were broken into regularly, but as the ranger radioed his colleagues of his approach each day, he could never catch the thief in action. Finally, the rangers realized that the thief carried a stolen Forest Service radio and was receiving a handy warning every time the ranger came near. So they devised a scheme whereby the ranger, in leaving the trailhead, radioed that he was heading for a distant trailhead, and though parked down road, sent several messages indicating he was en route. He then drove back in radio silence to the trailhead and not only surprised the thief but recovered the stolen radio. Given that Wendy dropped off Zoe and me at the Canyon Creek trailhead, I was not concerned about car break-ins. The parking lot was almost full, which was good news for potential thieves but bad news for me. I’d be seeing a lot of people. My pack seemed heavier than it had seemed back at our cabin, but my pencil was at the ready: the botanical contest was set to begin. Miss Eastwood’s report on her trip listed the trees and shrubs she saw between Redding and the headwaters of Canyon Creek. She listed

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sixty-six species of trees and shrubs in Canyon Creek (she found some of these species before she reached Canyon Creek but also found them in the lower reaches of the watershed). So a winning total of sixty-seven species was my target. In the first turn of the trail, I caught my breath! I saw a shrub my predecessor had missed: Aralia californica, or elk clover. But elk clover was a red herring—it is a very large herb rather than a shrub—so I did not include it in my list. The Jepson Manual includes perennial herbs, shrubs, or small trees in the genus Aralia, which includes elk clover. The one species native to California is “perennial,” which the manual defines as herbaceous and not shrubby, although all shrubs and trees are indeed perennial. Furthermore, in her local classic Flowers and Trees of the Trinity Alps, Alice Jones clearly says of elk clover, “Although from 6'–10' tall, this plant is not a shrub” (99). I composed myself, adjusted my pack, and carried on, stopping to record the species I had seen in the previous fifteen minutes and giving me a convenient excuse to catch a breather. Unlike the Stuart Fork trail, which seesaws up and down for the first several miles, Canyon Creek trail is a well-designed slight but steady uphill grade. Zoe, who cared little about Miss Eastwood or the contest, was busy reading the news of the past few days, sniffing the trail and every bush extending into it. Her idea of a break was to chase the occasional Douglas squirrel that had identified itself with a squeak. As a herder, her idea of success is the chase rather than the kill. The only squirrel she ever cornered, near Stoddard Lake in the northern Trinity Alps, bit her on the nose or paw, and convinced her that the chase is more fun than the catch, inviting something of a catch-and-release strategy for mammals instead of fish. Although the trail has but a slight grade, the slopes we traversed had grades of 60 percent to 70 percent, and she thought nothing of running to the bottom of a slope and racing back up to the trail. I tried to look tough as I moved up the 5 percent grade of the trail, stopping to record species or to contemplate why I hadn’t found species I expected to encounter. Each species of tree or shrub has environmental limits that constrict its presence. Some grow only below the snow zone, whereas others appear only at the high elevations. So I had some good clues about which species I shouldn’t bother to look for yet and which ones I could expect to find in the low country. I recorded about twenty species in the first mile of trail, mostly species of wide distribution in the low country: ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, snowbrush, Oregon grape, service-berry, and the like. The weather was cool and cloudy, making the hike quite

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My Contest with Miss Alice Eastwood

pleasant, and the backpack seemed lighter as I moved up the canyon. Miss Eastwood was in for a fight. By the time I reached Hound’s-Head Fall, now Lower Canyon Creek Falls, I had recorded forty-six species, more than two-thirds of the total I needed. I was missing one of her low-elevation species, vine bark (Neillia opufolia), but had two species she had apparently missed: ninebark (Physocarpus capitatus), a common shrub that I was surprised she had overlooked, and a buckwheat (Eriogonum sp.) whose species I did not identify. The buckwheat was along the trail on a dry rocky slope, and I surmised that Eastwood and her party had missed it because they had headed directly up the bottom of the canyon rather than along the cushy midslope trail that I followed. Too bad for Miss Eastwood. So I decided that I had the early lead, but I was still early in the game. I camped just above the falls on a beautiful little flat across the creek where someone had arranged chunks of tonalite to make a nice fire pit and low table. I arrived there in midafternoon and spent the rest of the day setting up camp, making notes about the day, and preparing for my assault on the high country early the next morning. Zoe and I hiked up the smooth, barren granite slopes and got a clear view of the country ahead, as clouds billowed across the sky from west to east. Zoe enjoyed racing ahead with four-wheel drive and waiting patiently for her twowheeled master to catch up. I gathered a few dead manzanita branches on the way down the hill to fuel a minicampfire in the evening. Campfires are forbidden in the high country because of the lack of fuel and the damage that desperate fire starters cause to live vegetation. In the low country where I was camped, campfires are permissible, but very small fires are not only safer but provide ample warmth and reassurance that one is master of his domain. Eastwood spent several nights in the high country, and she was awed by the wonderfully clear sky and the immense number of stars filling the sky. I was going to have only two nights, and the first was decidedly overcast. My plan was to hike from camp up to the lakes and back the next day, so I needed to leave early to give myself time for plant searches. I hung my food to discourage bears from rooting around camp. I didn’t have a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver like Eastwood’s companion S. L. Berry did, but I had my trusty dog, Zoe, who had proved herself a couple of years earlier when I hiked up the Rush Creek Lakes trail with her and spun out on a spur ridge. Sitting in a natural rock “chair” chiseled out of the ridge, I had been contemplating the views toward Mt. Lassen and Mt. Shasta when Zoe spotted a bear

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silently moving upslope and let out a great howl. The bear jumped and noisily retreated down the hill. So I was sure that if deer or bear were around our camp, I would have an early warning system in place, although the alarm would sound off immediately adjacent to my ear. Hoping that the skies would clear overnight, I crawled into the tent and became a temporary pupa, hoping to metamorphose into a winning botanist and dreaming about Miss Eastwood’s twin lakes, which I would finally see tomorrow. During the night, I began to hear plops and drips as rain penetrated the forest canopy and hit the rain fly of the tent. In the morning, rain was falling hard, and the forest canopy was saturated, dripping copious amounts of water to the ground. As I dressed, I wondered how the weather would affect my hike to the lakes. Opening the tent fly, I found the lakes had come to me! The flat was locally flooded, but when I moved a few pieces of wood, my lake began to drain. A cool rain pelted me as I fired up my little stove, and my adventurous dog stayed in the tent, which was a really bad sign. I wondered if Miss Eastwood was behind this setback. When Zoe and I left our muddy camp, I had yet to find some twenty species on the list; I started hiking into a sea of clouds that were pouring precipitation. At least the downpour was rain with no chance of snow. My old coated nylon raingear failed in about an hour. Relying on this gear was a critical mistake—I should have had a waterproof, breathable fabric—but ever since the late 1970s, when my first “waterproof but breathable” raingear failed in 9 inches of rain in the Olympic Mountains after only one month of use, I had refused to buy more. The salesperson at the store said knowingly, “Well, you have version 1 of this material and now there is version 2, much more reliable.” “And even more expensive,” I muttered under my breath. So I moved to heavier rubber-coated products and then to coated nylon, which works OK when it’s new. My raingear at Canyon Creek wasn’t new, and by the time I approached Twin Lakes, leaving the forested valley below, I was soaked, Zoe was soaked, and visibility was about 100 feet. I later invested (an accurate term given the price of good raingear these days) in a breathable-fabric rain suit, which passed a severe thunderstorm test the next year in the Stuart Fork. After my trip, I learned that 80 percent of the rainfall between August and October 2003 fell that day. However, damp as I was, the list of plant species left to find was shrinking, and I had only about ten more to go. I ducked into the Stonehouse, a natural rock shelter called a “tor” about a quarter mile below the lakes. The Stonehouse was formed by jointed tonalite and stacked in a way that created

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My Contest with Miss Alice Eastwood

a protected “room” under the rocks. A clueless climber had fixed a climbing piton to the ceiling; he might as well have spray-painted his name on the rocks. I had temporarily escaped the rain, but not the water against my skin. I knew now, in my cold and clammy state, that beating Miss Eastwood would be tough. Zoe and I hiked up the last bluff through a thick blanket of fog into the supposedly beautiful amphitheater of the Canyon Creek Lakes. The glaciers had polished the tonalite, and the last portions of the trail were marked by small stone cairns—three rocks piled on one another— as we climbed up the smooth, convex stone face that held behind it the Canyon Creek Lakes. As we crested the bluff, the lower lake was to our right, but I couldn’t see across the 600-foot-wide lake. Ghostly Shasta red firs, mountain hemlocks, and Brewer spruces appeared and disappeared in the mist. I had difficulty seeing where I was going, and the cold wind blew hard across the exposed fetch of the lake. I lost the trail by walking too close to the lake; stumbling along through the rocks and shrubs, I came to a cliff. Retreating upslope, I saw through the mist my secret weapon, Zoe, sitting next to a trail marker, and we were soon on our way again to the upper lake. I found mountain heather (Phyllodoce), one of the high-elevation plants still on the list, but soon realized that the white heather (Cassiope), which Eastwood found on a ridgetop and which grows at higher elevation than the mountain heather does, would not join my list today. I also could not find alpine laurel (Kalmia) and ruled out hiking up another 1,200 feet to Kalmia Lake, where I surmised I might find it. The contest was getting tight, and with Miss Eastwood leading by at least one plant, I had to find western Labrador tea (Ledum). I decided to look for it at slightly lower elevation, for I had pushed up to the lakes pretty quickly in the morning. On the way down, in one of the small wet meadows, I left the trail and walked over to the creek, as if Miss Eastwood were leading the way. There, at the edge of the stream, was the Labrador tea. With my ninebark and buckwheat secure on my list as new species, I was assured of at least a tie in my contest with Miss Alice Eastwood, unless someone tampered with the scorekeeping. Buoyed by my late success, and burdened with an ever-growing weight of water inside my raingear, I struck out for camp down the slick tonalite. My feet suddenly were in front of my eyes, and I fell hard to my side, revived by a quick, warm lick on the face. Once off the first bluff, the trail became easier to navigate and it was soon buffered by forest. By the time we reached camp, the rain had stopped, and patches

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of blue were appearing and disappearing among the lower-elevation clouds. Camp was still a muddy mess, so I packed up and headed down to the trailhead, where Wendy was to pick me up the next morning. Zoe and I hiked past the trailhead to a small open beach between the river and the road, where we unpacked, set everything out to dry, and contemplated the day. I felt a bit guilty about my blind challenge to the gracious Miss Eastwood but secretly felt smug, although the final tally of species was not yet complete. As the next morning dawned with clear skies, Wendy picked us up right on time, and once back at our cabin, I began the final tally. Neither Miss Eastwood nor I had likely found all the species of trees and shrubs in Canyon Creek, but one of us had likely found more than the other. The final scorekeeping had to be completed by one of the contestants, and as Miss Eastwood was unavailable, I volunteered for the job. I first adjusted Eastwood’s list (in my favor) by subtracting vine bark (Neillia) from her list, because it is not a native plant. It is a member of the rose family native to China and was likely introduced by Chinese miners in the lower watershed. The contest started at the trailhead, and if this plant were still around, I would have found it far down the valley. My find of ninebark was a short-lived advantage, because in rechecking Miss Eastwood’s list I found that she had indeed listed ninebark, and I had simply overlooked it when I had put together the list of her plants. I also had to rule out my buckwheat, because Eastwood had noted that she purposely did not list a number of low, shrubby plants, including buckwheat. With vine bark gone and ninebark added, the list to beat still had sixty-six trees and shrubs, and my rival had them all. Because of my failure to find the white heather and alpine laurel, the elimination of buckwheat, and the wash for ninebark, my total was sixty-four. Dang! I declared Miss Eastwood the winner. Wendy and I opened a bottle of wine to celebrate Miss Eastwood’s narrow victory. I didn’t really intend for my botanical contest with Alice Eastwood to be a true contest. I sought to show that at a landscape scale, species composition can stay remarkably stable, even over a century’s time. This stability is less likely to hold in heavily managed landscapes or in areas that contain aggressive alien species, but upper Canyon Creek is a wilderness where forces of nature have been the primary elements at work. Eastwood was described as “too big for jealousies and petty squabbles” and would surely have turned our contest into a joint venture had we been contemporaries (Jones 1933–35, 8). She was not only one of California’s most acclaimed botanists of her time, but of all time,

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My Contest with Miss Alice Eastwood

and she was a gracious and tough lady. She single-handedly saved most important herbarium specimens at the California Academy of Sciences, about 1,500 of them, during the Great 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. Botanists have named plant genera not only after her surname (Eastwoodia, a shrub of the sunflower family) but also after her given name (Aliciella, a recently revived genus with former members of Gilia in it). She named 125 species of California plants and published more than three hundred scientific papers, general articles, and books. Marcus Jones, a contemporary Western botanist, remarked in 1933, “Her work, like mine, is mostly done and the falling leaves will soon obscure our graves, but it will be many a day before botanists cease to venerate her magnificent work for the Academy” (Jones 1933–35, 8). With her recent victory at Canyon Creek, her reputation remains formidable. The year after her victory, in early spring, I visited her memorial grove of redwoods at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, now part of the Redwood State and National parks. Most of the redwood groves in the state parks were donated to the state of California by the Save-theRedwoods League through memorial dedications of small tracts in the names of beneficiaries. After Alice Eastwood’s death, she had a grove named for her through the efforts of the California Spring Blossom and Wildflower Association and Friends. Her sandstone memorial plaque is set back from the road behind a wooden sign noting that the Edna Sammet and Alice Eastwood groves are a quarter mile up the road. I saw Eastwood’s plaque only after noticing Sammet’s (“A True Lover of Nature”): it was obscured by a small hemlock branch that had broken off and impaled itself just behind the plaque. Eastwood’s plaque is embossed with the words “Ageless as the Redwood Trees She Knew and Loved,” and growing in front of it are two species of plants with a trinity of leaves: a Pacific trillium, just coming into bloom, and a small bed of redwood sorrel, the cloverlike ground covering so familiar in the redwoods. I followed the sign to the grove, which instead led to the “Little Creek trail.” The trail leads up the south side of aptly named Little Creek. Sword ferns cover the forest floor, and on one uprooted old redwood, the ferns were so thick that they reminded me of a Fourth of July fireburst in green. Here is the heart of big-redwood country, shared with the occasional Sitka spruce and Douglas-fir. The lower trunks of the redwoods remain so moist throughout the year that western hemlocks can germinate on their bark and eventually grow roots down into the soil.

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Along the trail, I saw one small hemlock clinging to its host redwood as a frightened child would cling to its mother. Birds’ spring mating season was under way, and the creek was gurgling, the sound broken only by the occasional low whoosh of a car passing up or down the road. I was grateful for the silence but knew it had come at a cost. When Redwood National Park was expanded in 1978, this road was Highway 101, full of logging trucks, but the park legislation authorized rerouting of the highway to the east of Prairie Creek. The new “freeway” has been a source of periodic road-cut failures and erosion, but it passes through young second-growth forest. The reroute measurably increased the enjoyment of the old Highway 101 corridor, which still meanders up Prairie Creek and its massive old-growth redwood forests. Redwoods of all sizes were on the slopes when I was there, and the older ones all had char on their bark. Even the wet redwood forests are “fire forests,” with the trees having adapted to survive by their thick bark and ability to sprout a new crown if the old one is scorched. The trees are so tolerant of fire, as well as shade, that they persist and dominate in the presence or absence of disturbance. I looked up, and up, to the tops of trees as high as a football field is long, to a beautiful blue sky. The warm and clear coastal weather on this trip was as anomalous among the redwoods as the storm in Canyon Creek had been the previous summer. Lungworts littered the trail, beautiful, large, greenishwhite lichens that favor moist canopies and fix atmospheric nitrogen high up in the tree into forms usable by plants. As my gaze came closer to the ground, I saw huge salals and smaller California huckleberries. Deer ferns were scattered among the sword ferns, and redwood sorrel framed the many “humbler” plants, as C. E. Dutton, a contemporary of Eastwood, noted in his descriptions of the diverse understory plants he found in the meadows above the Grand Canyon. I was never sure that I actually stood in Alice Eastwood’s grove, because the trail seemingly disappears at a bench honoring Frank Finley Merriam, former California governor and realtor and relative of C. Hart Merriam. I’m sure that Alice Eastwood would have wanted it that way, honored by an obscure grove tucked up the slope, without the large, somewhat pompous signs of the roadside groves. She would have always favored place above person.

Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

chapter 6

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Wild Creatures of the Klamaths

Most people are much more impressed by a creature than a plant, even though both are beautiful and both can be dangerous. Trees have been known to fall and land on people, and plants can be poisonous, either to the touch or upon eating. But the former is a rare occurrence, and poisonous plants such as poison oak can be avoided by the careful hiker. The sighting of wildlife or fish has an emotional power far beyond that of forest plant life, whether in a hunt for meat or for the thrill of seeing wildlife in its native habitat. Some wildlife species can be quite dangerous; the most dangerous, the grizzly bear, has been extirpated from California, except for its place on the state flag, but some other species, such as the mountain lion, still pose a potential danger on any trip into the Klamaths. The most impressive wildlife encounter I have had was with a golden eagle at Deer Creek. I was hiking along the Stuart Fork trail in early morning, on a crisp and clear summer’s day in the early 1960s. I heard the usual small bird chatter, and then suddenly a “whump-whump” that was at first strangely faint and then frighteningly louder. I froze in my tracks, briefly terrified of this unknown sound, but then saw gliding toward me through the trees below the trail a huge bird, which I soon recognized as a golden eagle. Dangling from its talons was a dead opossum with its long, ratlike tail hanging beneath it. The eagle landed on a large Douglas-fir log about 50 feet away from me to catch its breath, its eyes directed at me, the invader of its space, while it heaved for air. 56

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Standing on the log, and slightly upslope from me, it appeared to be taller than I was. I stood motionless in respect and awe. The opossum seemed about a quarter of the bird’s size, and the eagle was clearly having a difficult time carrying the prey upslope to its nest. It surely would have avoided stopping at my location had it known I was there, but it appeared to be exhausted. Several minutes later, much rested, it raised its wings and with one beat, powerfully levitated about 3 feet with the dead mammal and took off downslope. When it cleared the trees, it circled back upslope in a large spiral pattern and disappeared, leaving me with an indelible memory. That moment captured the essence of wilderness for me, however ephemeral it was. Birds of prey, as is the case with most predators, tend to be charismatic, but when they prey at night, their charisma is less dramatic. One of these less dramatic birds is the northern spotted owl, our only large owl in the Klamaths with dark eyes. Like other owls, it is nocturnal, preying on small mammals across its range of about 25 million acres from northern Washington state south to San Francisco. This owl is of the “heavy forest,” as my early 1960s Peterson bird guidebook describes it. In the Cascades of Washington, it feeds primarily on northern flying squirrels, whereas in the Klamaths, it favors the dusky-footed wood rat, which provides about 70 percent of its diet by weight. This difference in prey appears to have a major influence on the types of forest patterns most suitable for owl nesting, roosting, and foraging. In the Klamaths, as elsewhere, the spotted owl nests in older forests, often in old hawk nests or mistletoe brooms, but it forages heavily in other types of vegetation cover where the wood rat is plentiful. So a mix of older conifer forest and other vegetation appears to be the “best” owl habitat in the Klamaths, in contrast to larger expanses of older conifer forest farther north, where flying squirrels are the major prey species. Spotted owls’ requirement for old forest, for nesting, foraging, or both, caused its population to decline during the liquidation of the old growth in the Pacific Northwest between 1960 and 1990. When its decline was documented in the mid-1980s, plans for recovery began a revolution in forest management that culminated in the adoption of the Northwest Forest Plan in the mid-1990s covering 25 million acres of public lands in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. This plan will continue to affect the Klamath region’s public forestlands (I discuss its design later). The current status of the spotted owl is not promising. Although logging on public lands has almost ceased to be a problem, loss of habitat from forest fires in the drier portions of the owl’s range is

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now the largest source of habitat loss. The spotted owl is also suffering from competition with the barred owl, another large but more aggressive owl that has expanded its range west and south over the past several decades. In Washington, barred owls are displacing spotted owls even in the undisturbed old growth of Olympic National Park; the degree to which they may do the same in the Klamaths is still being evaluated. Osprey swoop up the streams regularly and grab fish, particularly if they have seen the Fish and Game planting truck nearby. Another good fisher is the great blue heron, a seemingly awkward bird that is really quite graceful. I had a wonderful encounter with a great blue heron on the Stuart Fork. Fishing at sunset, and sitting on granite boulders in the middle of gentle, white, splashing rapids, I was unsuccessfully trying to thread a monofilament leader into the eye of a tiny, hand-tied fly. As I readied to leave, a heron flapped its way upstream toward me on a lateday fishing trip. I stayed perfectly still, expecting it to fly over my head. But as it neared me, it slowed, turned, and landed on the boulder immediately next to the one I was sitting on. With its back to me, it preened for about a minute and then lazily looked upstream directly into my eye. It did a grand double take, worthy of Daffy Duck, and leapt into the air. With a loud squawk and a quick embarrassed glance back, it flew back downstream, passing a few bats beginning to feed on the insect life above the stream. Bats are the only true flying mammals, and they are nature’s bug zappers, at least here in the Klamaths. More than seven hundred bat species exist worldwide, thirty-five of which are in the western United States, with fourteen species in the Klamath Mountains. In the tropics, many bats are fruit eaters, and are quite large, but most temperate forest bats are small and insectivorous. One evening as I sat outside a cabin at Enright Gulch at the head of Trinity Lake, I saw the bats flitting by in the night snatch many more insects than did the electronic bug zapper humming nearby. A single bat can consume 3,000 insects in a night! As I sat outside my cabin, every fifteen seconds a bat swept through the area and consumed another insect near me. Until recently, we knew little about bats: where they live and how best to manage their habitat. They are long-lived, often surpassing twenty-five years of age, an incredible feat for such a small mammal. In contrast, a two-year-old mouse is a real veteran of its species. We are learning more about where bats roost and about how bats locate prey. About 70 percent of all bat species use echolocation, and all of the bats in the Klamath region echolocate. They send out ultrasonic waves

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that reflect off still or moving objects, and their receipt of the reflected waves (the echo) allows them to maneuver through the forest and to fix on prey. The spotted bat, which is not found as far south as California, has a call within the range of human hearing. But most northwestern bats emit waves at 60 to 200 kilohertz (kHz: a thousand cycles per second), well above our hearing range of 20 kHz. As a bat detects a flying prey, it increases its emission frequency, essentially homing in on the prey. This frequency is known as a feeding buzz. Scientists have developed electronic bat detectors, small handheld machines that record bat calls and electronically translate them to the range of human hearing. The detector alters the frequency by a division factor, such as 8, which will take a call at 80 kHz, translate it to 10 kHz, and amplify it as a “call” audible to humans. As a result, every time a bat flies by the detector, the device emits a small squawk. When detectors are hooked to a tape recorder, the calls are recorded in this translated, audible range. Because individual species or species groups of bats produce different patterns, this approach allows scientists to record indices of activity by group. Using computer software, researchers can then graph the patterns of each call. Some species have unique patterns, whereas others, like the myotis group of about six species, have very similar calls. Bat detectors have greatly expanded the amount of information available about bat activity in different kinds of forests, shrublands, and streamside areas. Bats feed where insects are plentiful. Creeks and streams provide good feeding places for bats and also serve as travel corridors through the forest. One evening just at dusk, I took a bat detector down to the bridge that crosses the Stuart Fork and turned it on. Its range of detection is about 50 feet. In just several minutes, I listened to hundreds of calls, each one lasting a second or two and sounding like “z . . . z . . . z..z..z..zzzt”! Whereas streamside areas are favored feeding sites, large upslope trees appear to be favored roost sites. The bats wiggle under loose bark and go into torpor (low metabolism) for the day, and they typically prefer trees in drier and warmer locations, such as ridgetops. Healthy bat populations require attention to both feeding and roost habitat. We still know little about how bats gather for mating. They can congregate for short periods in largely unknown places we call hibernacula, where mating occurs. The females of some species store sperm for later fertilization of the egg, so that they do not need the males around when conditions are best for pregnancy. In some areas, we find only males during certain seasons. Breeding sites and habitat requirements are largely unknown for most forest bats.

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Some of the largest black bears (to 600 pounds) have shown up in the Klamath Mountains. Most bears are much smaller, with females weighing 100 to 200 lbs and males weighing 150 to 350 lbs. As a youngster, I saw a huge dead black bear that had been shot while raiding trash cans. It filled the entire bed of a full-size, late-1940s pickup truck. I’ve seen others on Highway 96 that could have been mistaken for a Bigfoot as they stood on hind legs and pawed the air. Black-bear populations appear to be on the rise, numbering some 10,000 statewide in the early 1980s and about 30,000 in 2000. About onethird of the annual statewide harvest of bears occurs in Shasta, Siskiyou, and Trinity counties, and if harvest is proportional to population, about 10,000 bears live in this area. Excluding the major human population centers, one could likely count more bears than people in the Klamath Mountains. Most bears run from human contact unless cornered or with cubs, so they pose a minor threat compared to mountain lions. Still, seeing one along a trail gets the adrenaline pumping! Historically, wildlife management has focused primarily on game species, the charismatic megafauna of the region: deer, bear, mountain lion, or even the smaller carnivores such as fisher, pine marten, mink, and wolverine. Some are doing well, some are species of concern, and a couple—the grizzly bear and the gray wolf—have disappeared from the region. The last recorded grizzly bear in the Klamath Mountains was a 600-pound specimen shot by Uncle Tom McDonald on Swift Creek in 1910. Scientists are not sure when the gray wolf disappeared. Recovery plans for both species do not include sites in California, so any ecosystem restoration in the state will be shy two of its topline carnivores. The small carnivores such as fisher, wolverine, and pine marten are rare, but whether their populations are at risk for extirpation is unclear. The mountain lion (also called cougar or panther) is still common and is a major predator of deer. A mountain lion can eat a deer a week, plus larger numbers of fawns. In the wildland-urban interface, mountain lions also prey on dogs, cats, and small farm animals. Recently, their predation on humans has increased, although not to date in the Klamaths. In 1994, two women were killed, and in 2004, one man was killed and a woman was mauled in Southern California. The number of mountain lions has increased tenfold since the early 1970s when then governor Reagan announced a moratorium on recreational hunting. In 1990, Proposition 117 declared the mountain lion a “specially protected

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mammal” in California. Mountain lions are still killed by wildlife officers (roughly eighty-five per year) and through special depredation permits (roughly one hundred per year) in areas where cougars are killing livestock. Snakes, especially rattlesnakes, seem to produce memorable encounters. As a Boy Scout camping near Yosemite, I had an unusual encounter when I was fishing along a stream and stopped at a slate outcrop to change my fly. The outcrop was shoulder high, and as I stood there working on the fly, my head leaned back onto a western rattlesnake, which had been sunning itself next to a smaller rock on the ledge. The snake immediately began to rattle, and although I had never heard a rattlesnake before, instinctively I knew the sound. I stupidly turned around, saw the snake’s heat-sensing tongue directly between my eyes, and luckily launched myself backward into the stream before it struck. After that day, I knew that rattlesnakes, although dangerous, were not exceptionally aggressive and would give a person a chance to leave, or would try to leave, rather than initiate an encounter. They are generally much less dangerous than their reputation suggests, as several Trinity stories attest. The first story involves the Baron de La Grange, French owner of the La Grange hydraulic gold mine in the late 1800s. While the baron leaned against a rock ledge during a deer-hunting trip, a rattler crawled out from under a rock on the ledge and onto his shoulder and looked him in the eye. This encounter was surprisingly similar to mine, except that I didn’t hang around, and the steely baron did. According to the Baroness de La Grange, man and snake remained motionless, except for the darting tongue of the reptile. The snake eventually moved to the baron’s other shoulder, then back on the ledge and under its rock. Once the baron recovered from a cold sweat, he dislodged the rock and finished off the rattlesnake with the butt of his rifle, the only trophy he bagged that day. When I was fifteen, I rode with my dad by horse to Morris Meadows to do a little trout fishing. Unlike the narrow gorges of the Stuart Fork downstream, at the meadow, the stream sinuously flows through the forest, and grass grows to the water’s edge. This gorgeous meadow was once a glacial lake, gradually assuming its current form as sediment filled the area behind the old moraine that serves as a dam. Dad somehow picked up a small rattlesnake on his boot as he shuffled through the grass to the stream, and when I approached from downstream, he was sitting on a 4-foot soil bank dangling his feet over the edge, and the

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snake was perfectly balanced, hanging over the toe of his right boot. The snake was about a foot long, but quite distinctive from where I stood, with its triangular head and button of a rattle. Even small rattlers can pose quite a problem if they bite, and this one could have easily slithered up his pant leg. He was not aware that he had a poisonous snake on his foot, so I shouted that there was an emergency and that he needed to do exactly as I said. As I instructed him to kick his right leg, he responded vigorously, and the snake went sailing into the stream and swam off. If Dad had had the mysterious powers of G. A. Wirzen, he might not have needed to kick so hard. In 1855, the Swede found an enormous rattlesnake up Rush Creek and started whistling at it. The snake raised its head, then collapsed and rolled over as the whistling continued. Wirzen picked up the reptile and carried it home, and soon he and his trained snake had their debut in Weaverville. The act traveled as far as San Francisco, and Wirzen supposedly made a fortune. Although Wirzen had once been bitten by a rattler, his trained snake remained under his “mysterious power which he really possesses,” according to Isaac Cox (21). Wirzen was more comfortable than Wilber Dodge of Trinity Center, who constructed a flowing moat around his cabin to keep rattlesnakes out. Unknown to Wilber as he relaxed inside his moat was that rattlesnakes swim easily. Other snakes in the Klamath region are less frightening than the rattlesnake. The California mountain kingsnake is an amazingly colorful serpent of black, white, and red rings. I’ve seen only one in the Klamaths, as I was hiking along a trail, and it stood out dramatically in this world of muted browns and greens. This kingsnake superficially resembles a poisonous Arizona coral snake, native to the southwestern United States, but it has bands of red bordered by black, whereas the coral snakes have red bands bordered by yellow or white. It was rather uninterested in me, and I suspect its bright markings tend to deter most predators. It has a reputation of eating rattlesnakes, which it does, but also takes a wide variety of other reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals. The western aquatic garter snake is a common sight along streams and can often be seen serpentining its way across a pool. Its habit of sunning itself on rocks makes it rather vulnerable to hawks and other avian predators. The garter snake can be aggressive, chasing bathers at times. I saw an especially ambitious but undersized garter snake snag a nonnative bullfrog by its butt along the shores of Trinity Lake and

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then hang on as the frog jumped to and fro, trying to shake the reptile. The snake struggled to get a better grip, but it had no chance of swallowing the large frog. The battle went on for about half an hour, at which time the snake let go and the frog hopped off with a bloodied rear. The rubber boa is one of the region’s prettiest and most docile snakes. The two ends of the snake look about the same. I bumped into one of record size in a Trinity meadow on a warm evening in the late 1950s. As I crawled around with my face to the ground collecting grasshoppers to use as fishing bait, I encountered a 3-foot-long boa, twice as large as any I had ever seen and a good 6 inches longer than the longest noted in field guides: it must have been a hunting record worthy of the Boone and Crockett Club. It was out looking for a vole for dinner. We were shocked to see each other, and we both recoiled from the encounter. Immediately, I decided to catch the snake to observe it more closely, as I could not believe the size of this boa. I jumped up and chased the snake, but the grass was too tall for me to see the snake clearly, and I had to chase the waving seed heads of the grass as the boa slithered through. Just as I would track it to the left, it would turn right, and I dove in vain at least twice to try to get a hand on it. I was surprised at its speed and sense of direction, as it finally eluded me in an old, hollowed-out oak stump. I would have had to tear the stump apart, which was likely its home, to capture it and probably would have hurt the snake in the process. I ceded victory and returned to my grasshopper quest. Western pond turtles appear to have disappeared from the most northerly part of their range but still are common in the Klamaths. Their habitat requirements are more flexible than those of other aquatic turtles. The changes in the Trinity River below Trinity Dam have reduced their habitat somewhat by producing greater sedimentation, lower water temperatures, and higher water velocity than they experience in the undammed South Fork Trinity River. The dam appears to have homogenized the habitat, lessening the presence of deep, slow-flowing pools with underwater cover. On a trip home from Trinity one year, I rescued a western pond turtle near Carrville on Highway 3. As my wife and I drove north, a speck in the road became a “rock” that I recognized as a turtle as our car passed directly over it. We pulled over, and I got out, picked up the turtle, and moved it off the road to a more suitable basking place. The most common frog of the region is the foothill yellow-legged frog, but it is less common than it was fifty years ago. I remember times in the 1950s at Trinity Alps Resort when every third rock in the river

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had a yellow-legged frog on it, and I could count twenty to thirty of the frogs as I looked up the river. I seldom see one now. The floods of 1955 and 1964 scoured much of the frogs’ habitat, reducing bankside cover, and the populations have never recovered. They may also be victims of the mysterious worldwide amphibian decline. Red-legged frogs appear to have replaced the yellow-legged ones, albeit in much smaller numbers, in the Stuart Fork and Canyon Creek. Yellow-legged frogs have also declined below Trinity Dam. The more uniform deepening of the channel and an increase in stable riparian vegetation on river bars have reduced habitat. High-flow releases from the dam during summer have destroyed egg masses, and the cold temperature of the water delays larval development. The artificial stability of the river channel has encouraged nonnative bullfrogs, suspected predators of yellow-legged frogs. The success of pond-breeding bullfrogs in the main stem of the Trinity is testament to the pondlike nature of recent river currents. During the 1990s, the number of egg masses of yellow-legged frogs on the dammed main-stem Trinity averaged one or two per mile in contrast to the sixty to eighty per mile on the undammed South Fork Trinity. A frog with no voice would seem a very sad animal, but such is the tailed frog. This frog of ancient lineage, with relatives only in New Zealand, is a small, wrinkled, rough-skinned amphibian, the male of which has an external copulatory organ—thus, the “tailed” frog. Unfortunately for the female, she is also known as the tailed frog, although she has no tail. The tailed frog occupies very cold and fast streams, which are usually small headwater streams. The “tail” is used for internal fertilization of the eggs, because the sperm would simply wash away if it were externally applied near the eggs. Tadpoles often take two years to metamorphose into adults, meanwhile using a strong, suckerlike mouth to attach themselves to rocks from which they can glean algae without washing away in the current. The Klamath Mountains have an impressive diversity of salamanders, creatures that are frequent subjects of fact and fiction. Depending on how tightly one defines the region, it may have as many as fifteen species, but salamanders are never as noisy or obvious as the frogs. The roughskinned newt is often the most visible because of the bright orange coloring on its belly, and it is also the most poisonous of the salamanders. One often sees newts in the spring in large, copulating masses, with ten or more clasping each other in large balls. Later, one can see them on the bottoms of ponds or slow streams. Some other salamanders, like the northwestern salamander, also breed in ponds, whereas other, more

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streamlined species, like the southern torrent salamander, breed in streams. Yet others are fully terrestrial species, such as the lungless plethodontids that breathe through their skin: the ensatina and the clouded and black salamanders. They lay their eggs in moist logs and protect them while they develop. The terrestrial salamanders burrow into the ground and remain dormant during the dry summer but are quite active in late fall and spring. Likely because of the ancient age of their geology, the Klamaths have supported salamander populations for tens of millions of years, and the rugged topography has served to isolate populations and allow separate species to evolve. Until 2005, the Klamaths had two endemic species: the Del Norte salamander and the Siskiyou Mountain salamander. Both are lungless plethodontids that are closely related to one another, and they occur nowhere else in the world. Both are small (2.5 to 3 inches total length) and are active only during the wet period of the year, retreating beneath rocks in the summer. Because they are small and look somewhat alike, with the Del Norte salamander being a bit darker, identifying one to species is difficult. But in 1996, Forest Service biologists Dave Clayton and Sam Cuenca found an unusual salamander that didn’t fit the typical description of either known endemic species near the confluence of the Scott and Klamath rivers, near the historic boundary between the ranges of the Siskiyou Mountain and Del Norte salamander species. This salamander was a bit stouter than the other two, with a wider head and longer legs. Subsequent genetic analysis led to the declaration of a new species in 2005: the Scott Bar salamander, Plethodon asupak, in which the species name is the Indian name for the Scott Bar area. Not since David Rains Wallace’s fictional book, The Turquoise Dragon, in 1985 had a new salamander species been proclaimed in the Klamath Mountains, but in this case, fact followed fiction. Of course, the species was not entirely undiscovered; in this case, good biologists sensed that slight morphological differences had genetic origins, and subsequent genetic analysis bore out their suspicions. Why would such a diversity of salamanders appear here? And have we discovered all the species yet? Answers are not firm, but the ancient age of the terranes and a generally mild climate, at least in some refugia, probably account for the persistence of salamanders over millions of years and for their ability to evolve into separate species. It would not be surprising to find other new salamander species in the future, and I would look in the older terranes and at low elevations that have not undergone glaciation.

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The most imposing physical specimen is the Pacific giant salamander, a foot-long beast that can actually growl and eat snakes, mice, and shrews, instead of the usual terrestrial salamander diet of springtails, slugs, and beetles. It is the largest terrestrial salamander in the world. It sometimes exhibits neoteny, remaining in aquatic larval form as an adult and reproducing without metamorphosing into adult form. The related Cope’s giant salamander in coastal Washington is almost always neotenic. The advantage of neoteny is not clear, but why leave the house if one doesn’t have to? Some of my best memories of the Trinities are fishing stories. I started fishing the Stuart Fork in the early 1950s, when the stream was full of big fish. One could rent a horse and head up trail to places that were rarely fished, returning with a large string of big trout. Keepers started at about 10 inches, and 16 inchers were not uncommon. Most of these larger fish were native rainbow trout, with their splashy sidebar of violet to red, but occasionally one would catch a “German brown,” a nonnative and quite elusive species with speckles of black and red on its back. Why it was “German” is puzzling, because the strain in California up to the mid-1950s was from Scotland, and today the fish is known simply as the brown trout. These “brownies” grow to large size and live in the deeper, cooler pools. The limit back then was probably twenty fish per person, and as the area became more popular, even with more restrictive take limits, the fishery declined. The floods of 1955 and 1964 significantly widened the channel in places and removed streamside cover, including food sources for the invertebrates that the fish ate. I’m sure that big natives still hang out in some streams, but these days, I mostly fish with barbless dry flies and release the little rainbows I catch. The thrill is to read the stream to predict where the fish are and then to lay a fly with a natural drift and watch the water roil when the fish strikes. My favorite late-season fly is a small “muddler minnow” made of deer hair, which is supposed to be fished under water (“wet”) and to simulate a minnow. But I fish it “dry,” and it must bear a close resemblance to a grasshopper because it is a successful fish catcher. Native rainbows’ genetic stock has been altered by hatchery-planted rainbows, but the species is not threatened in the region. Probably the biggest effect in the past half century has been a change to a much younger rainbow population. This pattern won’t change without restrictive regulation of the take of large fish. Most of the lakes in the Trinity Alps have historically been “barren.” To a fishing enthusiast, this designation has meant that the lakes are

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fishless, but they were far from barren. Invertebrates, reptiles, and amphibians lived in the lakes, and they have suffered from the introduction of trout. Trout-planting efforts first used pack stock to carry in buckets of fish and later relied on airdrops. Rainbow trout are common, but eastern brook trout are even more common in these lakes, because they breed more successfully in high-elevation lakes without permanent tributary streams. The “brookies” are easily identified by the wavy, wormlike dark patterns on their backs, and they normally don’t get very large. In addition to the resident fish, migratory fish swim, or once swam, in the rivers of the Klamaths. Most of the anadromous species, those that spend part of their lives in freshwater and part in salt water, have suffered major declines since the mid-twentieth century due to a variety of causes: dams, pollution, overfishing, and damage from logging. The effect has been more significant for some species than for others. The plights of steelhead and salmon receive the most attention, but other species are involved, too. Before the Trinity Dam blocked the main stem of the Trinity River above Lewiston, all these species occurred in the upper Trinity River. I can remember seeing the Pacific lamprey, a long, snakelike creature, hanging out in the Stuart Fork. The lamprey has a strong suckerlike mouth that helps it rest on its trip upstream and that it uses to move rocks to create a suitable spawning nest. After spawning, adult lampreys die, and the young burrow into soft sediments and stay as small juveniles for four to six years, filtering out microscopic plants and animals. Metamorphosed adults emerge as 5-inch-long lamprey that migrate to the ocean, returning in two to three years as 15- to 30-inch-long bluish-gray adults. Iron Gate Dam on the Klamath and Trinity Dam on the Trinity stopped the lampreys’ migrations, so the fish are no longer present above the dams. Though they are not an endangered species, their numbers are likely far below historical populations. Three species of salmonids have historically spawned in the Klamath and Trinity River systems: Chinook (king) salmon, coho (silver) salmon, and steelhead, which are essentially seagoing rainbow trout (see table 1 and figure 11). Of the three species, the Chinooks have had the largest runs and have spawned in the larger, deeper portions of the region’s streams. The egg nests, or redds, are in coarser gravel than that used by coho or steelhead. Spring Chinook return in spring and summer. They wait until fall to spawn. Fall Chinook begin returning in late summer and breed slightly later than the spring Chinook do. The coho is a smaller salmon that returns with the fall Chinook, but it spawns in

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Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

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table 1. life histories of the three major salmonids Migration

Spawning

Egg Incubation

Emergence of Fry

Rearing of Juveniles

Smolt Migration

Chinook (spring-run)

April– September

August– November

August– December

November– April

May– February

March– September

Chinook (fall)

August– December

October– December

October– December

January– April

May– February

March– September

Coho

September– December

November– February

January– March

February– May

May– February

February– June

Steelhead (summer)

May– August

February– May

February– June

March– July

July– age two

March– July

Steelhead (fall)

August– November

February– May

February– June

March– July

July– age two

March– July

Steelhead (winter)

November– April

February– May

February– June

March– July

July– age two

March– July

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Figure 11. The life cycle of Pacific salmon, representing the migration between freshwater and salt water. (Illustrator: Jack DeLap.)

shallower water with lower stream velocity and smaller gravel. Both species die after spawning and likely provide substantial protein to wildlife scavenging at the water’s edge. Bears, raccoons, eagles, and even mice use the carcasses, which were once thought to simply wash back downstream to sea. Studies in the Pacific Northwest have found

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nitrogen that derives from marine sources (salmon carcasses) in streamside trees, which then grow faster and provide larger woody debris to small streams: a complex web indeed. Steelhead spend more time than salmon in freshwater as juveniles and might spend as long as five years at sea before returning. They can return almost any time of year and have runs defined as fall, winter, and summer (table 1). They spawn in small to medium-size gravel, but unlike salmon, they can then return to the ocean, demonstrating an anadromous fish version of the fountain of youth. The placement of Trinity Dam on the Trinity and Iron Gate Dam on the Klamath has eliminated runs of anadromous fish above the dams. Changes in channels below the dams have also decreased spawning habitat for these fish. The original plans for the Klamath and Trinity rivers would have eliminated anadromous fish habitat on both rivers. The California Water Plan, a 1950s creation, noted a need for “the development of a new environment for the anadromous fish now using those streams. It is planned that conditions will be improved on other smaller coastal streams through construction of stream flow maintenance dams and other measures. It is expected that this will result in an increased anadromous fish population in these streams, thereby compensating, to some extent, for the loss of the famed Klamath system runs” (172). Though the California Water Plan was never fully implemented, 90 percent of the anadromous fish runs were destroyed with only one dam on the Trinity River and a series of dams that begin with the Iron Gate more than a hundred miles up the Klamath River. The coho salmon suffered the greatest loss, and the species is now listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Recovery is under way and appears to be making more progress on the Trinity than on the Klamath. Plans call for restoring flow to the main-stem Trinity, where up to 90 percent of the inflow to Trinity Reservoir was diverted to the Sacramento drainage for transport south during the early years of the dam, and for restoring the river below the dam through removal of riparian vegetation, bar reshaping, and increased high flows to restore more natural spawning gravels. Fish and wildlife have a much different role in resources management than they did decades ago. Early resource-management programs paid little attention to the effects of management on wildlife populations, and as a result, a number of species became threatened or endangered, either through overharvest or loss of habitat. New legislation and regulations have slowed and in some cases reversed population declines, and fish and wildlife are now primary considerations in natural-resources management on both public and private lands.

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chapter 7

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Change Is the Only Constant

As I sit on a small bluff overlooking the Stuart Fork in late summer, I am impressed most by the serenity of the place. Perhaps I am just reacting to the contrast with the pace of the city, but the sounds of the forest are part of the place, not noise at all. Nuthatches occasionally let out their unmistakable “yank yank,” while western fence lizards and dark-eyed juncos rustle among the leaves of the canyon live oaks. The closest thing to noise is the scolding of a Steller’s jay and the squawk of a raven. Old Douglas-firs stand with ponderosa pines and incense-cedar as sentinels on the slopes, offering testament to the serenity of the landscape. But this seeming stability belies the reality that this forest was created by disturbances like forest fires and that it has been maintained until recently by fires. Any sustainable future for Klamath forests must incorporate change, the hallmark of dynamic ecosystems—indeed the hallmark of all ecosystems. Earlier, I discussed the concept of potential vegetation as a means of predicting change in the absence of disturbance. But where do we see real examples of potential vegetation, where the slow process of succession has finally allowed the most shade-tolerant species to replace those that must begin in sunlight? In the Klamath Mountains, potential vegetation is just that: a potential that is rarely, if ever, realized. The area almost always has a suite of shade-intolerant, or pioneer, species present, which are often still dominant, because of the ubiquity of forest disturbances and the longevity (300 to 1,000 years) of the dominant species. 71

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“Forest disturbance” is an imprecise phrase. We usually try to define “disturbance” as a discrete event that has an effect on the forest’s species composition, its structure (either horizontal or vertical), or its function: how it cycles nutrients or provides wildlife habitat. However, this definition is somewhat arbitrary. When does a breeze, or a winter storm wind, cease being a normal part of ecosystem rhythm and become a disturbance? Wind is usually considered a disturbance when it breaks or blows over a substantial number of stems in the forest, but not when it follows its usual diurnal pattern. How discrete must an event be to qualify as a disturbance? Fire is usually quite discrete, but tree mortality from insects often occurs over several years. In the 1980s, ecologists Steward Pickett and Peter White edited a book on natural disturbance in which they listed more than twenty-five general types of disturbances, some of which were physical, like ice storms, and some of which were biotic, like insects. They didn’t separately list the defoliating insects, the bark beetles, or the multiple species of each disturbance guild. They also suggested ways to characterize disturbance: by type, frequency, magnitude, season, and synergistic effects. These categories fit some disturbances, like fire, better than others, like insect epidemics. Frequency is the return interval of the disturbance: how many times it occurs in a given period. Even very long disturbance intervals are important in conifer forests, because the trees can live for many centuries. Magnitude describes the intensity of the event: flame length for forest fires, wind speed for windstorms, and flow rate or flood height for water. Season of disturbance may also affect recovery. Fires in the spring are often more damaging than those in the fall because vegetation is more vulnerable: buds are not hardened, and root reserves of food are low after bud break. New stream terraces created by flooding in winter are good for redwoods because their cones open in winter, spreading seed on bare soils with few seedling pathogens. Such new, bare soil is still moist in spring, providing good germination sites for alder and cottonwood. Finally, some disturbances set the stage for other disturbances to occur, feeding off each other in synergistic fashion. Fires can damage trees and make them susceptible to insect attack, and conversely, tree mortality from insects creates fuel for potential fires. When a disturbance occurs, its effect depends partly on its magnitude, but it also depends on what adaptations the vegetation has, either for individual species to persist, or, if the disturbance kills them, to recover by vegetative (sprouting) or seed reproduction. Some species have thick bark: redwood, Douglas-fir, and ponderosa and Jeffrey pines.

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Others have moderately thick bark: sugar pine, incense cedar, and Port Orford cedar. These features are excellent adaptations to surface fires. The knobcone pine has serotinous cones, which stay closed for decades with viable seed in the tree canopy until a hot fire comes along to melt the resin around the cones and open them. Postfire sprouting from the crown or base is another adaptation to hot fires that kill the foliage in the crown. Almost all the hardwoods possess this sprouting ability. Adventitious buds, such as those of willow and cottonwood, allow stems and branches buried by floods to resprout and colonize bare stream terraces in which they have just been deposited. Redwoods can also develop a new root platform in place if the old one has been buried by sediment. The old roots grow up into the new deposits, and a new root system sprouts from the buried portion of the stem. Each of these adaptations tends to favor the individual species, either by selectively killing other species or by providing a reproductive advantage that allows the species to preferentially colonize a site after it has been disturbed. In this chapter, I emphasize the two disturbances that are the most important and widespread occurrences in the Klamaths: fire and water. Though we usually don’t think of the two as being compatible, they coexist here because they occur in different seasons. Fire is confined to the dry season, and water, primarily to the wet season (but summer thunderstorms can occasionally create severe erosion). Both have had tremendous effects on the region in the past, and both will do so in the future, regardless of dams or efforts at fire suppression.

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fire We call fire-prone areas “fire environments” because they have environmental conditions that foster the occurrence and spread of fire. The Klamath Mountains are a classic fire environment. A prolonged summer dry season reduces the moisture content of dead fuels as well as that of live vegetation. Thus, ignition is easier, so less energy is necessary to vaporize the remaining moisture from burning fuels, so more is available to preheat the next leaf or twig, helping to spread the fire faster. Substantial fires can occur beginning in May and extend into November. Historical fires that began early in the period had the opportunity to burn all summer and often did. When C. Hart Merriam was working on Mount Shasta at the turn of the twentieth century, he remarked, “Of the hundreds of persons who visit the Pacific slope in California every

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summer to see the mountains, few see more than the immediate foreground and a haze of smoke which even the strongest glass is unable to penetrate” (Morford 1984, 9). Native Americans used fire as their main resource-management tool. As people of the rivers, they often burned off the valley bottoms, and many of their fires burned up into the higher country. Lightning was another source of fire, increasing from the coast inland and from low to high elevation. Lightning in the Klamaths has a 33 percent chance of striking any square mile in a year. The lightning-fire history in the centrally located Salmon River drainage (see figure 12) is a startling example of the role that fire must have played in historical forest dynamics. Dry lightning storms, with little associated precipitation, have the highest chance of starting fires, but the wet lightning storms often pack the most lightning. This double whammy of lightning on ridges and native ignitions in the valleys, in an extended summer-dry area, has almost ensured a substantial presence of fire every year. Variability in local climate, different species adaptations to fire, rugged topography, and short-term weather patterns have all contributed to an extremely complex mosaic of fire histories and effects in the Klamath Mountains. Coastal and high-elevation areas are the wettest, and annual precipitation generally declines inland, although a “bulge” of higher precipitation occurs in the eastern Klamaths (figure 3). Most forests in the Klamaths have one or more species with moderate to thick bark, so historical fires seldom have killed all the forest over the entire area of the burn. Topography plays a key role in fire behavior. South aspects and steep slopes are drier, and often support hotter fires, than north-facing or gentle slopes do. Finally, weather systems may dampen or accelerate fire behavior. Three types of weather systems in the Klamaths create critical fire weather: postfrontal, prefrontal, and subtropical high systems. Postfrontal conditions include strong north and northeast winds following the passage of a cold front. The 1999 Megram fire in the New River area had its big runs during such conditions. Prefrontal conditions exist when strong southwesterly or westerly winds follow the tail of a cold front. The 2001 Oregon Mountain fire that invaded Weaverville was such an event. The fire started just west of Oregon Mountain summit on Highway 299 and quickly blew east toward town. It was stopped just at the west edge of Weaverville but burned several homes and left a large landscape scar that will be visible for decades. Subtropical high conditions exist when air aloft sinks and warms adiabatically (due to increased

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Figure 12. Fires started by lightning in the Salmon River drainage over a seventy-year period. (Illustration courtesy of the Salmon River Restoration Council. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

atmospheric pressure nearer the earth’s surface), causing warmer, drier air at the surface. Strong inversions accompany these conditions and may reduce fire behavior below the inversion. The 1987 Hayfork fires are good examples of this phenomenon. Of course, other weather patterns of less-than-critical fire weather have also occurred in the region, adding to the myriad fire weather conditions in which historical fires

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have burned. In addition, fires burn differently in the day than they do at night, further expanding the mix of fire effects that are possible in the Klamaths. To organize this complexity, fire ecologists have developed simple classification systems, or fire regimes, to describe the fires that have occurred in the Klamath region. These fire regimes were the patterns that maintained the biodiversity of the region over past centuries. The most commonly used category has three levels: low severity, mixed severity, and high severity. The low-severity fire regime includes fires that have been frequent (usually less than twenty-five years apart) and usually of low intensity, creating so-called underburns that killed few large trees. The high-severity fire regime includes fires that have been infrequent (with return intervals of more than one hundred years) but have often been of high intensity, killing all of the trees in their path. The mixed-severity fire regime has been marked by a complex mix of underburned forest with little overstory tree mortality, stands that are significantly thinned but have significant remaining tree cover and stands that have been completely top-killed by the fire. Return intervals for mixed-severity fire regimes have been twenty-five to seventy-five years in most areas of the West but have been a bit shorter in the Klamath Mountains. Patterns in historical fire regimes have changed significantly, with a reduction in low-severity fire and an increase in high-severity fire, due to a multitude of factors. In the Klamath Mountains, these changes have not been quite as significant as in the drier ponderosa pine forests of the Intermountain West. Sometimes large regions have similar historical fire regimes. In Canada and Alaska, boreal forests of these areas’ higher latitudes had and still have a high-severity fire regime over millions of square miles, and so does the Yellowstone region, illustrated by the massively scaled, intense fires of 1988. Most western forests show much more diversity. The eastern Cascades of Washington, for example, had a gradient from low-, through mixed-, to high-severity fire regime as the terrain shifted from lower-elevation pine forests to true fir and hemlock forests at the crest. The Sierra Nevada had a low-severity fire regime in the pine forests that transformed into mixed-severity fire regimes in red fir forests nearer the crest. In contrast, the Klamaths contain that same diversity on the local slopes of individual mountains. One of the ecological principles of fire is that it thins the forest from below. Fire first kills the smallest trees with the thinnest bark and lowest crowns, and as it intensifies, it takes larger trees. At one extreme, in a

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table 2. bark thickness of mature coniferous trees of the klamath mountains Thick Bark

Intermediate Bark

Thin Bark

Douglas-fir Incense-cedar Jeffrey pine Ponderosa pine Redwood Sugar pine

Shasta red fir Western white pine Gray pine Knobcone pine White fir Port Orford cedar

Mountain hemlock Whitebark pine Brewer spruce Lodgepole pine Alaska cedar Engelmann spruce Western hemlock Foxtail pine

forest with only large trees and a fire of low intensity, the effects may be so benign as to be unnoticeable a year later. At the other extreme, a fire might burn through a forest with a variety of tree sizes under severe fire weather and kill all the trees, so that tree size is not a criterion for survival. A second principle is that the effects of the fire depend not only on its behavior but also on the adaptations of the vegetation that is burning. Thick bark is the most common adaptation to fire in conifers (see table 2). This feature is an adaptation to surface fires that move under the canopy of a forest and do not produce enough heat to scorch the entire crown. Across the region, Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine, the two most widely distributed conifers, both have thick bark, and old trees have been known to survive fifteen to thirty such fires over their lifespans. Other adaptations exist, too. The knobcone pine’s serotinous cones contain live seed but remain closed in three- to four-cone whorls on the branches. Only a fire hot enough to melt the resin sealing the cones enables them to open, spreading seed into an ashy, competitionfree forest floor. Although such fires are usually hot enough to kill the mature trees, they also produce conditions suitable for a new group of knobcone pines to grow. Serotiny is an adaptation to intense fires, and the widespread occurrence of knobcone pine suggests that hot fires have been part of the Klamath landscape over past centuries. Sprouting is a third widespread adaptation to fire. Almost all the hardwoods will crown sprout from latent buds if the crown is scorched, and most will sprout from the base if the crown is killed. The bark of most hardwoods (Pacific madrone, tanoak, California black oak, canyon live oak) is thin or of intermediate thickness, which puts the trees at a disadvantage to

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.

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the conifers with their thick bark in the presence of a low-severity surface-fire regime. Organizing the fire ecology of the Klamath Mountains by major vegetation types enables us to discuss both the unique fire histories and the interactions of the various species and their adaptations to fire. My summary of the historical ecology below is relevant for the past couple thousand years during current stable climate and vegetation patterns, up to the early twentieth century, when fire exclusion became national policy. Later, I discuss the effects of twentieth-century fire exclusion; the loss of large, fire-tolerant trees due to selective harvest; and plantation forestry.

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Redwood Forest Fire and flood built the old-growth redwood forest. Walking along the alluvial flats where the biggest redwoods grow, one is struck by the ubiquitous charcoal on the stems of the trees. On the slopes above, even more char is evident. This charring was not an accidental catastrophe of nature: it was neither unusual nor catastrophic, except in a very few instances. The story of fire in the redwoods sheds light on the story of the inland Klamath. If fire is so important in the land of summer fog, occurring every few decades, then surely it can be important where the summers are too hot for fog. A typical moist redwood forest has a multilayered structure, with trees of all sizes. The tallest trees are the redwoods, which are usually many feet in diameter. Sharing the overstory are large Douglas-firs, and occasionally Sitka spruce is a codominant species. The midstory is usually western hemlock, with some redwood, and the lower tree story is again hemlock and redwood with evergreen hardwoods: California laurel and tanoak. Yet we know from the analysis of fire scars that fires have occurred fairly frequently in these groves, perhaps every twenty to forty years. How can the current forest structure be consistent with this history of disturbance? We can often reconstruct the history of a forest using the age classes of the trees and their ability to survive with or without disturbance. The most disturbance-tolerant species is redwood: it can resist a surface fire with its thick bark and sprout a new crown in place if the fire is hot enough to scorch the existing crown. The year after such a scorch, the tree looks like a green telephone pole. Redwood is also tolerant of shade, so it can reproduce in the absence of disturbance. Douglas-fir

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also has thick bark but is shade intolerant: it can survive a surface fire but needs open space to regenerate in redwood forests. Such open space is associated with hotter fires. Hemlock has thin bark but is shade tolerant, as are the hardwoods. Both types of trees are usually killed by any fires. Age-class analyses show redwoods of all ages, usually including a few that exceed a thousand years old. The redwood age classes appear to be almost independent of the fire history of the past millennium. Douglas-fir needs fires that are intense enough to open the canopy and allow the tree to reproduce. Overstory Douglas-firs usually cluster in one or more very tight age classes, indicating that they regenerated after fairly intense fires perhaps two hundred or four hundred years ago. Thus, we don’t see them in the understory of a mature forest. The hemlocks and hardwoods were all killed, or at least top-killed, by the last fire, so their ages all postdate the last fire, with the largest specimens being those that established soon thereafter. Hardwoods, being sprouters, are usually the first trees to recolonize the understory after they have been top-killed. What will happen when this forest burns again? The redwoods will persist, having added just a bit of char to their bark, although smaller ones may be top-killed. Large Douglas-firs will likely survive, although their density may decline a bit. Another age class of Douglas-fir may become established if the fire has created sufficiently large openings. The remaining species will be killed to the ground, but the next spring, the hardwoods will sprout, along with the shrubs, such as California huckleberry and salal. Away from the coast, and also farther to the south, redwood forests exist only in riparian or streamside areas, and the forest type quickly transitions to a mixed-evergreen forest with Douglas-fir as the overstory dominant. The fire history of those forests more closely mimics that of the upland forests. A seemingly unusual ecological effect of surface fires in the redwoods is the combustibility of the basal bark. The Canoe fire of 2003 in Humboldt Redwoods State Park burned away 6 or more inches of the bark around the bases of a number of large redwoods (6 feet or more in diameter), and several years later the trees are being top-killed due to the loss of cambial tissue, which apparently heated up behind the thin residual bark. Little or no reference to this effect exists in the published literature, yet the forest undergoes significant structural change when these large trees die, even though they sprout from dormant buds at the ground level.

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Mixed-Evergreen Forest Mixed-evergreen forest is a simple phrase for a complex and variable mosaic of vegetation that occurs at lower elevations across the Klamath Mountains. Douglas-fir tends to be a dominant conifer, but to the east, ponderosa, Jeffrey, and sugar pines become codominant. Tanoak, California laurel, and chinquapin are the most common hardwoods to the west, with California black oak and canyon live oak becoming more important to the east. Chaparral patches are mixed with forest. Fires have occurred on average every ten to twenty years in these forests. Historical forests were more open than today’s, with lower tree density, larger trees, and larger treeless openings. The variable nature of the available fuels, and the fact that these fires often burned for months, created a mosaic of fire effects that in turn influenced the complexity and variability of the next fire. Most of these fires were surface fires. R. B. Wilson, who in 1904 surveyed the lands that became the Trinity Forest Reserve (now part of the Shasta-Trinity National Forests), described them as “ground fires, and easily controlled. A trail will sometimes stop them” (Skinner, Taylor, and Agee 2006, 170). However, we know from the scattered presence of knobcone pine today that higherintensity fires had to have occurred, or this species would not have persisted to the present. Douglas-fir would have been the most fire tolerant of the conifers. It grows over the scars left by fires faster than the pines do, and the Douglas-fir bark beetle that attacks injured trees is less aggressive than are the beetles that attack the pines. Low-intensity fires were common; they killed only the smallest conifers and top-killed some of the hardwoods. The forests were open enough that Douglas-fir was able to establish in small openings. Thus, a single stand may have five to ten age groups of Douglas-fir, with each age group linked to a past fire. On steep slopes, fires were often light enough to enable even the thin-barked canyon live oak to survive. Other oaks, such as California black oak, also survived these historical fires because of the light fuels around the bases of the trees. Frequent fire precluded intense fire. Geographers Alan Taylor and Carl Skinner have done more fireecology work in the Klamath Mountains than anyone else. Their work near Happy Camp and Hayfork has shed considerable light on physiographic controls on historical fire patterns. At Thompson Ridge, lowseverity fire was prevalent on lower slopes and to east aspects (see figure 13), whereas high-severity fires were more common on the upper thirds

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Figure 13. Classes of fire severity for historical fires on Thompson Ridge, north of Happy Camp. The first three columns represent slope positions from the drier west side of the ridge; the three columns to the right represent slope positions of the wetter east side of the ridge. (Data source: table 8 in Taylor and Skinner 1998. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

of slopes and on west aspects. Their work at Hayfork further demonstrated the influence of topographic complexity (ridgetops, creeks, geology, aspect) on fire patterns. These features often stopped fires from spreading, but they acted more as filters to fire than as barriers. Some fires did cross these boundaries, particularly in very dry years, but many were constrained by the changes in environment and vegetation that occurred with changes in physiography. Vegetation that is adapted to more severe fire grows on the upper slopes and south- to west-facing aspects. Knobcone pine, shrubby patches, and even-aged stands are most likely to be here, with the larger, Douglas-fir–dominated forests more likely to be on lower slope positions and on east to north aspects. Although these latter forests look a lot like the Douglas-fir forests far to the north, they developed under an incredibly different fire regime. In the wet Olympic Mountains of Washington,

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one often finds stands that regenerated after a fire five hundred years ago, where fire has not revisited the area since. No such Douglas-fir stand in the Klamaths exists. The Klamath Douglas-fir stands have persisted as “old growth” precisely because they have burned frequently. In a fire environment such as the Klamaths, a policy of total protection will only change the nature of fire and its effects. These stands will continue to burn, but vegetation more adapted to severe fires is likely to expand at the expense of Douglas-fir. In the eastern Klamath Mountains, fires were apparently more frequent than in forests at similar elevation to the west. At Whiskeytown, historic fire intervals were 5 to 15 years in forests dominated by ponderosa pine, incense cedar, Douglas-fir, sugar pine, and white fir. A similar story occurs around Trinity Lake, where I found a sugar pine stump that has thirty-one fire scars it sustained over about a 250-year period.

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Woodland and Chaparral On drier slopes in the mixed-evergreen zone, and at lower elevations in the eastern Klamaths, lies a diverse woodland and chaparral zone. Historically in the western Klamaths, ridgetops often supported white oak woodland. These areas appear to have burned frequently, although most species do not record fire scars well. Indians frequently burned white oak woodlands in the western Klamaths. Both white oak and tanoak were resistant to low-intensity and short-duration fires. Commonly, these areas were burned in autumn. Fires were generally of low intensity, and prevented conifer encroachment. Oak savannas crested these ridges, partly because of unstable terrain and partly due to the frequent fires. Many of these fires would have fingered down into the associated mixed-evergreen or redwood forests. Chaparral patches contain many shrub species that are well adapted to fire. Most species, such as chamise, sprout a new crown after burning. Others, like buckbrush, are seeders: the plant is killed by fire but has a seed bank in the soil that is released by burning. Some seeds burn up, but others have their seed coats crack, enabling them to germinate the next spring. Chaparral fires are usually intense, because almost all of the dead fuel is dry and of small diameter, and the living foliage is often waxy and flammable. In the eastern Klamaths, juniper woodland dots the valleys and lower hillslopes. Blue oak is a common tree associate, along with many species

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of shrubs. Juniper has thin bark, so historic fires would have favored other species, such as the oaks. Fires here were likely widespread because of the continuity of fuels and frequent ignition by Indians and lightning.

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White Fir Forest White fir forests occur at middle elevations and have many of the same species found in the mixed-evergreen zone, with the addition of white fir. These areas have more persistent winter snowpack. The overstory may be dominated by the conifers from lower elevations, but white fir is a common understory species. Its importance increases in stands in which the wind has created canopy openings, releasing the understory trees to grow and fill the openings. We know less about the local fire ecology of the white fir zone, but studies at the margins of the zone suggest fire patterns much like those in the mixed-evergreen zone but with extended fire-return intervals of twenty to forty years. White fir is quite sensitive to fire when young, but older trees are fire tolerant because they have developed persistent, moderately thick bark. In low-intensity fires, the age of survivability may be roughly thirty years. If a white fir can avoid fire that long, it is likely to survive subsequent fires and persist as a canopy tree into an old-growth condition. As in the mixed-evergreen zone, a low-severity fire regime was likely most prevalent. However, because of the persistent low-branching character of white fir, stands that had a significant understory component of fir could wick a surface fire into the crowns of the larger trees in the unusual dry year or on a windy day. One often sees scattered, old white firs with significant bark char surrounded by a younger even-aged class of firs without char that regenerated after a fairly severe fire. Where a knobcone pine seed source was present, knobcone pine may also occur as scattered individuals or in nearly pure stands. Higher snow loads in white fir forests also increase the chance of windthrow or wind snap, which can add to fuel loads and subsequent fire behavior. If a fire occurs before substantial compaction and decay of the tree tops, more intense fire than normal will occur. The 1999 Megram fire burned through fuel accumulations created during a winter storm in 1996, and fire severity was much higher in the wind-snap–affected area than elsewhere. Would this wind snap have been characteristic of historic forests with possibly lower tree densities? We cannot provide a definitive answer, but we can surmise that wind damage exacerbated historic fire severity on occasion.

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Shasta Red Fir Forest

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The Shasta red fir forest of the Klamaths is romantically called the “snow forest.” Growing in a band at a higher elevation than one finds the white fir forest, it has persistent snow all winter yet still has a prolonged dry season. Common associates of red fir are western white pine and Jeffrey pine, with white fir common in the transition to lowerelevation forest and mountain hemlock in transition to higher-elevation forest. Historically, fires were able to spread during the short dry season. High densities of lightning strikes are common in red fir forests, often higher than in other forest types because these forests grow in areas where lightning is common. Many of these fires historically ended up as spot fires that did not spread much, but some covered wide areas. Our knowledge of historic fire-return intervals in Shasta red fir forests of the Klamath Mountains is limited, but in other areas, return intervals range around forty years. Carl Skinner has documented a nine- to thirty-year fire-return interval (with substantial variability) for Shasta red fir stands near Mumbo Lakes in the eastern Klamaths. A mixed-severity fire regime occurs, because Shasta red fir, when mature, is resistant to low-intensity fires. So are all of its common associates except for mountain hemlock. Where fires have been intense, knobcone pine often shows up in patches. A good example of this pattern is on slopes opposite the Cecilville-Callahan road several miles west of the crest. In the absence of knobcone pine, an intensely burned patch may revert to shrub dominance, and several such patches exist on the south aspect of the ridge where Cecil Lake sits. Trees may take a long time to establish themselves in these locations, and recurrent fires in the shrubs can create semipermanent shrub patches. Subalpine Forest Subalpine forests are limited in the Klamath Mountains because of the limited high-elevation areas. Most ridgetops are 4,000 to 6,000 feet in elevation and harbor white fir or Shasta red fir forests. The subalpine forests usually have a substantial component of mountain hemlock, along with red fir, whitebark pine, foxtail pine, western white pine, and lodgepole pine. All of these species have medium to thin bark, so fire, even if it is of low intensity, will have a mixed-severity effect on the forest. Because the subalpine zone is transitional to alpine areas that cannot support forest, its harsh environment usually makes for slow forest recovery after a fire.

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Forest in the subalpine zone tends to be discontinuous and fires are patchy as a result, because they are unable to cross rock fields or wet meadows under most conditions. In the China Mountain area, Carl Skinner found that over 85 percent of the fires detected through firescar sampling occurred only on single trees. Lightning was common enough, however, to produce median fire-return intervals of ten to fifteen years. These data suggest that the area sustained many very small fires. The presence of fire scars suggests that these fires did damage trees, and most fires probably killed some larger, thin-barked trees.

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Meadows and Openings Nonforested land in the Klamath Mountains is limited. Most of it is in the eastern margin in the dry rain-shadow areas between Mount Shasta and Yreka. But within the forest of the Klamaths are mountain meadows and forest openings. The forest openings were historically more common than they are today, a result of effective fire exclusion. Now, a more homogenous pattern is evident, with denser forest and smaller openings. Mountain meadows were often treeless because of high water tables that prevented tree encroachment, plus the occasional fire that moved through the cured herbs late in the summer. Ecological dynamics in these meadows have been complicated by their grazing history and climatic variation. In the Sierra Nevada, sheep heavily grazed meadows in the 1800s, causing erosion and effectively lowering the local water table, allowing trees to invade the margins and shrinking meadow sizes. In the Pacific Northwest, trees invaded snow-dominated meadows during a regional drought between 1920 and 1940, and those trees have survived, effectively reducing subalpine-meadow area in the Olympic and Cascade mountains. All of these factors—fire, grazing, and climate— have affected meadows in the Klamath Mountains. Like the forest openings, meadows in the Klamath Mountains have generally been shrinking. Morris Meadows in the Stuart Fork is a good example of this phenomenon. My friend Bill Weston took the top picture in figure 14 in 1960, and the bottom picture is a retake of the same scene in 2004. The meadow was a privately owned enclave within the primitive area in 1960, likely accounting for the stump of the ponderosa pine tree in the foreground. That tree has since disappeared, probably gone to firewood, and the area, still privately owned, is now surrounded by the Trinity Alps Wilderness. The small ponderosa pine tree beside the cut tree in

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Figure 14. Morris Meadows in 1960 and 2004. The pine tree in the foreground has grown considerably, whereas the stump and log have disappeared (probably harvested for firewood). Trees are encroaching at the meadow edge. (Source: 1960 photograph by William Snow Weston.)

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1960 is now larger, with an incense-cedar at its side. Shadows indicate that trees in today’s background are larger, too. A look at the 2004 meadow margin shows much denser tree cover and tree or shrub cover where meadow was present in 1960. Walking through the area today, one sees small ponderosa pines appearing in the meadow. The meadow is slowly shrinking but will likely not disappear altogether. Is this shrinking a natural cause or a human-induced event? Morris Meadows does not appear to have been overgrazed as much as some of the Sierra Nevada meadows have been, but pasture grasses like timothy are common and were probably broadcast to increase forage for sheep and cattle. Climatic influences may have played a role in recent tree invasions, and fire exclusion has prevented late-season fires from removing those trees. Allowing more naturally occurring fires to burn in the area, such as one that arose on the ridge separating the meadow from the Deer Creek Canyon in the early 1990s, is a reasonable management action if and when Morris Meadows becomes public land, and a prescribed fire, intentionally lit by managers, may be a justifiable restorative action.

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water Substantial rain and snow fall in the Klamath Mountains each winter. Once in a great while, a relatively warm and prolonged rain falls after a cold snap in which snow has accumulated on the surface and soils are saturated. At these times, great floods pour out of the mountains. These floods are quite different from the flash floods of the Southwest, where short but very intense thundershowers can create a wave of water down the dry washes of the desert. Floods in northwestern California typically occur with a rain of moderate intensity, perhaps only a fraction of an inch per hour, that nonetheless persists at a steady rate for several days. The rain must be warm enough to melt the snowpack even at higher elevations: freezing levels may be above the tallest peaks, which are at an elevation of only 9,000 feet. The melting snow adds to the rain, and the streams begin to swell. Creeks and rivers that are easy to ford on foot in the summer become deep, raging torrents, carrying trees, sediment, and structures toward the ocean. Coastal California was raked with a tsunami in March 1964 from the great 9.2 magnitude Prince William Sound earthquake in Alaska. The tsunami caused significant damage to coastal towns down through British Columbia and hit Crescent City, California, with a 16-foot wave that essentially wiped out the downtown area. Tsunami damage was

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recorded as far south as Hawaii. After this great push of water onshore, later that year the entire North Coast was inundated with a great push of water offshore: the 1964 flood. November and December were wetter than usual, and a significant snowpack had accumulated in the mountains. With the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in full swing, I left campus to burn slash piles at the university’s forestry summer camp in the headwaters of the Feather River in the northern Sierra Nevada. On December 18, a low-pressure system from the tropics moved onshore at nearly right angles to the coast and produced high rainfalls in the coast and the northern Sierra Nevada. Many areas received over 8 inches in twenty-four hours, with succeeding storm tracks dropping about 20 inches over five days in many areas. We left without doing much pile burning, because the piles were just too wet. Little did we know at the time that over the next week, this storm would become the largest in recorded history for the northern coast of California. Some rivers reached incredible volumes that week. The Eel River at Alderpoint ran 90 feet deep, with a peak flow of 752,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). This flow is hard to comprehend, but if it were directed into a totally dry Trinity Lake, with no other input, it could fill the lake in less than two days. By comparison, summer regulated flows from Trinity Dam have been only 450 cfs. This deluge was a monster flood. It tore out streamside trees that had persisted for hundreds of years and buried others in suffocating gravels. It produced record flows on the Klamath, Trinity, Smith, Van Duzen, Mad, Eel, and Russian rivers. More sediment was moved in that short time than in the previous decade. The Eel River, for example, moved 116 million tons of suspended sediment in three days, compared to only 94 million tons in the previous eight years. Those totals do not count the bed load, which consisted of material too heavy to remain suspended. Along the Trinity River at Junction City, estimates indicated that the water was flowing at 100,000 cfs, and it redeposited substantial amounts of the dredger tailings that filled the valley at that time. That material can be deposited as terraces along the stream banks, thereby providing a way to compare the impact of one flood to that of another. After the 1964 flood, Ed Helley and Val LaMarche Jr., U.S. Geological Survey scientists, studied the stream terraces in the Klamath Mountains for clues to past flood events. The recorded history of regional floods, although a century and a half long, is short in a geological context. In December 1955, a similar rain-on-snow event had hit the same area and caused substantial damage in the Sierra Nevada. The 1955 flood

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inundated Marysville and Yuba City, and those towns received much of the press. Though I read the paper every day during that period, having started my Oakland Tribune route the previous July, and was aware of the flood damage in the Sacramento Valley, I had no idea that the flood was also devastating my favorite place: Trinity Alps Resort. When my family returned in the summer of 1956, the stream banks had been scoured, several of the cabins on the river had been washed away, and the fabulous restaurant that spanned the Stuart Fork was also gone, blasted away by two large trees carried by the raging waters. The restaurant had already been dropped into the water by a stream-powered log that ripped away its foundation, and when the two trees hit the sagging wood frame, they reportedly did not even slow down. The restaurant simply exploded from the power of the stream, and parts of it likely reached the ocean, some 100 miles away. This type of havoc was being wreaked across the region. I experienced a similar event in 1975, in Redwood Creek, in the southern portion of Redwood National Park. I was working as an ecologist for the National Park Service, and the service was negotiating with the adjacent timber companies for improved timber-harvesting practices. Foresters, geomorphologists, hydrologists, ecologists, lawyers, and managers came out for a field inspection in March in the midst of a period of prolonged rainfall. Redwood Creek, which one could wade easily in summer, was a raging 30 feet deep and perhaps 300 feet wide. A large redwood came down the creek broadside and swept into a red alder grove on the east bank. Without slowing down, it snapped off the stems of the entire grove of perhaps fifty or sixty alders. Even today, I get shivers when I remember the roar of the water and the explosion of the alder grove. Later we saw a tributary stream, Bridge Creek, so actively eroding its banks that upslope alder trees on the unstable, recently logged slopes broke off in clumps and slid down several hundred feet into the creek within seconds, quickly disappearing in a vortex of water and being moved downstream, as another group of trees eroded down the slopes. We had to leave, because the road was washing away, threatening to leave us stranded. Without the road and its bridge, no one could have crossed Bridge Creek, a roiling brown torrent with standing waves and debris poking in and out of the water as it raced downstream. The power of water to reshape landscapes was never so vivid to me as on that day. Needless to say, the timber-company representatives did not make much of an impression on the federal folks, and the perhaps-inevitable expansion of Redwood National Park became law three years later.

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Floods have always been important events in redwood country. The groves with the largest trees are on floodplains that have been periodically inundated with water and layers of fine sediment, primarily silt. The floods favor redwoods by discouraging the competing species. Douglas-fir, western hemlock, and the hardwoods do not tolerate having their root systems buried, so they die. Redwoods simply grow new root systems. Flood-excavated trees have shown many layers of past root systems, each having been replaced by one above it, over hundreds to thousands of years. Access to moisture and nutrients, along with the flood weeding-out of competition, have allowed redwoods on these stream terraces to reach their maximum genetic potential, and redwoods there are the tallest organisms in the world. Another great Klamath Mountains flood occurred in December 1861, under exactly the same conditions: rain on snow and warm winds. We know little about the storm, except that it washed away almost every gold-mining operation along Klamath and Trinity river streams and washed Big Bar, which once lay across the Trinity River from Big Flat, off the map, until it was later relocated about 3 miles downstream. The sporadic occurrence but great impact of floods sparked Helley and LaMarche’s interest in studying these events. Which of the great floods was the largest: the one in 1964, 1955, or 1861? And did even greater floods occur before then? The researchers used a combination of geological and botanical evidence to compare these floods with each other and with those of the past. They knew that in the North Coast region, the 1964 flood was larger than the 1955 flood, although the National Weather Service (NWS), in its top fifteen California weather events of the twentieth century, awards the 1955 flood twelfth place and ignores the 1964 storm. The NWS apparently ranked events based on their economic impact rather than on their physical magnitude. Helley and LaMarche selected a number of sites at which they could date minimum ages of floodplain deposits by analyzing tree rings. First, they mapped the occurrence of deposits of varying ages according to their thickness and the composition of gravel. The sorting of the deposits by size and the weathering rind around individual pieces enabled them to identify and differentiate the deposits, and the ages of the trees growing there provided minimum ages for the deposits. Their assumption was that immediately after deposition of these gravels, the surface was bare and that trees might have immediately regenerated or perhaps have been delayed for decades on harsh sites. So the method of dating was approximate. Along the Scott River, based on gauging-station records, they

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estimated that the 1861 flood was comparable to the 1955 flood but that the 1964 flood was larger. Along the Trinity River, Helley and LaMarche studied a series of gravel bars above Trinity Lake at Eagle Creek. Both Eagle Creek and Ramshorn Creek enter the Trinity River here. The valley is wide and flat, creating potential for sediment deposition and preservation (see figure 15). They identified three gravel units in addition to the obvious 1964 deposit, which totally overlaid any 1955 deposits. This finding suggests that somewhat larger floods are likely to destroy evidence from slightly smaller floods. Older gravel 1, as they called one unit, is limited to the mouth of Ramshorn Creek. Older gravel 2, about 5 feet deep, lines both banks of the river; and older gravel 3, about 12 feet deep, is farther from the river and nestles against older, nonflood deposits. The researchers aged seventeen live trees and stumps (they had the date of cutting) by counting the annual growth rings on cross-sections or increment cores. I added another seventeen stumps to the count. The resulting calendar dates showed a wide range of ages across the three older gravels. This age spread stems from several factors. After a flood, some gravels, particularly those with coarse textures, discourage the establishment of seedlings, so regeneration can be delayed for decades. Then, regeneration can be continuous for a long time, as long as growing space is available. Further, an older gravel can be flooded from a more recent event that creates a younger and lower gravel deposit, and this new deposit can provide a fresh sand substrate on the older deposit to enable trees to establish themselves, even if few of the existing trees on the older deposit are killed. Helley and LaMarche suggested that older gravel 1, with a single tree date, was at least as old as 1735 a.d. Older gravel 2, in their opinion was older than 1540 a.d. and older gravel 3 was much older than their oldest tree date of 1500 a.d. The additional data I collected did not shed much additional light on the matter. I did find a stump on the old gravel 3 deposit with a germination date of approximately 1469 a.d., which set back the creation date to at least that time. Evidence also exists of widespread tree regeneration between 1707 and 1777 a.d. Almost half the trees in the sample established themselves in that period. Alternative explanations include a climate change that may have created better, moister conditions that enabled trees to establish on the gravel deposits, which would mean the tree dates are not associated with floods; another disturbance such as a fire that would have left many trees but perhaps killed some and allowed regeneration to occur; or a flood of intermediate magnitude

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Figure 15. Alluvial deposits along the Trinity River at Eagle Creek. Old gravel 1 is located just south of the Ramshorn Creek confluence, sandwiched between the 1964 and old Gravel 2 deposits. Surfaces 1, 2, and 3 are described in the text, and “Pre-Q” is pre-Quaternary and may be of old glacial origin. A cross-section of the river (line A–B on map) is shown in profile below. (Source: Helley and LaMarche 1973. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

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that might have left a thin, fine-textured surface deposit that was more amenable to tree establishment. In the lower reaches of Coffee Creek, just downstream from Eagle Creek on the Trinity River, the 1964 flood left widespread sand deposits across vegetated preflood surfaces. But the specific dates of the deposits, whatever they may be, are much less interesting than the fact that the older deposits represent very large floods. Helley and LaMarche suggested that the lack of deposits at Eagle Creek associated with the 1861 or 1955 floods indicated that, as elsewhere, these floods were not as large as the one in 1964. At Coffee Creek, John Stewart and LaMarche estimated the 1955 peak flow at 3,360 cfs and the 1964 peak flow at 17,800 cfs. That the 1964 flood was bigger than the one in 1955 certainly fit my experience, without reference to the numbers. In 1960, I camped on a gravel bar on the Stuart Fork just downstream of Deer Creek, which was seemingly equivalent to the Eagle Creek old gravel 2. It was covered with old trees, off the main trail about 100 yards, and was a fabulous spot to camp. My visit was five years after the 1955 flood, and I witnessed no significant damage from the 1955 event. Returning there in 1970, six years after the 1964 flood, I found that the bar had been totally washed away, and a small boulder field was in its place. Farther down the river, at Trinity Alps Resort, several more cabins had washed away, the car and footbridge were gone, and the stream had widened by about 100 feet at the place where the old restaurant had spanned the river. Had the restaurant miraculously survived the 1955 flood, the larger 1964 flood would have destroyed it. Coffee Creek was similarly affected. Many older gravel deposits washed away, with some alluvial fan deposits as much as 1,700 years old. The water carried away boulders as large as 6 by 4 by 3 feet. At Eagle Creek, perhaps the most significant conclusion that Helley and LaMarche reached was that older gravels 2 and 3, based on their superior position to the 1964 deposit, represented floods much larger than the one in 1964. Based on the width of the gravel deposits, older gravel 2 appears to represent a flood about 50 percent larger than 1964, and older gravel 3 represents a flood twice as large as the one in 1964. Stream-discharge data from just downstream show that the 1964 peak flow was about 21,000 cfs, the older gravel 2 peak flow was about 30,000 cfs, and the older gravel 3 peak flow was about 40,000 cfs. Flows of this magnitude are hard to imagine. They likely represent even more extreme rain-on-snow events, perhaps occurring a bit later in winter when more snow was present. And they must have been devastating

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to the watershed through which they ran. Yet these large, seemingly catastrophic events define the character of the valleys. Such events have the power to move large material and large amounts of smaller material. They are the engineers of the valleys. Coffee Creek is a good example of a valley that has been repeatedly sculpted by floods. Its upper portion lies north-south in a broad, flat, glaciated valley that has been pirated at Big Flat (a different Big Flat than the one on Highway 299) by the South Fork of the Salmon River (see chapter 11). Below the terminal moraine, the valley turns abruptly to the east and narrows, and the stream gradient becomes steep. The valley widens near its mouth, broad meadows occur across its 1,000-foot width, and at the confluence with the Trinity River, a half-mile-wide alluvial fan occurs, which pushes the Trinity River against its east bank. The alluvial fan creates a deltalike emergence for Coffee Creek at its mouth. Much of this alluvium was likely deposited during glacial times, likely before the pirating of the upper portion of Coffee Creek. As with the Trinity River in the vicinity of Eagle Creek, Coffee Creek has deposits suggesting it has experienced floods larger than the 1964 event. The 1964 flood dumped about 10 inches of rain at the mouth of Coffee Creek and likely much more at higher elevations in the watershed. Almost all the snow at higher elevation melted. John Stewart and Val LaMarche evaluated this flood in the lower Coffee Creek watershed. One of their first findings was that, in contrast to the views of local residents, no landslide had blocked the stream, as had occurred in the same storm in the lower Salmon River. There was simply a tremendous volume of water, which caused extensive erosion of gently sloping land to flat land in the lower valley. Cabins washed away, or toppled after being partially undercut by the stream, which had been nowhere near them before the flood. Beautiful meadows with scattered trees turned into fields of boulders. A net loss of material occurred above mile 2 ranging up to 800,000 cubic feet per mile of stream length. In the first two miles, net deposition was as much as 6 million cubic feet per mile. Poorly sorted gravel created natural levees along both sides of the stream. The channel of Coffee Creek moved more during this event than it had in the previous 110 years of record. New channels formed as old channels filled with sediment. In other places, new channels augmented the old channel. In some places, the new channel became the postflood channel, whereas in others, the old channel was reoccupied after the flood. Stewart and LaMarche identified logjams as a major cause of stream-channel disruption during the flood.

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These scientists attributed the lower severity of floods in Coffee Creek before 1964 to its snow-dominated hydrology. Unlike the upper Trinity River, with only about 20 percent of its basin area above 6,000 feet elevation, Coffee Creek has 40 percent of its basin area above 6,000 feet. Snow and snowmelt runoff would be expected to be more important in the hydrology of the Coffee Creek drainage than they are in the upper Trinity. Stewart and LaMarche noted that in 1960, the upper Trinity River peak stream flow occurred during a storm in February, whereas Coffee Creek’s peak stream flow in June during snowmelt exceeded its peak during the February storm. One can see differences even between snow-dominated watersheds in the local area. Swift Creek, the next large tributary stream to the Trinity south of Coffee Creek, has almost the same proportion of its drainage area (38 percent) above 6,000 feet, so it ought to act much like Coffee Creek. However, it suffered damage in its lower-valley portion not only in 1964 but in earlier floods. Before 1964, broad gravel flats flanked its channel, whereas the pre-1964 channel of Coffee Creek was flanked by mature conifers. One explanation for this difference may be that the upper-elevation portions of Swift Creek are all at its extreme western edge, so snowmelt from various small tributaries enters the main channel at about the same time, whereas Coffee Creek’s high-elevation areas border almost the entire length of the valley, so the timing of flow into the main channel is not so synchronous. Downstream peaks may therefore be less in Coffee Creek than in Swift Creek. The next big flood could occur any year. Flood-frequency prediction is evolving but suffers from a relatively short historical record in the Klamath Mountains. Stewart and LaMarche estimated that the 1964 flood was a 100-year event, based on a complicated analysis that related peak discharges to average precipitation, basin area, mean basin altitude, and other variables. This estimate does not mean that Coffee Creek will flood in 2064 as it did in 1964. It means that each year brings a 1 in 100 chance that the event will occur, and this probability will change as the record increases. When I worked in Redwood Creek, the area had a 100-year storm in 1973 and another one in 1975. This level of discharge downgraded the event to perhaps a 10- to 20-year storm because additional flow data recognized that this storm was not so unusual. In the Klamath Mountains, catastrophe drives the riverine landscape. Flood events such as those of 1955 and 1964 create new surfaces, reset the successional clock for streamside vegetation, and also damage human improvements. In such floods, high flows also affect fish habitat

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in both negative and positive ways. In areas in which we have buffered the effect of floods by building dams, downstream areas have generally suffered substantial losses in rearing habitat for juvenile salmonids, and nowhere better is that fact illustrated than at the Trinity River.

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insects and pathogens Thousands of species of insects and fungi live in Klamath forests, but few represent major disturbances with significant effects on the forests. The Klamath region has some fifteen to twenty major insects that either kill or substantially affect forest growth by defoliating or girdling trees, several foliage diseases, a handful of root rots, a similar abundance of heart rots and decays, six mistletoes, and three rusts. Generally speaking, two related reasons explain why neither insects nor diseases have had large-scale effects in the Klamaths. First, the region has a high diversity of forest species, and second, most insects and diseases influence a limited suite of species. Even with epidemic levels of one species group, forest composition is rarely so pure that any infestation or disease will affect all the tree species simultaneously. This situation makes the Klamath forests unique in the West. The bark beetles (Dendroctonus) are the most significant insect group in the Klamaths. The western pine beetle, mountain pine beetle, and pine engraver, each about the size of a grain of brown rice, attack only pines. Female beetles of the former two species and male beetles of the latter attack a susceptible tree and bore a hole through the bark. The tree responds by attempting to force the beetle out with the flow of resin, and if it issues enough resin, the beetle will become encased and the attack will be unsuccessful. A healthy tree holds the resin at high pressure (up to 200 pounds per square inch). In a tree that is stressed (perhaps during a drought or after a fire), an attack has a higher probability of success. If the beetle is successful, it emits a chemical known as a pheromone that wafts through the air and attracts other beetles to the tree. Mass attacks then occur. The beetles carry fungi on their bodies, and these fungi invade the water-conducting tissues of the tree, desiccating the crown and killing the tree. The eggs laid by the females then hatch and develop as they mine the inner bark of the tree, later emerging as adults to renew the process. The pattern of egg galleries is a good way to identify the cause of death: western pine beetles have a serpentine, crisscross pattern that resembles spaghetti, mountain pine beetles have a vertical gallery, and pine engravers have a tuning-fork pattern of

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three galleries, each representing a different female attracted to the site by the attacking male. The red turpentine beetle also attacks pines, but usually the tree survives the attack, because the beetle’s gallery, where the larvae swim around in resin as they develop, is no bigger than a compact disc. The Douglas-fir beetle attacks only Douglas-fir, and the fir engraver attacks only true firs. The Douglas-fir beetle has a vertical gallery, but the fir engraver has a horizontal gallery with vertical, radiating larval galleries that expand away from the egg gallery as the larvae grow. Bark beetles are always present at endemic levels and tend to attack trees of low vigor. At greatest risk are trees that are in dense stands or in stands stressed by drought or wildfire that did not immediately kill the trees. The beetles also colonize recently windthrown trees. Once a beetle population increases above endemic levels, the insects can successfully attack even healthy trees. Flatheaded borers (Melanophila) usually attack only dead and dying trees and are therefore called secondary attackers. However, the flatheaded fir borer is a primary attacker of Douglas-fir in the Klamath region. The Melanophila beetles are also known as “fire beetles” because they are attracted to recently burned areas. After substantial experimental work, E. G. Linsley, a University of California entomologist, established that the beetles have sensory pits on their bodies that allow them to sense heat or smoke from tens of miles away. Later, scientists determined that these pits are infrared radiation detectors, allowing the beetles to find sites that assure their ability to reproduce. Root rots and heart rots usually have localized effects at the stand level. Like the insects, most have affinities for one or more species, but not all species. Armillaria root rot infects all conifers, although it favors Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine. Laminated root rot focuses on Douglasfir, and annosus root rot focuses on ponderosa pine and white fir. One root rot of major importance is caused by Phytophthora lateralis, an introduced pathogen that has decimated Port Orford cedar. It is carried by water, so it can spread anywhere that water can take it. Port Orford cedar root disease has been spread primarily by road traffic, so trees in unroaded areas tend to be less affected. The heart rots, such as red ring rot and velvet top fungus, provide a critical wildlife function. They provide decayed wood that birds can easily excavate. Cavity-nesting birds, either primary excavators like the woodpeckers or secondary cavity nesters like red-breasted nuthatches and chestnut-backed chickadees, require decayed wood for successful nest holes.

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Mistletoes are usually species specific. A variety of dwarf mistletoes attack the conifers, but Douglas-fir dwarf mistletoe cannot infect ponderosa pine, and the ponderosa pine dwarf mistletoe cannot infect the true firs. Conifer dwarf mistletoes tend to be more important on sites where the conifers are stressed. Douglas-fir mistletoe is absent in the Olympic Mountains of Washington but is common in the Klamaths. Any small conifers of the same species are likely to be infected by dwarf mistletoes growing on larger trees. The dwarf mistletoes shoot out sticky seeds with amazing velocity, and when the seeds land on shorter trees of the same species, the mistletoe grows into the small branches. Although dwarf mistletoes have external growth, the tip-off to their presence is witches’-brooms, dense branchings that occur around the mistletoe infection. Small trees infected by dwarf mistletoe generally do not develop into canopy trees. In large trees with low brooms, fires can move more easily into their crowns. Yet dwarf mistletoes serve an important wildlife function by creating localized dense cover for animals that can utilize arboreal habitat. Two workers saw a great example of that function when they were cutting small trees to increase the vigor of adjacent large pines that were serving as eagle-nest sites. As they began to saw down a 10- to 12inch white fir that had a lot of dwarf mistletoe in the crown, the saw seemed to malfunction, making an odd, roaring sound. When they turned off the saw, the noise continued. The sound was coming from a bobcat hiding out in one of the lower mistletoe clumps! Incense cedar and the oaks have true mistletoes (Phoradendron) that provide excellent hiding and nesting cover, much as the dwarf mistletoes do. The true mistletoes are the ones that promote kissing at Christmas, so they serve another major function as well. True mistletoes are an excellent winter food for deer. The forests also have one rust of major importance: white pine blister rust. The rust was introduced to North America early in the twentieth century and has spread everywhere, infecting and killing members of the white pine group that are common in the region: sugar pine, western white pine, and whitebark pine. The rust requires an alternate host, gooseberry or currant, to complete its life cycle. On the pine, the disease appears as a large canker that girdles the stem. In the early 1980s, I worked on old burn sites in the central Olympic Mountains, which were high-elevation areas that were still largely meadows after fifty to sixty years. Groups of small white pines, in states ranging from recently infected to long dead, littered the slopes. They had all been

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killed by white pine blister rust and had significantly delayed forest succession on a site that was at least 30 miles from the nearest road. The long-term future of the white pines is not bright, although some resistant white pine genotypes appear to exist. The rust can change its genetic makeup much faster than a tree can. The newest forest disease threat is sudden oak death (caused by Phytophthora ramorum), a water mold that looks like a fungus that has entered California and southern Oregon in the past decade. The organism that causes this disease is related to the pathogens that have caused jarrah (a eucalyptus) dieback in Australia and the Irish potato famine. Its origin is yet unknown; it may simply be a hybrid of two existing Phytophthora species. Its presence became significant when it began killing tanoaks in the mid-1990s in central coastal California. Tanoak is the most susceptible species, but true oaks, including California black oak, coast live oak, and canyon live oak, are also susceptible. Sudden oak death has a wide range of hosts, including Pacific madrone, California buckeye, California laurel, hazelnut, bigleaf maple, redwood, and Douglasfir. Infections are usually not fatal on these other hosts. Many understory shrubs are also affected: rhododendron, California coffeeberry, manzanitas, California huckleberry, salmonberry, poison oak, and toyon. Somewhat surprisingly, the white oak group (Oregon white oak, blue oak, and deer oak) does not appear to be susceptible. Sudden oak death appears to afflict only aboveground parts of plants, unlike the related Phytophthora that infects Port Orford cedar roots. Lethal infections occur on branches and stems, killing the tree. Death can occur rapidly—hence the name sudden oak death. Sublethal infections occur on foliage and twigs, and are the common expression of the disease on most hosts other than the oaks and tanoak. As of 2006, its spread seems confined to areas within 20 miles of the coast below 3000 feet elevation. In northwestern California, this is primarily redwood forest. If sudden oak death were to remain there, its threat to the Klamath Mountains would be limited. Yet its sudden appearance and unknown origin suggest that it may have the capability to morph into a form more capable of moving inland. Certainly the host species are present throughout the Klamath Mountains. The hardwood trees and understory shrubs that host sudden oak death are responsible for substantial structural diversity in the lower elevation forests of the Klamath Mountains. If SOD, as it is known, were to become more virulent and widespread, it would have cascading ecosystem effects. One of the first would be a loss of acorns from tanoak, black oak, and canyon live oak.

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The first victims would be wildlife species such as squirrels and deer that rely on acorns for substantial portions of their diets, and birds that prey on insects that favor oak leaves or acorns. Right now, it is not possible to project future impacts of sudden oak death, except to conclude that widespread control in wildland environments is not likely to be possible. Hopefully, resistant genotypes of the host species will emerge, and SOD will become an inevitable but less epidemic pathogen in California. The distribution of sudden oak death appears to be closely related to fire occurrence over the past fifty years. The relevant burned areas have little to no SOD, but why the occurrence of a fire as long as several decades ago is linked to absence of SOD is a largely unanswered question. Perhaps a long-term chemical effect is at work, or an indirect effect on the presence of SOD-related tree or shrub species, or no cause-andeffect relationship at all, if SOD is simply confined to wetter areas that burn less frequently.

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wind Wind can act in many ways on trees in the forest. If fairly strong winds occur often, they shape the morphology of the stem and the crown. Persistent strong winds create a flagging effect on crowns, abrading and desiccating leaves on the upwind side and eventually thinning or killing the crown on the upwind side but leaving the downwind side intact. This flagging effect is most noticeable along the coast but occurs wherever winds are strong. Trees that are blown around consistently develop buttressed bases, strong roots that have the shape of an I beam, and occasionally flutes, or small ridges of sapwood that run vertically along the stem. Very old trees that have been subjected to winds for centuries often have their tops blown off; the remaining branches turn up and grow to the sky, creating a candelabra effect at the top of the tree. But the major effect of wind is its ability to snap tree stems (wind snap) or uproot trees (windthrow). A tree is much like a sailing vessel in this regard. The crown acts as the sail, the stem as the mast, and the roots as the keel or a anchor. Winds apply the most stress to dominant trees, whose crowns are largest and most exposed. This force transfers to the stem. If the stem has decay, or the tree has two stems because of the past death of the main leader, the stem becomes weak and may snap. If the force is transferred down to the roots, shallow-rooted trees are most likely to be uprooted. Forest stands typically have a range of trees that are vulnerable because

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of their position in the stand, species characteristics, and susceptibility to diseases, so wind may act on individual trees rather than affect the whole stand. As an ecological agent, wind tends to thin stands from above, first taking the trees with the largest crowns. This characteristic is perhaps its largest contrast with fire, which thins the stands from below by first killing the smallest trees with the lowest crowns and thinnest bark. Wind tends to leave the smaller and usually more shadetolerant trees, effectively releasing them to grow into the overstory. Near the coast, wind is a much more significant disturbance than it is farther inland. Estimates suggest that about half the mortality in Humboldt County forests is due to wind, with the other half occurring because of fire, insects, and disease. Fire is much more important away from the coastal areas. A clear example of wind disturbance, and its synergistic effects with other disturbances, is a storm that occurred in early 1996. A strong wind entered the area between South Fork Mountain and the Trinity Alps after a snowstorm had filled the tree crowns with snow and cooling weather had turned the snow to ice. Above 3,500 feet where the snow line began, from Highway 299 on the south across to Highway 96 on the north, the crowns of many trees snapped off, creating a hazardous fuels matrix the next summer that covered some 30,000 acres. Many tops of white fir trees lay on the ground, with all the leaves and small branches intact. North of Hawkins Bar were some of the worst conditions. I saw some of this area when I was invited to visit as part of a touring group associated with implementing the Northwest Forest Plan. Weather reports predicted that this windstorm would cause damage as far north as Seattle, but as it moved north, it lost its steam somewhere around Portland and clocked in at only 40 miles per hour in Seattle. The Forest Service was later able to treat the fuels along a few ridges with thinning and slash disposal, but much of the damaged area was in wilderness. In 1999, two forest fires, the Fawn fire and the Megram fire, began in the wilderness in August, merged in September, and moved south and west out of the wilderness. The fire in the windaffected area was more severe than it would have been without those additional surface fuels. About half of the blowdown area burned with high severity, compared to less than one-third outside of the blowdown. The effects of wind made the fire event more severe, illustrating the classic synergistic effect between two disturbances. This storm blew down substantial timber elsewhere, too. I was doing summer work at the time in the Applegate River to the north and east

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of the main wind-snap area, and the higher-elevation areas there also suffered wind damage. In 1998, rather than do my usual bushwhack from the Stuart Fork to a favorite overlook, I decided on an easy hike up the Rush Creek Lakes trail. The trail itself had turned into a bushwhack, covered with windthrown trees from the 1996 storm that were difficult to hike around or through. The trees were later cleared, and a hiker along the trail now might think that all the logs have been there for a long time or have accumulated gradually. Instead, the Douglas-fir and white firs came down almost at once, and young white fir are beginning to grow into the canopy gaps left by the fall of the more dominant and larger trees. The smaller branches and needles have now fallen to the ground, and the fire hazard is less severe than it was in the initial years after the event.

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drought Annual precipitation varies around some mean level and is rarely exactly average. The “normal” range spans 5 or so inches, and only significant departures below this range are defined as drought conditions. Drought can directly affect the mortality of trees, but its effects are more commonly synergistic: more forest fires or increased levels of insects or diseases as a result of stress on one or more species of trees. Southern California endured a tremendous drought in 2001 and 2002. Whole forests of ponderosa pine died from drought when the area around Lake Arrowhead suffered a year without precipitation. Evergreen shrubs went deciduous. Tree-killing insects did not even have a chance to infest the trees before they died; now, the trees are simply food for wood-boring insects, and for forest fires. Fortunately, the Klamath Mountains have not had such a radical drought on record. For Weaverville, with average annual precipitation of 36 inches, the driest year on record was 22.5 inches. Such dry periods can have significant direct effects on vegetation but generally do not cause regionwide mortality in the Klamaths such as that in Southern California. Direct effects of drought on vegetation begin with a slowing of growth. One of the guiding principles of dendrochronology (the study of tree-ring patterns) is that trees accrue wider rings in wet years and narrower rings in dry years, in areas where moisture is a strong limiting factor for growth. By matching the patterns of wide and narrow rings, which are analogous to barcodes on merchandise, one can reconstruct an index to past climate and identify disturbances like forest

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fires far back in time. In the Klamaths, any site is likely to have a range of species, and some are going to be more drought tolerant than others. The more sensitive species will show the strongest growth declines, and they are also more likely to die directly from drought or from drought-related insect attack. Smaller trees of the more sensitive species are likely to die first, because their root systems are not as well developed as those of larger trees of the same species. Bark-beetle attacks usually increase during drought because of lowered vigor of the target species. Drought can create substantial mortality over wide areas, but it does not appear to have done so in the Klamath Mountains. Perhaps it will be an ecological surprise in the future, particularly with global warming occurring. Global warming could affect storm tracks so that not only average temperature and precipitation change but their variability increases.

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other disturbances Local disturbances such as snow avalanches and soil-mass movement are part of the diversity of Klamath disturbances. Snow avalanches, of course, are restricted to the high country where snow accumulates, and they typically occur in steep terrain, with a broad run-out zone at the bottom. In spring, these snowy paths look like streaks of vanilla ice cream dripping down the sides of the taller mountains. Trees often have a hard time colonizing these chutes because the avalanches occur regularly enough to snap the stems of the conifers or uproot them. Shrubs remain short enough to avoid damage, and most also have the ability to sprout. The striated pattern of forest and shrub, following the pattern of minor ridges and valleys on steep, south-facing slopes, is a common characteristic of the snow forest. Such avalanche chutes may help partition forest fires, because they are generally less flammable than the neighboring forest. When I worked for the National Park Service in the 1970s, I was sent to Mineral King, a Forest Service area surrounded by Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. The Forest Service planned to issue a permit for a ski area in this narrow valley. Two things stood out to me that day: a rare sighting of a wolverine in the valley, and much of the “developable” parts of the narrow valley were the run-out zones for avalanches. Development, had it occurred, would have turned to disaster in a year of high snowfall, with permanent targets awaiting the

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avalanche in the run-out zones. Fortunately, the ski-area plan was derailed, and Congress transferred the Mineral King area to the Park Service. Nature is full of surprises. It always carries remote possibilities of disturbances we can’t anticipate. Having worked along the coastal parts of Oregon and Washington since the 1970s, I was impressed by evidence of soil charcoal, indicating that widespread fires could occur in these moist environments. Then, in the mid-1990s, a light bulb went on when geologists and ecologists confirmed the presence of a magnitude 9 large subduction earthquake along the coast of Oregon and Washington in January of 1700 a.d. The scientists used records of a large tsunami in eastern Japan, together with cross-dated tree-ring records showing that many western red cedar trees on coastal terraces dropped into tidal marshes and were killed, sometime after the growing season of 1699 and before the spring of 1700. We had known for a long time of a huge forest fire or set of fires in the eastern Olympic Peninsula in 1700 or 1701. The working hypothesis is that the quake shook down whole forests, which then dried out and became extraordinarily flammable in the next summer or two. The same fire event appears to have happened in locations on the Oregon coast. Much of today’s old growth in these areas was generated after these events, which are, in retrospect, large ecological surprises. The severe 1964 Alaska earthquake caused a tsunami that hit the northern coast of California and destroyed much of the downtown area of Crescent City. We can be almost certain that previous large coastal earthquakes had a similar effect. In Yurok Myths, Alfred Kroeber presents an account of an unusual “flood” by an informant (brackets are mine): “Then the ocean began to turn rough (from the anger of the old men). A breaker came over the settlement of Siwitsu [at Redwood Creek lagoon], washed the whole of it away, and drowned everyone. Then all the people of Orekw ran off to the top of the hill, wearing their woodpecker-crest headbands: they were afraid” (Kroeber 1976, 186). Kroeber placed a footnote on this story, noting that he had difficulty believing that the storm waves were tall enough to remove the village and saying that the story was likely exaggerated. But the edge of the bar at the mouth of Redwood Creek is very low, so even a small tsunami could have devastated a village there. This tsunami may well have been the one in 1700 that also hit Japan as an “orphan tsunami,” one that was not accompanied by earthquake; the earthquake occurred on the northwest coast of North America.

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Earthquakes probably have the highest potential to cause damage along the western edge of the Klamaths. South from the Klamaths, the world-famous San Andreas Fault comes ashore at Point Reyes and runs south through San Francisco clear to Los Angeles. Other less-known faults parallel the San Andreas, creating the general northwest-tosoutheast river systems of the north coast, such as the Russian River (which flows southeast and eventually turns west to the Pacific), Eel River, and Redwood Creek. Magnitude 7 quakes have occurred along the north coast in the past twenty-five years, creating structural and road damage. If a quake as large as 8.5 were to occur, it would likely create tsunami damage around Humboldt Bay, cause substantial structural and road damage, topple many trees, and create substantial landslides, particularly in winter when soils are wet. Earthquakes can occur further inland, and many older faults are present: there is a pronounced fault just west of the Oregon Mountain summit along Highway 299. But the Klamaths have few active faults. A line around the Klamaths encircles a dead zone without much recent earthquake activity. Based on present knowledge, we can place large earthquakes in the “big surprise” category for the Klamath Mountains. Natural disturbances have played a critical role in the creation and preservation of biodiversity in the Klamath Mountains. Although we have tried to exclude fire from the managed forest (whether managed for wilderness or timber), we have simply changed the type of fire that occurs, producing a higher proportion of high-severity fires. Fortunately, not every wildfire has caused total stand replacement, and even in burned areas, substantial residual vegetation exists. The other common disturbances are less under human control, although indirectly we have affected them by altering the compositions and structures of forests. The major lesson we have learned from natural disturbances is that the spatial and temporal scales of their occurrence and severity have worked to maintain native biodiversity. Though these patterns are not a strict template for sustainability, the more closely we can emulate them, the better will be our chances of sustaining the native biota of the Klamaths.

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chapter 8

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First Peoples of the Rivers

The Klamath Mountains have long supported a limited population of self-reliant individuals. Today, the region’s population concentrates right along the coast and along the Interstate 5 corridor. If one subtracts the population within several miles of those two linear features from the regional total, only about 62,000 people currently inhabit the Klamath Mountains. The population density is about 4 per square mile, with about a third of those people living in the five largest rural towns: this is not a heavily populated region. The pre-European Indian population has been estimated at less than this current number: some 25,000 people, or 1.5 people per square mile. Some valleys had more than 5 people per square mile concentrated in small villages along the major streams, and population density declined as one went inland to drier landscapes. The Indians of the Klamath region (see figure 16), based on their language origins, were the most diverse in North America. Considerable debate still exists about the number of groups shown in figure 16 and about the precise boundaries of their lands. Even in Shirley Silver’s chapter in the recent Handbook of North American Indians, maps of the individual tribes in different chapters fit together like a poorly designed jigsaw puzzle. For example, the Chimariko chapter shows the tribe’s range extending upriver only as far as Big Bar, whereas the Wintu chapter shows the Chimariko boundary starting at Junction City, another 10 miles upriver. 106

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Figure 16. Native American groups of the Klamath Mountains. Much uncertainty remains about group boundaries and even about the number of groups. KON: Konomehu; NRS: New River Shasta; TSN: Tsnungwes. (Sources: University of California; Washington State University; Silver 2004; J. Rohde personal communication. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

Peoples of differing language origins migrated to the area over thousands of years, bringing with them languages shared with tribes that are now far distant. The only unique language of all the California Indians is Yukian, spoken by the Yukis of the northern Mendocino area. Robert Heizer, successor to Alfred Kroeber as the dean of California Indian anthropology, claimed that the Yuki are the only original California Indians. The other tribes came from language stocks represented in other parts of North America, indicating that they immigrated to California.

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The coastal Yuroks and neighboring Wiyots had an Algonkian language family. The adjacent Whilkuts, Chilulas, Tsnungwes, and Hupas had an Athabascan language family, whereas the more interior Karuk and Chimariko people had a Hokan language stock. The eastern Klamath Wintu came from a Penutian language stock. Scholars believe that these people arrived variously between 0 a.d. and 1300 a.d., so they have lived in the region for a long time. That the groups’ languages remained so distinct suggests that they lived in isolation during most of their time in California. The Indians of the Klamath Mountains practiced sustainable management of their natural resources. Even with sustainable practices, nature occasionally withheld an acorn crop or salmon run, and life that year became difficult. To the extent that their practices were unsustainable, they paid with hunger and starvation. The tribes I list above have lived here a long time, and they have lived within the limits of the land, observing practices that Robert Heizer called a “land etiquette.” Their diversity in language stands in sharp contrast to their similarity in culture, derived from their reliance on the same resources, whatever the land could offer and sustain. Although they traveled to the high country, they were really people of the rivers. Even the names of tribes reflect this riparian nature: Yurok means “downriver,” Karuk means “upriver,” and the Hupas took their name from the valley they lived in. None of the tribes had a centralized tribal government; instead they operated as tribelets or communities, living in smaller groups that controlled certain sections of watersheds. Contrary to modern practice, they seldom drew boundaries along streams. Instead, they usually drew lines along ridges and watershed boundaries. This practice reflected the importance of streams to the cultures of the Klamath Mountains. Although anthropologists and others have grouped Indian communities into tribes by language stock for classification purposes (as well as for Western legal purposes), maps such as the one in figure 16 obscure the defining political structure of the Indians: rarely was a mapped tribal group a real political entity. Instead, the village or community group was the instrument of political power. The community leader, or headman, was not a “chief” in the sense of having authority but was rather a wealthy individual who had considerable persuasive power. Each community managed its own ecosystem, which because of the rugged terrain had quite definable boundaries. One’s world might be no more than 10 or 20 miles in any direction, but rarely would all of it be visible from a single point. The world was defined around the center of

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Figure 17. The Yurok idea of the world. (Source: T. Kroeber 1959. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

the universe, which was where one lived. For example, the Yuroks saw the world (see figure 17) as a large island on which the land floated. The sky was formed by a mythic person who had knotted a great net and thrown it into the air. Anyone who spends a clear night in this country can understand the appeal of this idea. Absent urban light pollution, views of the stars seem endless, such that each one might represent a knot in the mesh of the great net. With so many “knots,” the mesh was clearly very, very fine, containing the known world. Bird migrations were allowed through a “sky hole.” The “upriver ocean” was created by a tipping of the earth, such that the ocean flowed up the Klamath River carrying fish and other sea life far inland. The Yuroks were apparently aware of the headwater Klamath Lakes, although few had ever traveled that far. After much prayer and dancing, according to the myth, the water reversed, and the ocean flowed back across the bar at the mouth of the river. Many other myths help explain the presence and function of the land and its flora and fauna. The dramatic foci of these myths are often plants or animals that began as Ikxareyav (Karuks) or woge (Yuroks), the people who lived on the land several generations before the modern people arrived.

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The interior Wintus also believed that an earlier people had lived on the land before their arrival. These early people left or transformed when modern Indians arrived, but their successors saw them as creators of the modern world, and the tales of creation serve to explain the modern world and provide models for appropriate behavior. Almost all natural phenomena have their origin in myth, as two of these myths illustrate. The first is a Karuk myth explaining the diversity in acorns. Acorns were once Ikxareyav maidens, and they were told to weave hats for themselves. Black Oak Acorn did not finish her hat, whereas Tanoak Acorn finished her hat but did not clean it. White Oak Acorn finished her hat and cleaned it, and Canyon Live Oak Acorn did the same. The maidens spilled from the heavens into the modern world in this way, shutting their eyes and turning their faces into their hats. Tanoak Acorn wished bad luck to White Oak Acorn and Canyon Live Oak Acorn because she was jealous of their nice hats, and as a result, Indians were said to prefer eating tanoak acorns over either of the other acorns. All the acorn maidens were painted when they first spilled out, and the stripes painted on Black Oak Acorn are still present today. Tanoak Acorn was not painted much, because she was angry that her hat was not cleaned. Today, all the acorns still have their faces inside their hats (the acorn cups). A Yurok myth explains why American crows are black. Wohpekumeu (a woge) went to the sky and saw people eating acorns. Because there were no acorns on the land, he stole one in his mouth, and he was chased by people and sealed in a hollow tree. Birds pecked him free, and in return, he offered to paint them pretty colors. Crow wanted his body to be painted the red color of the woodpecker’s crest, but Wohpekumeu told him that if he adopted the red color, he would have to stay deep in the woods. Crow said he wanted to be near town, which irritated Wohpekumeu. He told all the birds to close their eyes while he painted them and then to fly off and look at themselves. He painted Crow all black, which Crow saw as he flew into town. Crow was angry, because he had worked the hardest to free Wohpekumeu. He returned to the place where he had been painted and saw a few small birds still around. He shoved them into the ashes, which is why they are dull and not so pretty as other birds. In general, the northwest California tribes were wealth oriented and had well-defined property rights. Often, one man had many more rights than he could possibly use, and he gained prestige by sharing those rights with neighbors. At the coast, a man might have the rights to a

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particular sea stack (a protruding rock in the coastal waters) for the harvest of mussels. Fishing rights in various pools were owned by individuals, and oak groves for acorn harvest were also allocated to individuals. These resources were threatened by natural catastrophes, but the tribes of the Klamath region warded off disruptive events as much as possible with the World Renewal ceremony, which sought to pacify supernatural spirits for ecological sustainability. This ritual took place once a year in many of the larger towns, at which time the richest men (the closest thing to chiefs) would throw a feast for the surrounding people up to 50 miles distant. The ritual, if conducted with great solemnity and attention to detail, would prevent the powers of nature from interfering with the salmon runs or acorn crop and would ward off earthquakes, floods, and the like. If a catastrophe occurred later in the year, the Indians attributed it to a flaw in the ceremony. Indian communities’ use of resources went hand in hand with their great respect for what they took. Because they believed that spirits resided in the fish, the deer, and the oaks, they saw close interconnections between natural objects and humans. They felt a sense of responsibility for any animal they killed and sought to use it as much as possible, not only because they needed the resources it provided but also because the animal had died for them. This philosophy tempered the urge to overharvest or overhunt and produced an ethic that allowed the people to live with the land as well as on it. Yet the ocean provided a significant source of protein for all the coastal tribes of the West: anadromous fish that spent but a small part of their life cycle in freshwater rivers. Without that addition to their diets, the people of the rivers would have had much smaller populations, no matter how well they stewarded the land. The Yuroks, although they had access to ocean salmon, fished for salmon in the rivers, much as the inland tribes did. River fishing was more efficient than ocean fishing, because they could place drift nets in the lower reaches and construct weirs farther upstream in shallower portions. They cleverly placed “crab bells,” dried crab carapaces, on the poles supporting the drift net. The rattling of a crab bell signaled that a school of fish had entered the drift net, and the time had come to empty the catch. The weirs were intricately constructed dams, which the Yuroks made by placing the poles across the stream and interweaving smaller branches. This design allowed water to pass downstream but forced the migrating fish to funnel into the narrow opening, where fishermen caught them using woven nets. Similar weirs worked in reverse to capture outmigrating steelhead in the spring.

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The coast tribes had a variety of tideland resources available to them: clams, mussels, crabs, surf fish, and kelp, the last of which was traded upstream. They hunted seals with harpoons and harpooned sea lions when they were basking on rocks. They also scavenged the occasional dead whale. Lewis and Clark, during their stay at the mouth of the Columbia River at Fort Clatsop in the winter of 1805–06, heard about a dead whale along the coast of Oregon, but by the time they reached the site, it was only a skeleton, having been butchered by the locals. Northwest California coastal tribes also relied to a lesser extent on land mammals such as rabbits and deer, which they acquired using snares and stealth hunting with bow and arrow, and hunters occasionally scored an unfortunate black bear. Grizzly bears were understandably avoided. If Wiyot hunters came upon a black bear in a hollow log (most likely redwood), they would quickly drive stakes into the open end of the log, trapping the bear inside, and then suffocate the animal by directing smoke into the opening. Farther inland, salmon and steelhead were the primary marinederived sustenance, but land-based game increased in importance. Hunters used snares for quail, rabbits, and deer, and hunting with bow and arrow was important, too. In the eastern Klamaths, the use of pits covered with branches was so common that the early gold miners, who lost numerous horses in the pits, named this area the Pit River. The Indians sometimes used fire to hunt deer in the inland regions. Hunters would dig a hole adjacent to a deer trail, build a fire in it, and then at night enter the warm hole with bow and arrow and wait for a deer to pass. Occasionally, they used fires to herd deer, but Edward Curtis noted that the Indians were occasionally trapped and killed by these fires if the wind shifted or if they moved into dangerous areas ahead of the fire. Across the region, acorns were a staple of the diet, although the species of oaks varied. Tanoak (not a true oak) also helped feed communities on the coast, as did California buckeye where it was common. Communities stored the acorns until they needed them and then crushed and leached the nuts with hot water to reduce the tannin content, which is bitter tasting and interferes with protein digestion. They could then consume soups and breads prepared from this mash. The land was critically important to survival. Frank Lake, a student of traditional ecological knowledge, likens the land to the people’s hardware store, grocery store, and pharmacy rolled into one. Baskets, fishing

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tools, food, and medicines all came from the land (see table 3), and the stewardship to maintain its productivity came from the “managers” who owned that particular property right. Tobacco was the one crop that Indian tribes cultivated in northwestern California. As John Harrington, an early ethnographer, noted, the Karuk had many animal pets (dogs, bear cubs, raccoons, skunks, and woodpeckers [which they penned in hollowed trees]) but only one plant pet: tobacco. The native tobacco was widely grown across western North America. The first mention by an outsider was in 1579 by Sir Francis Drake, who visited Indians near Point Reyes (although the exact location is still debated) and noted baskets and bags of tobacco. Juan Francisco de la Bodega visited the Yuroks at Trinidad Bay in 1775, noted gardens of tobacco, and described the pipes used to smoke it. The species of tobacco that the Yuroks grew, Nicotiana quadrivalvis, is an annual plant, and each autumn, at harvest, the natives separated the seeds from stems and leaves. They stored the seeds for cultivation the next spring and set the leaves in sweathouses to dry, later storing the leaves in tobacco baskets on shelves in the houses where women and children slept. The stems, of much less quality for smoking, were crushed and often mixed with leaf to create a low-quality tobacco that the Indians offered to visitors of little wealth or used as offerings to the gods (with no insult implied). To throw good tobacco to the gods would unnecessarily diminish one’s wealth. In the early spring, the men scattered along the hillsides to choose garden places, and the tribes burned logs at these isolated, small garden sites to fertilize them with “ash elements” such as calcium, potassium, and sodium. This burning also helped reduce competing vegetation. Shortly thereafter, they sowed the seeds and harrowed them with the broken top of a nearby shrub. They performed occasional weeding but no irrigation until the plants of the year were mature and ready for harvest. The Indians invested considerable care in storing tobacco and created specific baskets for this use. Two-year-old hazel sticks provided the basket foundation, and hillsides were burned on a rotational basis to provide a continual supply of two-year-old hazel sprouts. Jeffrey pine roots, obtained from pine trees growing on serpentine soils, served as the floor of the basket. The sides of the basket had bear-grass for white overlays, five-finger fern stems for black overlays, and chain fern fronds for red overlays, which the basket makers dyed by wetting them with spittle reddened by chewing white alder bark.

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table 3. selected plants used by the karuk people Trees California laurel Pacific yew Ponderosa pine Redwood Sugar pine Tanoak White fir White oak Shrubs California hazel California wild grape Cascara Gooseberry Mock orange Ninebark Poison oak Rabbitbrush Salal Service-berry Thimbleberry Western Labrador tea

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Herbs Bear-grass Common horsetail Five-finger fern Indian tobacco Leopard lily Lupine Pacific trillium Soap plant Spring beauty White-veined wintergreen Wild-ginger Wild onion

Uses Leaf oil for insecticide, twigs for basket foundations, nuts for food Bows, oars, bark tea for stomach aches and kidney problems Roots for basketry, nuts for food and for beads Canoes, house planks, roots for basketry House planks, resin for chewing gum, nuts for food Ground acorns for flour (most important flour source) Needles brewed for tea Ground acorns for flour (not as tasty as tanoak) Basket foundation, fish traps, nuts for flour Raw berries for food Bark as laxative tea Raw berries for food Stems for arrows, tobacco pipes Shafts for obsidian arrows Contraceptive, treatment of rattlesnake bites Tea for colds and fever, mashed leaves for toothache Berries for dye, syrup, and cakes Projectile points, berries for food Raw berries for food Medicine for high blood pressure Leaves for basketry Poultice for sore eyes, stems for sharpening of mussel-shell scrapers Stems for weaving black patterns on baskets and clothing Cultivation for smoking Baked bulbs for food Medicine for stomach problems Eye medicine, remedy to stop excessive bleeding Bulbs to stupefy fish, treatment of poison oak rash Consumption of leaves to prevent scurvy Root tea for stomach aches Tea to treat colds, stomach disorders, and earaches Food flavoring, poultice for burns, boils, and insect stings

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Pipes were typically linear, 4 to 6 inches long, more in the shape of a clarinet than in the form of an English pipe in which the bowl is perpendicular to the stem. The Yuroks often used Pacific yew to make the pipes, whereas the Karuk used mock-orange wood. The pipe makers lined the bowls of good pipes with soapstone chipped off large river rocks. The people typically shared the pipes but used them more as a habitual act of friendship than in peace-pipe rituals such as those observed elsewhere. Given the events to come, no amount of peace pipes could have averted the destruction of Indian culture that began in the mid-nineteenth century. Because the Indian cultures were isolated from each other, most strife was internal and thus was often mediated by the village headmen, who had little formal power but harnessed the strength of the community to enforce decisions. Crimes were generally resolved by restitution, but if a poor member of the community could not pay, he or she became a servant, so slavery in a modified form was an institution of most communities. Rarely did wars break out, but they were not unknown. Among the most memorable wars was that between the Yuroks and Hupas, not only because of the size of the dispute but because both its cause and settlement are unclear. The Yurok version is that some Hupas came downriver to demand that a Yurok woman release her starvation curse on them. When she insulted them, they pierced her with an arrow and she died. The Yuroks retaliated by heading upriver, killing Hupas and burning all the houses in a village; the Hupas followed up this attack with a downstream raid some months later. Another Yurok version describes attacks on Yuroks who had married Hupas during visits to Hupa territory, instigating the Yurok attack as a retaliation. A Hupa version is that the Yuroks came upriver unprovoked, attacked the Hupa village, spurring a later retaliation by the Hupas, joined by some Whilkuts and Chimarikos. All versions agree that large parties from each tribe did major damage to a village of the other tribe. A notorious liar, who is Yurok in one version and Hupa in the other, tried to warn his neighbors, but they would not listen. The war was fought between villages and communities, not between tribes. In both accounts, attackers who passed uninvolved communities of Yuroks and Hupas produced no reaction, suggesting that if two villages had a quarrel, they were left to sort it out by themselves. Peace was usually made by payment of damages by both sides, but later informants on this war were unable to describe how the villages reached a settlement. Common practice was for each side to pay the other for the

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entire loss suffered, rather than having the winner pay the difference between the losses. As Alfred Kroeber noted, this solution often took a large toll on the winner, especially in the case of a big victory. Because this battle, which probably took place between 1830 and 1840, was among the largest ones in both Yurok and Hupa memory, its settlement was likely quite large. According to Edward Curtis, another war started when a young Tolowa woman met a handsome young Karuk man at a Yurok village dance. She left with him upriver, and the Tolowa sent a courier asking for payment. At first rebuffed, the courier was then paid, but he was ambushed and killed on his way back to the coast. The Tolowa attacked the Karuk village of the young man, but few Indians were there, most being in the hills for a ceremony. The Karuk later found that only one of the attackers returned to the coast alive, all others being killed by grizzlies, rattlesnakes, lizards (even Curtis added a “!” here), falling trees, and various other disasters. In the end, each side paid the other for those killed, and peace was restored. Twenty years after Lewis and Clark spent the winter at the mouth of the Columbia River, beginning the end of native civilizations of the West, Jedediah Strong Smith came to California in 1826. Representing U.S. fur interests, he moved north from Los Angeles, trapping beaver along the way. His fur-trapping party spent two years making its way north through the Central Valley and in 1828, the group traveled west into Hayfork Valley, where they pursued their trade down the South Fork of the Trinity River toward the coast. Their encounters with local Indians were hostile, and they shot and killed several Indians to intimidate them and gain passage. Although Smith did some friendly trading with the coastal Yuroks, his violent encounters with the interior tribes were a precursor to the loss of most of his party to Oregon’s Umpqua Indians later that year. They also presaged the destruction of the tribes of the Klamath Mountains two decades later, when gold replaced furs as the resource to exploit. The discovery of gold in California is the stuff of legend. In 1848, John Marshall, who worked with John Sutter on the lower American River in a scheme to develop an agricultural and timber center based on indentured Indian labor, accidentally stumbled on a yellow metal in the stream. Ruling out iron sulfide, he concluded he had found gold. As word spread of the discovery of gold, Sutter’s Mill was abandoned, along with his idea of an agricultural utopia, and Indians, who had once outnumbered whites ten to one, were suddenly outnumbered themselves

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two to one. On the upper Trinity River later that same year, near today’s Douglas City, Major Pierson B. Reading’s party took out $80,000 worth of gold on its first trip. This windfall initiated a stampede to the Klamaths by miners from Oregon and other parts of California and began a fifteen-year annihilation of the Klamath Mountain Indians. Historian Hubert Howe Bancroft (1890) said of the gold rush’s influence on Indian history that it was “one of the last hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all” (474). The hunt was basest and most brutal in northwestern California. Albert Hurtado explains that the isolation of the Klamath region tribes from earlier Hispanic or Anglo influence likely made them vulnerable. In the Hispanic contacts, restricted to Sonoma County and south, Indians were integrated into the developing society. In contrast, the Anglo notion was to expel Indians from areas where whites had interests. The Sierra Nevada Indians, mostly Yokut and Miwok, had a much longer history of contact with Anglos than did the Klamath tribes, so they adapted more readily to the new invasion, although the gold rush was a disaster for their society. In 1852, so-called domesticated Indians were more than 10 percent of the population in the Sierra Nevada but only slightly above 1 percent in northwestern California. The Klamath Mountain tribes, although scattered and beaten, resisted elimination and segregation until the end of that other war, the Civil War. Gold money from California, deposited in eastern banks, was a significant aid in the victory of North over South in the Civil War. The end of that war coincided with the end of Indian dominance in the “northern district” of California. The miners coming into the region had no respect for the Indians or their place. The miners were visitors who wanted to get rich and return to some other place. The Indians had a strict code of honor concerning property rights, and when the whites ignored this code, conflict was inevitable. With limited places to live, and miners and Indians both needing river frontage, although for different purposes, peaceful negotiations were few. Most California Indians became known by the derisive label of “Diggers,” because they used tubers and bulbs dug from the ground. In Trinity County, Indians were called “Wintoons.” The U.S. Senate, responding to pressure from the California state government, did not ratify temporary federal treaties establishing reservations, because the state was loath to cede any lands to the natives. The constituents of state lawmakers had a different plan: a war of extermination, carried on by white Digger hunters, many of whom became

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“California volunteers.” After all, many whites considered California Indians to be much less noble than the “savages” living elsewhere on the continent. According to Heizer, “They were of the Digger tribes, known as friendly Indians, the most degraded and defenseless of the race, entirely destitute of the bold and murderous spirit which characterizes other tribes of red men” (254). Almost immediately, Indians began to experience difficulty getting enough to eat, not because they had violated their World Renewal ceremony but because they were in direct competition with white miners. Laws were passed prohibiting their burning of forest openings. Cattle were consuming the fruits of Indian bulb-foraging grounds. Miners were muddying the streams to which salmon were returning. Indians began to steal cattle to survive, and for loss of an Indian life, they retaliated by taking a white life. On the Klamath River, the Karuk in 1851 showed the federal Indian agent a bone with twenty-six notches marking white deaths and twenty-seven marking Indian deaths. But the “law” of the time was a set of one-sided resolutions by miners. A jury trial was “suggested” for any white who killed an Indian without cause. No punishment was due if the killing was for cause, which included almost any cause. For an Indian who killed a white, the punishment was death without trial, burning of the village in which the killer lived, or burning of the closest village if the perpetrator could not be identified. Indian killing was also allowed for the theft of horses or as a preemptive strike to prevent robbery. The miners ignored even these feeble, one-sided resolutions, and Indian hunting became unofficial policy in the region. Men, women, and children were all targets. Adult males and older women were killed, and younger women and children were sold as concubines or slaves. No incident is more shocking than the Bridge Gulch massacre. In the summer of 1852, a Weaverville butcher headed east of town to check on his cattle grazing there. When Colonel John Anderson’s mule returned alone to town, a search party went out and found his body. The cattle had been stolen or scattered, and a posse was organized to find the Indians responsible. The search took the posse around Oregon Mountain, then over Hayfork Divide and up the stream that is today called Hayfork Creek. Two prospectors in the area happened upon Natural Bridge, a limestone “bridge” created by dissolution of the rock by water flowing under it. They saw a large Indian band, most likely Wintus, in the broad hidden valley above the bridge and reported their sighting to the posse. Without any evidence that these Indians were in

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fact the perpetrators of the crime, the posse ambushed the group early the next morning as it readied for the day. The whites had surrounded the small valley and began firing from all directions. Accounts of the killing recall attacks on 150 men, women, and children. Several wounded Indians escaped, 2 children were captured, and the rest were killed. Other Indians of the region suffered similar fates. The southwestern Klamath region had much less gold than the eastern Klamath region did, and major conflict between whites and Indians was delayed until the mid-1850s. Then, the story became much the same. With white settlers occupying seasonal resource lands, cattle and sheep grazing the traditional herb grounds, overharvesting of deer, and no place to overwinter, Indians had difficulty finding food and shelter. Whites could kill Indians who simply seemed to pose a threat to livestock. Placing themselves as victims, whites perceived the genocide as self-defense, creating, as historian Richard White has asserted, an inverted view of conquest: the victors pose themselves as victims. This inverted view was widely held across America, showcased in traveling exhibitions such as that of “Buffalo” Bill Cody, and is still widely held today. The federal government dispatched the U.S. Army to the area, where the soldiers found themselves in the unusual role of protecting the Indians rather than fighting them. The standard operating procedure began with a hungry Indian’s stealing a steer or mule to butcher. The owner of the livestock would then kill the next Indian he saw, the Indians would kill the next white, and then whites would kill a number of Indians to avenge the dead white. The army was significantly understaffed and could not efficiently play a mediating role, particularly with the rugged terrain and troops stationed mostly on the coast (Fort Humboldt) or far inland (Fort Jones and Fort Reading). The California volunteers who were ready to assist the army were there mostly for blood and were responsible for some of the worst massacres of Indians. In 1860, hundreds of Wiyots were still living peacefully around Humboldt Bay, but white ranchers were upset about cattle thefts and attacked the tribe. On an isolated island in the bay, 55 Wiyots were killed, along with 130 others in surrounding settlements, mostly through slaughter by hatchet of women and children. At roughly the same time, 250 Yuki were killed near Round Valley, and between 120 and 250 Wailaki were killed along the North Fork of the Eel River. These and many other brutal massacres often began with the loss of a few head of stock or as efforts to prevent future livestock depredation.

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Settlers, often solitary miners or isolated farmers, lost their lives in this period as well, but the sheer magnitude of the Indian losses makes the white losses pale by comparison. We can have no doubt about who the conquerors were. California law forbade Indians, blacks, and Chinese from filing any legal complaint, and state law permitted indenture of Indians under thirty-five years of age who were not on reservations. Posses roamed around, capturing bands of Indians, and after killing the men, sold the women and children to “apprenticeships” in the larger towns. A certain irony exists in the fact that this army that was accompanied by and cooperated with volunteers who sold Klamath region Indians into slavery would soon fight a war to free slaves in the southern United States. An 1861 article in the Humboldt Times (cited in Keter 1999, 42) opined, “What a pity that the provisions of the law are not extended to greasers [individuals of Hispanic descent], Kanakas [Hawaiians], and Asiatics. It would be so convenient . . . to carry on a farm or mine when all the hard and dirty work is permitted by apprentices.” There were a few uplifting stories. A Lieutenant Rundell heard of the kidnapping of the wife and children of an Indian leader and helped him file a complaint with a local sheriff. The kidnappers returned the victims unharmed and paid for court costs. But these small victories were tantamount to bailing a large lake with a bucket. Meanwhile, pressure on the remaining wild Indians continued. By 1864, the only areas with substantial Indian populations were the Mattole Valley, Hoopa Valley, and southwestern Trinity County in the Yolla Bollys. Some tribes, such as the Chimarikos in the middle section of the Trinity River (Big Bar to Burnt Ranch) were essentially wiped out, although Alfred Kroeber did interview two Chimarikos in the early 1900s. The army’s strategy up to 1860 was to organize campaigns to relocate Indians to reservations, where they would have some level of protection. But with the start of the Civil War, the regulars had left by late 1861 and were replaced by California volunteers. By late 1864, the situation for the remaining Indians was desperate. Being chased continually by the army and then the volunteers, having little to no chance to store food, small bands were surrounded and either surrendered or were killed. In January 1865, at the close of the Civil War, the army declared the hostilities concluded in Trinity County. Only a few “docile” Indians were left in their original tribal homelands. By 1860, the population of Indians across the entire state of California was about the same as that of just the Klamath region Indians fifteen years

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earlier. Overall, populations continued to decline until 1900. The Klamath Mountains had few free-living Indians; most of those alive were restricted to reservations, but Congress never ratified the original reservations set up in 1851. In 1855, an Executive Order mandated confinement of the northern Klamath tribes to the Klamath River Reserve, and in 1864, the 12-mile-square Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation was established for the Yuroks, Hupas, Chilulas, Whilkuts, Tsnungwes, Chimarikos, and Karuks. In 1870, the Round Valley Indian Reservation was established for all the southern tribes, including the Yukis, Lassiks, Wailakis, Pomos, Maidus, Yanas, and Wintus. Indians from numerous tribes, many formerly enemies, had to share land once more widely occupied by a single tribe. The Hoopa reservation was expanded in 1891 by adding a Klamath River corridor from the mouth, one mile on each side of the river, upriver about 50 miles. Soon after, the Klamath extension and the Round Valley Reservation were taken from common ownership and allotted to individual Indians as part of the Allotment Act of 1887, yet such lands were still held in trust by the federal government. The remainder was opened to non-Indian settlement. Mary Arnold and Mabel Reed, two “field matrons” in the U.S. Indian Service who spent two years on the “rivers” with the Karuk in 1908–09, wrote about life on the upriver portion of the Klamath extension. A practical mix of white and Indian customs had become the culture in the area, which the special agent for Indians in California described in 1909 as the “roughest field in the United States” (quoted in Arnold and Reed 1957, 13). Some customs, such as the deerskin dance, had survived to that time and still survive today, but much of the hunter-gatherer economy was gone: by then, white flour had replaced acorn meal. In 1920, Indians could have fee title to land, but those who opted for deeds found themselves liable for local taxation, and with the allotments too small for an individual to make a living on and pay annual taxes, Indians mostly sold them cheaply to private timber interests. In 1934, during the New Deal, Congress passed the Indian Recognition Act (IRA), which repealed the Allotment Act. The IRA recognized as tribes only those Indian organizations that had elected councils and had well-defined geographical boundaries. Some tribes, such as the Chinook near the mouth of the Columbia who helped Lewis and Clark during the winter of 1805–06, have never been recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs because of the interpretations of the IRA. Local landless tribes such as the Tsnungwes, who live at the mouth of the South Fork of the Trinity River, are still trying to gain recognition as a tribe. In the

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Klamath region, with its proliferation of villages rather than centralized tribes, meshing the local culture with the political structure of the federal government has not been easy. The loss of much of the Indians’ culture made even tribelet identification difficult at times. The controversy over the New River Indians exemplifies this problem, which stimulated an academic battle between two of the foremost Indian authorities in the early 1930s. Dr. Roland Dixon of Harvard University had done his dissertation work on the Maidu tribe (a North Coast tribe south of the Klamaths) and had studied under the legendary anthropologist Franz Boas, as had Alfred Kroeber. Dixon had conducted pioneering salvage work to understand the relationships of the central Klamath tribes in the first decade of the twentieth century, at which time some tribes had only a few living informants. In 1905, he wrote an article reporting that the language of the Indians of the New River was somewhat distinctive from that of the surrounding tribes, but he concluded from the few words available that the language stock was common with neighboring Shasta dialects. C. Hart Merriam, the famed naturalist, had developed an interest in anthropology about the same time that Dixon did his work, but although he focused on California Indians, he was overshadowed by Alfred Kroeber, who had started the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Merriam was a pioneering naturalist, but a less noted anthropologist, and, according to Robert Heizer, was rumored to be jealous of both Dixon and Kroeber. The battle became public in 1930, when Merriam claimed a “strange tribe” of Indians called the Tlo-Hom-Tah’-Hoi had lived on the New River. He made this distinction based on ten words that were distinctive from those of neighboring languages. He accompanied these conclusions with boasts of his “excellent and doubly checked” (284) vocabularies in contrast to the “unlucky guesses” (293) made by Roland Dixon in his earlier work. Half a century later, Robert Heizer, who had volunteered to manage the C. Hart Merriam collection at the University of California and had published in Merriam’s name much of the material that has made Merriam a prolific contributor to the literature on California Indians, suggested that Merriam’s scholarship in ethnography was deficient. In his introduction to the 1979 edition of Merriam’s Indian Names for Plants and Animals, Heizer noted that Merriam was untrained in linguistics, had a “bad ear,” and “invented his own kind of ethnography” (1). Back in 1930, Roland Dixon responded to Merriam’s paper with a

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spirited rebuttal to “Dr. Merriam’s Tlo-Hom-Tah’-Hoi,” suggesting that the tribe was a figment of Merriam’s imagination. Of the thirty-two words presented by Merriam, Dixon noted that only four had no reasonable analogues in neighboring dialects, and the four had quite different equivalencies in the various Shasta dialects, hardly justifying a claim of a distinct language. Noting Dr. Merriam’s “aggravatingly unscientific spelling,” Dixon (1931) turned Merriam’s own closing sentence against him: “Such inferences from insufficient evidence should sound a warning against the all too frequent offense of guessing” (267). Subsequent ethnology experts have been divided on the existence of this tribe. Both men made significant contributions to the knowledge of North Coast Indians, but by the time they began work at the very end of the nineteenth century, only fragments of the Klamath region Indian cultures were left to study, and there is much we will never know.

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chapter 9

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Gold Is Where You Find It

The modern history of the Klamaths is one largely of exploitation of natural resources: minerals, timber, and water. Katharine Hepburn, speaking to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, summarized the attitudes of the times: “Nature, Mr. Alnutt, is what we were put on this earth to rise above.” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, natural resources were prized for what they could produce: gold, lumber, irrigation, and power. The Klamaths are not unique; use and overuse were the models of the time. Much of value produced in the region went elsewhere, with little appreciation for the land left behind. Most of the cultural development of the region, particularly land ownership and land use, has been closely tied to these activities. This cultural history provides an important backdrop, leaving behind challenges and providing opportunities for a sustainable future. In 1938, Hollywood briefly moved to Weaverville to film Gold Is Where You Find It with Olivia deHavilland, George Brent, and Tim Holt. The film depicts a conflict between gold miners in the Sierra Nevada and downstream farmers (based on the Sawyer decision, which I discuss a bit later in this chapter). Holt later starred as Humphrey Bogart’s sidekick in a more famous gold-fever story, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In the Klamaths, gold seemed to be everywhere: in the streams and rivers as well as on ridges and mountaintops. In fact, much of the lode gold was along a fault zone separating two of the major Klamath terranes: the Central Metamorphic Belt and the Western 124

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Paleozoic and Triassic Belts (see chapter 2). Although gold was treasured by ancient Middle Eastern civilizations for thousands of years, the Native Americans here were not metalworking tribes and appear to have ignored the gold they must have seen in the streams. The gold rush of 1848 turned their culture upside down, just as it upset the gravels of the rivers. High temperatures and pressures beneath the earth’s crust concentrated gold in places we find it today. In the Klamath Mountains, two processes were at work to concentrate the gold. One was the subduction of rocks as the North American plate moved west. The associated high temperature at depth metamorphosed the buried rocks and expelled water, precipitating ore nearer the surface. A second process occurred from the intrusion of granitic magma, with hydrothermal fluids transporting ore and subsequently precipitating gold and other ores as the metals moved into cooler surrounding rocks. Yet gold often appears at sites with no associated granitic plutons, so the granitic process is not the only one that caused gold deposition. Often these deposits were along cracks and fissures, creating veins of concentrated ore. Miners found gold in the veins and in downstream placer deposits in places where the vein had eroded into stream deposits. Because gold is heavy, it concentrates at the bottom of these stream deposits. Miners used a variety of technologies to exploit the veins and the placer or stream deposits. After the discovery of gold on the American River near Sutter’s Mill, Major Pierson Reading discovered Klamath gold on Clear Creek and in the summer of 1848 left his rancho near today’s town of Redding and revisited a place on the Trinity River where he had earlier done some trapping. He named the river the Trinity, erroneously going along with the popular belief that it entered the Pacific near Trinidad Head. His crew of whites and Indians came away with $80,000 of gold before being chased off by a group of Oregonians. Reading and his group were the forerunners of the gold rush. The earliest miners showed up knowing little to nothing about mining, and many of them eventually left knowing little more. Technology was crude, but environmental damage was limited because of the small scale of operations. Some miners got lucky, finding large nuggets along streams. The earliest miners largely used gold panning to recover their finds. They shoveled stream gravels, or placer deposits, into the flat gold pan and swirled it to concentrate the heavier rocks by gravity to the bottom of the pan. This method limited production to about a cubic yard of material a day. Coarser gold

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could be picked out from the concentrate once most of the other rock, known as gangue, was floated out of the pan. At Douglas City, there were so many miners that if they had lined up, there would have been a panner every 8 feet along the Trinity River. The few miners fortunate enough to find the original sources of gold in rock veins adjacent to the streams could remove chunks of gold with their knife blades. The abundance of gold in California became known worldwide. Miners from every part of the world showed up, most notably from China. In 1848, there were reputedly 54 Chinese in the entire state, but that number swelled to 25,000 by 1852, mostly because of immigrants from southeast China. Trinity County had 2,500 Chinese immigrants during this time. The industrious immigrants banded together in the camps and small towns, doing service-related work as well as mining. They encountered discrimination but fared better than the Indians: “John Chinaman is pretty numerously represented along the riverbanks. It is no question as to his industry, for when did you find a John idle? It is singular that this degenerate race should be suffered to dwell in the midst of the chosen people, while the aboriginal people of the soil, who showed every mark of generosity and friendship, should be hunted down like wild beasts” (Cox 1940, 37). A prohibitive state tax on foreign miners was passed in 1850, which backfired in that most foreigners, including the Chinese, were jobless and flocked to unprepared cities. The tax was repealed but passed again in 1852 at $4 per month. The Chinese continued to mine and by 1853, had amassed enough capital to construct the first joss house (a Chinese temple) in Weaverville (the temple burned down twenty years later and was rebuilt in its current form in 1874). The largest local loss of Chinese life was self-inflicted, due to a tong war between Cantonese and Hong Kong factions. The combatants had local blacksmiths forge a variety of iron weapons for a battle near Five Cent Gulch, close to the current intersection of Highways 3 and 299 in Weaverville. Reputedly, between eight and twenty-seven Chinese were killed. One European who shot into the melee was himself fired upon and killed by an onlooker. The Cantonese, who were outnumbered and looked to be losing, ultimately won when they pulled pistols out from under their jackets. After the war, peace settled in, and the Chinese became known more for their noisy firecracker celebrations than for violence directed against others. Towns soon replaced the mining camps, but most buildings had rough wood frames. Much of Weaverville, like many early towns of the West, burned down several times before brick construction appeared.

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The sturdy brick buildings, with windows framed with iron shutters, began to appear on blocks of wood-frame construction, and by 1859, twenty such buildings fronted the main streets of town. Fires still occurred, in 1866, 1897, and 1905, the latter burning much of the remaining Chinatown. The development of water systems and modern firefighting equipment stopped fires in town from spreading. Today, the biggest fire threats to towns are fires that start in wildlands and move on wide fronts into urbanized areas, such as the Oregon Mountain fire in 2001 and the Junction fire of 2006, both of which burned to the west edge of Weaverville; the Lowden Ranch fire of 1999, which burned parts of Lewiston; and the French Gulch fire of 2004, which burned part of the historic town (twenty-six houses and seventy-six outbuildings) along Clear Creek. Within a year of the discovery of gold, technological improvements such as sluice boxes and rockers replaced the gold pan in most operations. Miners could procure much more material, and thus recover more gold, this way. The sluice box required a steady stream of water, so miners created small diversions of creeks and rivers to feed the sluices, and they were thus able to process as much as several cubic yards of material a day. The box had a corrugated bottom that trapped heavier material as the lighter rocks and sand flowed through and back into the stream. Development of the sluice allowed the mining and processing of large volumes of gold-bearing gravels next to a stream; the process depended on a source of water. This method was the beginning of hydraulic mining and the appropriation of water rights. Water rights were described in “miner’s inches,” which although they sound like a unit of volume, are instead a measure of flow rate. In California, a miner’s inch is equal to 1.5 cubic feet per minute (or cbm, although cfm would seemingly be more clear), or 11.2 gallons per minute, but the definition varies elsewhere. In British Columbia, a miner’s inch is equal to 1.68 cbm, and in New Zealand, it is a whopping 60 cbm. Because the geology of the gold-bearing deposits of the Sierra Nevada was similar to that of the Klamath Mountains, observations made in one place found application in the other, but the technologies were usually refined first in the Sierra Nevada. In both places, miners found “old gravels” away from current stream networks, deposited by fossil rivers tens of millions of years ago. In the Klamath Mountains, some of these deposits were as much as 800 feet deep. The most prominent were the “auriferous” or gold-bearing gravels of the Weaverville basin (see figure 18). Ambitious venture capitalists of the day dreamed of large-scale

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Figure 18. Gold-bearing gravels of the Weaverville basin. The graveled area stretched from the East Fork of the Stuart Fork south to Oregon Mountain just west of Weaverville. (Source: Diller 1911. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

operations that could remove the gold sitting on these dry ridgetops. In the meantime, large-scale operations in the rivers were expanding. In 1851, the Arkansas Dam, named for the investment company that constructed it, diverted the Trinity River just upstream of Junction City to allow mining of the main channel for about a mile downstream. After a couple of winter blowouts, the dam held for several years, but it had been abandoned by 1857, because the location did not yield sufficient gold. The first hydraulic mining occurred in the Sierra Nevada in the spring of 1852, where miners applied water to placer deposits to loosen them for removal. “Frenchy” Chabot used a hose at the end of a flume to concentrate pressure and actually hose the gravel down into his sluice. Soon, larger and larger operations appeared, and the debris discarded in the rush for gold began to clog the streams. Downstream in the Sacramento Valley, so much debris was deposited that boat travel was impossible, and mining operations left up to 8 feet

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of gravel on downstream farmlands. A plume of muddy water flowed out of San Francisco Bay, giving new meaning to the “Golden Gate.” Sacramento Valley farmers formed the Anti-Débris Association and went to court as their fields became gravel dumps and marshes. In 1884, the issue was resolved with the Sawyer decision, which forbade further dumping of gravel into streams and thereby terminated hydraulic mining, but only in the Sierra Nevada. The decision applied only to the Sacramento and San Joaquin river drainages. The Klamath drainage, because it drained to the Pacific without affecting major farmland areas, was exempt from the Sawyer decision on the basis that operations there caused no damage and generated no controversy. Only those Klamath region rivers that drained into the Sacramento, such as Clear Creek, were protected from further hydraulic mining. Hydraulic mining began at the same time in the Klamaths that it did in the Sierra Nevada. An 8-mile flume served Sebastopol, on the East Fork of the Stuart Fork, by 1853. The flume helped miners find gold in the northern portion of the auriferous gravels. Hydraulic mining along the Klamath River began at the same time, often powered by water wheels, which in turn were driven by diverted flows of the Klamath. Early hydraulic mining used canvas hose wrapped tightly with manila rope to increase its resistance to pressure. A nozzle at the end confined and directed the water. These hoses were later replaced with metal “giants,” but these larger hoses were no aquatic Bigfoots. The giants were huge metal nozzles connected to iron pipes that carried water from an elevated reservoir. The giants pivoted on a large, rock-ballasted base and could shoot an 8-inch stream of water 200 feet distant against a graveled hillslope. By 1880, a ditch had been extended beginning along the east side of the Stuart Fork above Oak Flat. A siphon carried the water across to the west side, where the flow of Owens Creek and Van Matre Creek joined in to assist in the hydraulic mining of Buckeye Ridge (now south of the Stuart Fork Arm of Trinity Lake) in the center of the auriferous gravel belt. The company that was mining the area, Buckeye Water and Hydraulic Mining Company, owned 1,100 acres of goldbearing gravel on Buckeye Ridge, and its ditch cost over $100,000, so gold mining was becoming a rich man’s game. After the Sawyer decision, hydraulic-mining companies had one of two options: go bankrupt, or go west to the Klamaths. The smaller mining towns in the Klamaths eventually dried up. Ridgeville, also known as Golden City in the early 1850s, was essentially a ghost town by 1870. It is now being reborn as an upscale subdivision next to Trinity Lake.

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The La Grange Mine is synonymous with hydraulic mining in the Klamath region. The construction of the La Grange ditch to the upper reaches of the Stuart Fork provided a steady source of water for the erosion of the entire side of a mountain just west of Weaverville, along the southern tip of the auriferous gravels. Baron and Baroness de La Grange, representing the interests of the La Grange Hydraulic Mining Company, purchased existing claims in the Oregon Gulch area. Water from a reservoir at high elevation, fed by the La Grange ditch, flowed through iron piping to the “giants” that systematically washed the mountain away. As the slurry flowed into a large sluice, it was washed, and the cobbles and boulders poured out of the sluice while the gold was collected by amalgamation with mercury retained in crevices along the bottom of the sluice. The gravels were rich enough for the baroness to remark that she recovered $700 in gold from a 6-foot sluice box set up to catch debris from minor road realignment. During its life, the La Grange Mine moved about 100 million cubic yards of gravel and netted about $8 million in gold. At its peak production after the La Granges sold their interests to others, the La Grange mine was the largest hydraulic operation in the world. Sluices light enough for a man to carry had morphed into 2,400-foot-long sluiceways that were 4 feet high and 6 feet wide. They could carry 1,000 cubic yards of material an hour, and the water could carry boulders as heavy as 7 tons. Most of the gold was recovered in the first several hundred feet of the sluice, but substantial fine gold washed out into the tailings. One of the dead mine’s “giants” sits today along Highway 299, overlooking Oregon Gulch, the depository for the tailings, which in some spots exceed 200 feet in depth. During the construction of Highway 299 across Oregon Mountain in the 1930s, the hydraulic operation was reopened to help excavate the right-of-way, although workers used a nearby water source in place of the then-unusable La Grange ditch. Hydraulic mining was finally outlawed in 1948, a century after the gold rush began. Mining operations commonly used mercury to increase the recovery of fine gold that was lost in earlier passes. Heating the mixture of mercury and gold in a retort to about 675oF would vaporize the mercury, leaving a relatively pure cake of gold, and the mercury could be captured for reuse by cooling and condensation in the bottom of a bucket of water. Cinnabar ore was mined to produce mercury, or quicksilver, primarily from mines in the Coast Ranges. Two of the largest local quicksilver mines were the Altoona and Integral Mines, at the headwaters

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of the East Fork Trinity River. Cinnabar Sam’s, a restaurant in Willow Creek, is named after a supposed historic miner who exploited a cinnabar deposit in the upper New River area. However, this area never produced a significant amount of mercury, and Cinnabar Sam has probably done better in the restaurant business. The Altoona Mine produced about five flasks daily, each containing about 75 pounds of quicksilver. In the early days, much of the mercury used to recover gold was released into the environment. It either slipped into the streams from sluices along with the unwanted gravel, or it vaporized when the amalgamations were heated in frying pans over open fires. Many of the miners did not trust commercial firms to separate their gold from quicksilver fairly, so they did a little home cookin’, and many were surely poisoned by mercury vapors. Residual mercury from nineteenth-century gold mining remains with us today in the streams of the Klamath Mountains. It complicates restoration of the main stem of the Trinity River (see chapter 16) as managers attempt to minimize disturbance of methylated mercury during reshaping of the river channel. Lode mining, which extracts the gold from its primary sources in quartz veins, was the next gold boom in the Klamaths. Starting in 1872, with the discovery of rich lodes in the Deadwood area between French Gulch and Lewiston, miners began to burrow into the hillsides, following the quartz veins and extracting ore. The ore then needed to be crushed for the miners to obtain the gold. Early ore crushing was done with crude arrastras that resembled a mortar-and-pestle approach. Arrastras were circular and consisted of a bed of hard stone with a post in the middle and a cross-member in the post. To the cross-member were attached large stones, which were dragged around the center post to crush the ore placed on the flat rocks beneath. The power in the crudest arrastras might be human, with donkey or mules being a step up, and waterpower being the most advanced. Where the paste of the crushed ore came in contact with mercury, an amalgam would form on top of the flat rocks that the miners would remove after sufficient gold collected in it. Later, and in all the larger operations, steam-powered stamp mills did the crushing. The mills crushed the ore by using a waterpowered camshaft to lift and drop heavy iron “stamps” onto the gold ore, which was fed into an iron box enclosure surrounding the stamps. A small two-stamp mill operates today at the Jake Jackson Historical Museum in Weaverville, but larger mills were common. Lode mining appears to have peaked in the period around 1910, when the Canyon Creek mines near Dedrick were in full production. The Globe Mine, at

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Figure 19. A typical dredge configuration. Dredge is moving from right to left. (Source: May 2001 Trinity, Trinity County Historical Society, Weaverville, CA. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

the headwaters of the Little East Fork, sank a 1,700-foot tunnel into the high ridge country between Canyon Creek and the Stuart Fork, all the way through the mountain, and crushed the ore in a twenty-stamp mill. Dedrick, which served the Globe, Chloride, and other Canyon Creek mines, was a flourishing town in 1900. Botanist Alice Eastwood (1902) described it as the “terminus of civilization” (45), but it had been abandoned by the start of World War II and is identified today only by a stone historical marker. The King Solomon Mine up the Salmon River used an open-pit method to remove finely divided gold that was dispersed and incorporated in sulfides (mostly pyrites) mixed with quartz and metamorphosed limestone. Discovered in the 1890s, the deposit’s major producing years were in the 1930s, and the mine never reopened after its closure at the start of the war. The ban on gold mining during the war forced increased mining of metals that were strategic to the war effort. For example, the Gray Eagle copper mine opened near Happy Camp in 1942 on a deposit that had not been mined for twenty-five years. It was the largest producer in California at the time. Removal of alluvial gold by dredges was in full swing by the time that lode mining hit its peak in the early twentieth century. Dredges were essentially boats with large digestive systems: they removed gravels from quiet water, spit out the boulders, and then sorted the smaller material for the gold within. The most common configuration (see figure 19) placed a dredge in a constructed pond deep enough to float the dredge.

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Figure 20. The arc pattern of gravel deposited from a dredge near Junction City. (Photograph courtesy of the Trinity County Historical Society, Weaverville, CA.)

The “chewing” end of the dredge was a bucket-and-chain system that pulled material into the dredge. Buckets came in various sizes, from 1 or 2 cubic feet to the huge Estabrook dredge buckets with capacities of 20 to 22 cubic feet. The dredge was held in place with a “spud,” a large steel cylinder driven into the bottom of the pond. The dredge pivoted on the spud, so that the tailings were spit out in an arc (see figure 20). When the arc was complete, the spud was lifted and the dredge repositioned; the pond slowly moved across the landscape as the dredge excavated in front and filled in the rear. Dredges were built as early as 1860 in New Zealand, and the first Trinity dredge was built by the Kise Brothers in 1887. It floated just north of the point that is now Lewiston Dam in 1889 and washed away in the big flood of 1890. Several dredges were working in the region by the early 1900s: on the Trinity, the Klamath, and the Scott rivers. Dredges were also active in the Sierra Nevada placer deposits, because they operated adjacent to the rivers and did not appreciably add debris to the stream. However, they left a wasteland of boulders adjacent to the stream. The Sierra Nevada dredges were often quite large, over 500 feet long and capable of displacing 4,000 tons. They could dig 125 feet into the gravels. Klamath dredges were usually smaller, displacing 1,000 to 1,500 tons and capable of digging 30 to 40 feet

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deep. One of the major challenges was to build a dredge that fit the river it was mining. In Coffee Creek, miners imported a dredge piece by piece up to the confluence of Adams Creek, to mine the gravels there, but the large boulders made the operation a failure. The dredge was disassembled, leaving behind the boulder piles that still exist today in the upper valley, and later was reconstructed in South America. In 1905, about 1,000 acres were considered suitable for dredging in Trinity County, with another 1,000 in Siskiyou County and 1,500 in Shasta County. Eventually, a much larger area was dredged as technologies improved. The Estabrook, the largest wooden dredger ever built, could work more than 6.5 acres a month. Dredging continued as hydraulic mining died out and lode mining declined. After the Second World War, during which all gold mining shut down, the dredge that operated near Junction City was moved to Minersville in 1948. It sank once, was refloated, but eventually succumbed when Trinity Lake was filled. The last dredge to mine the upper Scott River near Callahan in 1938 was moved to Brazil in the late 1970s to mine diamonds. The larger dredges could move as much material as the La Grange mine did but didn’t transport the debris much past the length of the dredge. Smaller dredges, called dragline dredges or doodlebugs, were developed in the 1930s to exploit the smaller streams. The dragline dredge was a small boat that processed material fed to it by a “dragline” bucket suspended on a cable from a crawler crane that moved on the stream bank in front of the boat. Generally, it left behind small linear piles of tailings, which later allowed visitors to identify the mining method. The East Fork of Coffee Creek, another small stream, was mined by a Canadian company in the 1930s that used shooter dams. The company constructed temporary wooden dams in the stream and then blew them up, allowing a 20-foot-tall wave of water to shoot down the stream and clear the overburden and leaving the gold-rich bottom of the stream exposed. The East Fork today still has unstable banks resulting from this repeated sluicing of its channel. A number of people criticized dredges as fairly inefficient ways to recover gold, because they would break down if their buckets repeatedly hit bedrock, which was where much of the gold was deposited. Nevertheless, the Trinity dredges were reasonably productive. A good deposit might average 50 cents of gold per cubic yard, and a dredge could excavate 250,000 yards per month. If the dredges got all the gold, they could earn their owners $125,000 a month, but no machine has ever been designed to get it all. At Callahan, the dredges averaged over

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$40,000 per month, with one ten-day record take of 1,875 ounces (worth $65,625 at the old price of $35 per ounce). Recovery per cubic yard was much greater than at the La Grange hydraulic mine, but of course, the dredges were working gravels of much different age and quality, so comparisons are difficult. In 1971, the United States deregulated gold and allowed its price to vary. Prices increased from $35 per troy ounce to over $800 in 1980, and since then, the price has declined to about half that amount. A new gold rush began, but this time in a different world. New environmental laws made large-scale operations next to impossible, and conflicts arose between land-management agencies and the new gold miners. The technology that we see today is primarily suction dredging, done from rafts anchored in the streams (see figure 21, top). A small motor on the raft creates suction that pulls water, sand, and gravel from the stream bottom to the raft, where the gold is separated from the gangue and the rocks and sand are dumped back into the stream. Mining operations no longer use mercury to amalgamate the gold. Instead, they use riffle mats to capture the gold and simply collect it off the mat. When a suction dredge is cruising the bottom of a river, it always encounters surprises. One such surprise was Percy. A team of suction dredgers that was working the main stem of the Trinity River in the 1980s came upon a gold tooth. This find, of course, generated a lot of conversation over the campfire that night. The next day, the rest of Percy began to emerge from under an old tree stub buried in the blue clay that coated the bedrock of the river. During the next two days, the team recovered sixteen coins, a crescent wrench, a pocket watch with the initials P. C. on the back, a small knife, and a wallet with a small gold coin. The gold coin likely was Percy’s lucky piece: on one side was a small picture of a golden bear; on the other was the inscription One Half Dollar, California Gold. A few rivets and parts of a belt and a buckle were all that were left of his clothes, except for a knee-high laced boot with bones inside. Percy’s lucky piece apparently deserted him in the 1920s or early 1930s, based on the dental work and the dates of the coins. Old-timers in the area recalled a Depression-era family that lived across the river from the highway. Each day the father crossed the river by boat with his children to allow them to catch the school bus. One day the father did not appear to pick up the kids, and he was never seen again. The suction-dredge team gave all the items it found to the county coroner. Though gold may be where you find it, occasionally you find other remarkable things.

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Figure 21. Top: Suction dredge operating on the Salmon River. Bottom: The Modern Gold Mine on the upper Trinity River.

Gold mining is inherently exploitive, because the gold removed is not renewable in any socially meaningful time frame. How damaging it is to the environment is a complex question with more than one answer. The type of extraction method has certain direct impacts, and the process of

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separating the gold from the gangue has indirect impacts. The earliest miners, such as Major Reading, had such little impact that people who visited the area the next year would have had difficulty finding evidence of the extraction. But gold panning, and its descendants the rockers and sluice boxes, soon increased the ability to work larger volumes of placer, if only by dint of the sheer number of miners present in the early days of the gold rush. Any concerns about these more efficient mining techniques were soon overshadowed by the advent of hydraulic mining, which tore apart sizable areas of the Sierra Nevada as well as the Klamath Mountains. The Sawyer decision recognized the downstream impact on farmers and by effectively prohibiting hydraulic mining in the Sierra, it allowed those streams to regrade over the next few decades and restore aquatic habitat for invertebrates and fish. The remaining slug of sediment eventually made its way to San Francisco Bay to create one of the first, albeit inadvertent, landfills to occur there. Hydraulic mining, through the miners’ ability to divert water, enabled exploitation of almost any land downstream of the diversion. During the heyday of such activity in the Sierra Nevada, some lands were so degraded that they still look like moonscapes 150 years later. Yet others that were mined have a conifer cover that to the untrained eye looks like any other forest. However, the site quality of the land, its ability to grow trees, is likely much lower than it was before the mining took place. The same story applies in the Klamaths. Along Highway 3 west of Trinity Lake are lands that were obviously hydraulically mined, and some areas have continued to erode, with pygmy trees desperately trying to reclaim the land. But in other areas, the forest has come back, and though the new growth may differ in some respects from the primeval forest, the area appears to be recovering. The era of dredging has left the most permanent scars. Waves of boulders litter the streamsides where the dredges worked. In the early 1900s, when people expressed outrage about the appearance of the land, the California State Mining Bureau argued that dredging reclaimed farmland by improving the fertility of the land, and it published photographs of such reclaimed lands that looked like the planet Mars with a couple of planted trees surviving. Junction City, Carrville, Callahan, and many spots along the Klamath are wastelands of rocks from the dredging activities that occurred there. The beautiful meadows that lined their streams are forever gone. Callahan dredging operations began in 1903 and expanded with the arrival of the Yuba Dredging Company. Downstream dredging

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operations were eventually stopped at the edge of the Wolford Ranch. John and Absolum Wolford had settled in the valley in 1854, running a productive cattle ranch. In the early 1900s, John’s widow, Margaret Christina Wolford, and her four sons ran the ranch. A small dredge had been hauled in to the upper Scott Valley by John Wolford II, who worked for a freight company at the time. Along with a second small dredge, areas in the vicinity of Callahan were excavated by small companies. The much larger Yuba dredge came in later and began to dredge down the banks of the Scott River toward the Wolford Ranch. But Margaret, backed up by her sons, was shocked at the transformation of the productive grazing and agricultural lands of the upper valley, which these dredging operations had turned into rock piles. She politely refused to sell the ranch, thereby stranding the dredger at the Wolford property boundary. With no easy way to dismantle the dredge and move it downstream of the Wolford Ranch, the dredge had to turn around and dredge back upstream. The Wolfords, through their love of the land, saved the Scott Valley downstream from their ranch from dredging. One dredge operated by the Trinity Dredging Company between 1913 and 1925 was unique in that it had no tailings stacker. It covered the coarse gravel and cobbles with the fine gravel and sand, which hastened recovery of the land. This system must have been economically inefficient, because later dredgers did not incorporate this design. Lewiston and Trinity lakes now cover most of the area worked by this dredge, and the dams themselves contain immense quantities of dredge tailings. The smaller streams, having been worked with smaller equipment, appear to have recovered better, with trees growing amid the rock piles lining the banks. The effects of dredge methods on the smaller streams more closely approximated natural flood impacts, and the same natural mechanisms have aided the recovery of vegetation on the smaller streams. However, the riparian zones in these areas, where vegetation should reflect the moist nature of the landscape, often appear no more moist than the uplands because of rocky debris piled by the stream edges. Vegetation has to establish itself on coarse-textured rock debris, and the process can be slow, with the plants that are best adapted to drought having an edge over more moisture-dependent species. Today, the most widespread gold-mining technique, in number of people, is recreational panning of surface deposits, but suction dredging moves the greatest volume of material. Suction dredging moves only a few thousand cubic yards of material per year in the region and essentially drops it in place. Dredging creates turbidity directly downstream,

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but most studies indicate that the effect is transient, invertebrate populations are not severely affected, and high flows generally rework the stream bottoms so that the impact largely disappears by the next season. One of these studies focused on Canyon Creek. Some dredgers argue that with the Trinity Dam muting the high flows of the Trinity River, they are actually doing the work of nature on the river’s main stem by shuffling the stream bottom. The Department of Fish and Game regulates suction dredging in California, but seasonal permits vary considerably by stream, sometimes allowing activity during anadromous fish runs. The main-stem Klamath River between the Salmon River and Scott River and the main-stem Trinity from the South Fork confluence to the North Fork confluence are open year-round for suction dredging. Smaller tributaries have more restrictive limits: the main-stem Salmon River is open July 1 to September 15, for example. One reason that suction dredging has had limited impact is its limited scale. Measuring the impact of isolated operations in larger stream systems is difficult, but effects would become more apparent if more operations were active. If gold prices were to soar as they did in the late 1970s, and if suction dredging were to intensify, the associated environmental impacts might be more intense as well. Larger-scale operations are still legal, but they face more constraints than they did in the early days of hydraulic and dredge mining. One such operation is the Modern Gold Mine (see figure 21, bottom), a modified dredge operation on the upper Trinity River floodplain above the confluence of the Little Trinity. Unlike the old days, multiple permits are now required: an environmental evaluation approved by the U.S. Forest Service, the California Department of Fish and Game, and Trinity County. Under the antiquated 1872 Mining Law, the Forest Service can require mitigation measures for operating plans but cannot disallow mining outright (see chapter 14). Under California’s Surface Mining and Reclamation Act, the Modern Gold Mine had to acquire a bond of $50,000 before it could begin the operation. The mining operation used an excavator to about 40 feet depth and then took the material to a centrally located extraction device. The operation ended up losing money and was not active in 2006, with the claims up for sale. The bond money will be used to rehabilitate the site after the operation is complete. This type of operation clearly has impacts, but much of the area looks as it might have looked soon after the 1964 flood, and the reclamation bond will help restore the old floodplain. The restoration will likely include regrading of the floodplain and planting of willow and other streamside

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Figure 22. Early twentieth-century dredge spoils in the Scott Valley, photographed almost a century later.

vegetation. This type of dredging is still fairly disruptive to the environment, but it creates much less permanent destruction than the old methods did. Decades after rehabilitation, this site will be recovering, whereas the Scott Valley dredge rocks will look just the same (see figure 22). One of the longest-lasting, significant, yet invisible impacts of mining has resulted from the sloppy use of quicksilver to amalgamate the gold. Over 200 million pounds of mercury was produced from California mines, mostly in the Coast Range, and about 26 million pounds found use in California gold mining. The best placer mines annually lost about 10 percent of the mercury, and an average loss was 30 percent. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that an average sluice lost several hundred pounds of quicksilver per operating season. It slipped through cracks in the sluice and was washed out with fine gold particles in the gravel slurry. Additional mercury was lost in stamp-mill and dredging operations. Locally, production of quicksilver from the Altoona and Integral mines also created a mercury-contaminated environment. Though natural sources of mercury are present, they are at low levels in unmined gravels. At the sites of the gold and mercury mines, and areas downstream, levels

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are still several times the background levels, more than a century after deposition. The loads of mercury released into the streams could have longlasting effects on small aquatic organisms, fish, and higher portions of the food chain, including humans. Elemental mercury becomes oxidized and then methylated through sulfate-reducing bacteria and other microbes that live in low-oxygen environments. Methylmercury can be incorporated in biological tissues, and it biomagnifies: the concentration of mercury increases each step up the food chain. If one were to mirror the story of DDT biomagnification so eloquently written by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring with the story of methylmercury, the title might be Silent Stream. Concentrations of mercury in fish, downstream from some historic mining operations, are at levels toxic to humans and to other organisms that eat fish, such as ospreys and eagles. In humans, mercury poisoning causes hair loss, depression, memory lapses, and tremors. Dr. Jane Hightower, a San Francisco physician, noticed these symptoms in those of her patients who ate a lot of sushi and swordfish. Although the source of the mercury in this case was ocean fish, the same pattern occurs with mercury-laden freshwater fish. The blood of Dr. Hightower’s patients had high mercury levels, which declined along with their symptoms when they reduced their fish intake. More than a century after the glory days of gold mining, Trinity Lake bass and catfish contain mercury concentrations that are high enough to prompt the California Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue a warning to avoid excessive consumption (more than 2 pounds of fish per month for a 150-pound person) of bass, catfish, and to a lesser extent, other fish from Trinity Lake, the Trinity River above the lake, Coffee Creek, Carrville Pond, and the East Fork Trinity River and its tributaries. For women of childbearing age and for children under the age of six, the EPA suggests lower consumption levels. I used to think that the sole threat from the river was falling in at high water, and I still have difficulty accepting that such a beautiful river carries significant health risks from century-old mining. In addition to gold and mercury mining, copper mining also occurred in the Klamath Mountains, but large operations started much later than the gold rush. Most of the copper was used in early telephone cables, and the boom years were the early 1890s to 1919 in the eastern Klamaths. Miners found major copper deposits in an arc that follows the arms of Shasta Lake (created after the mining in the 1940s), and both copper mines and smelters to process the ore lay along this arc.

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Gold Is Where You Find It

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Figure 23. Remnants of snags near today’s Shasta Lake. These snags are the only reminders of copper-smelter operations in 1922, after the boom years of the mines. (Source: USDA Forest Service photo by E. N. Munns.)

Some of the copper mines began as silver or gold mines. Among the miners at the Iron Mountain operation was Charles Ruggles, who along with his brother, John, was one of the notorious Ruggles brothers who held up the Weaverville-Redding stage in 1892. In the process of robbing the Redding-bound stage of its Wells Fargo strongbox, they killed a man, and they made off with between $25,000 and $70,000 in gold. Charles received a load of buckshot in the face during the holdup and was soon captured, but John successfully got away with the loot. John was eventually captured, and the two were in the Redding jail awaiting trial, when a lynch mob hauled them from the jail one July night and hanged them. John reportedly never revealed where he hid the strongbox, and the gold has never been recovered. Annual copper production peaked in 1909, when almost 60 million tons of ore were removed from local mines such as the Mammoth, the Keystone, the Iron Mountain, and the Balaklala. The smelters needed wood to burn, and much of the local forest was cut. The forest that was not cut was killed by the poisonous fumes that the smelters spewed across the landscape. Fumes were so thick that visibility was measured in feet, and the county hospital in Shasta moved to Redding to escape them. More than 240 square miles of mixed-conifer forest were transformed into a raw, eroding moonscape (see figures 23 and 24), which

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Figure 24. Vegetation and stream changes at Butter’s Dam on Big Backbone Creek (on the west side of today’s Shasta Lake) as a result of copper mining. Top: 1904. The forest is mixed evergreen with ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, canyon live oak, and California black oak. Bottom: 1939. Background vegetation is mostly brush and grass. The pool behind the dam has filled in with sediment that has washed off the denuded hills. (Source: USDA Forest Service photos, 1904 by D. M. Ilch and 1939 by Rene Bollaert.)

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has recovered at best to a scrubby landscape of manzanita, poison oak, and a few ghost pines nearly a century later. Copper mining also occurred from 1915 to 1930 in the western Klamath Mountains near Horse Mountain, southwest of Willow Creek, and at Island Mountain. Ore at Horse Mountain had to be hauled to rail, so miners needed to find high-quality ore (more than 20 percent copper) to justify the expense. Island Mountain was reachable by rail, and miners shipped ore from both locations to Tacoma, Washington, where a smelter operation processed it. As a result, the landscape around Horse and Island Mountains was not poisoned like the area around Shasta Lake. Later, after the local smelter closed, Shasta Lake ore was also shipped by rail to Tacoma. The Iron Mountain Mine, just northwest of Keswick, now produces among the most acid mine waters ever reported (with a negative pH!), and the area has been classified as a federal EPA Superfund site. The waters emanating from this mine contain up to 200 grams per liter of metals, including substantial amounts of cadmium, zinc, and arsenic. A regular wine bottle filled with this water would contain one-third of a pound of these metals! Water leaching through abandoned ore piles and from the mines has reached the Sacramento River at times and killed hundreds of thousands of fish and contaminated the Redding water supply. Rocks in local creeks have been stained a bright turquoise. Fortunately, remediation operations are under way, and they are reducing some of the toxic threat, yet scientists expect the problem to continue for the next 3,000 years. The glory days of mining in the Klamath Mountains have long passed. They have left a legacy of turned-over or washed-away mountains and streamside terraces, poisoned hillsides, and toxic waste. The romantic gold panner of the 1800s is far from the real picture of industrialized exploitation that the glory days memorialize. Those days are largely now the stuff of local museums, and we are lucky it is so. Yet the threat of large-scale gold mining is still locally with us. In 2004, Master Petroleum, Inc., a Weaverville company with origins in Texas, proposed to expand its 40-acre mine in Canyon Creek to an additional 22 acres of public land, which is legal under the currently applicable Mining Law of 1872.

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chapter 10

Green Grass and Green Gold

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The limited open country and widespread forests of the Klamaths supported the Native American communities of the region long before the days of the gold rush. Natives fished and hunted but, with the exception of growing tobacco, cultivated little land and kept little domesticated stock. Soon after the gold seekers arrived, supporting industry developed to feed both the miners and the structures they required for housing and mining activities. The isolation of the region, broken only with a few trails, demanded that crops, livestock, and timber be provided locally.

green grass Ranchers played a vital role in sustaining the gold-rush mining activities of the region, and ranching has persisted to the present as a more stable, albeit smaller, industry than either logging or mining. As different as the white culture was from the Indian culture that preceded it, the land shaped the cultures in similar ways. The idea of a world bounded by mountains in every direction, with little interaction with distant communities, was common to both cultures. The isolated Klamath Mountains had few roads well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, and until 1858, none connecting the goldfields to either the coast or the Sacramento Valley. Travel of any distance was constrained by lack of roads and seasonal high water. Development of local sources for grains, 145

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beef, and dairy was inevitable the day that gold was discovered. Ranches were successfully established in the eastern Klamaths that year, but development in the southwestern Klamaths was delayed more than a decade due to continuing friction with the Indians. Ranchers soon imported cattle and sheep in great numbers to graze the high country of the Trinity Alps in summer, and many of the place names there reflect this ranching history. Foster Lake is named for William Foster of the Trinity Farm and Cattle Company (TFCC) at Trinity Center; Ward Lake, for Whit Ward, the chief cowhand for TFCC; Van Matre Meadows and Van Matre Creek, for Mart Van Matre, a Lewiston cattleman; Morris Meadows, for James Morris, a Weaverville cattleman; Stoddard Lake and Meadows and Siligo Meadows, for John Stoddard and Louis Siligo, local cattlemen; Portuguese Meadows, for John Costa, cattleman; Conway Lake, for Fred Conway, another cattleman, and Eleanor Lake, for his wife; Bowerman Meadows, for John Bowerman, a Minersville cattleman; Black Basin, for local sheep men; Mount Eddy, for Nelson Eddy (no, not the movie actor), an upper Shasta Valley rancher; and Stonewall Pass, not for Stonewall Jackson but for a wall of stone that blocked grazing stock from moving from Siligo and Van Matre Meadows to Red Mountain Meadows. Some of the names were less celebratory: Poison Canyon was so named because of the deaths of a large number of sheep after their consumption of Sierra laurel, a poisonous shrub. At the end of summer, most of these stock were moved to the Scott Valley or to the Sacramento Valley for winter, although exporting was still difficult because of the lack of rail access until the 1880s. Stock had to be driven to riverboats at Red Bluff if they were to be marketed outside the region. Open lands at lower elevations became sites for dairy operations or a variety of crops. Coffee Creek Ranch began as a farm for hay and vegetables, and Norwegian Ranch, a swampy 160-acre meadow just south of the original Trinity Center that was part of a cattle, grain, and vegetable operation, reportedly grew a record 23-pound cabbage in 1860. Lower Canyon Creek was filled with hay farms, fruits, and vegetables by the late 1850s. In Weaverville, the Felter Ranch grew strawberries and sponsored an annual all-night Strawberry Festival in late spring that attracted guests from many miles around. The largest agricultural valley in the eastern Klamaths was Scott Valley, originally a swampy, poorly drained valley that was full of beaver. Thomas McKay, in 1836, trapped 1,800 beaver out of Scott Valley and later settled there. He claimed the area had the highest concentration of

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beaver he had encountered in trapping widely across the West. As early as 1851, oats were planted in Scott Valley, and by 1855, Scott Valley was producing 60,000 bushels of potatoes, 24,000 bushels of barley, 60,000 bushels of wheat, and 37,500 bushels of oats. The presence of grain meant that spirit production was not far behind. By 1854, a whiskey distillery was operating on Whiskey Creek (a now-defunct name) in Scott Valley, and almost every mule heading to the Salmon River country had a sack of flour on one side and a barrel of whiskey on the other. The flood of 1861 transformed Scott Valley into “one vast sea, upon whose bosom floated the debris from a hundred farms” (Wells 1881, 42). The distillery on Whiskey Creek also floated away. But the farmers persevered, and in 1877, production of grain exceeded that of 1855 by 50 percent. Much of this output was consumed locally. In 1873, ranchers shipped 138 tons of produce alone from Scott Valley to the mines in Salmon River country, all by mule train. The most impressive agricultural venture in the early days was Forest House. Several disenchanted miners in Scott Valley decided that the Klamaths needed a “place like Sutter’s” (Burton 1965, 1)—that is, like John Sutter’s utopian agrarian effort on the American River. Sutter’s effort failed after the discovery of gold, when all his workers left to find their fortunes. In 1863, the Forest House entrepreneurs established a large farm in the headwaters of the East Fork Scott River, and by 1867, they had 10,000 apple trees, the largest orchard in California. The nursery contained 10,000 fruit trees and all kinds of berries. Naturally, cider and wine production flourished, which Forest House claimed was produced specifically for family use. In 1870, Forest House produced 600 gallons of claret wine, a harbinger of the emerging wine industry in the region today. In contrast, the southwestern Klamaths (Hyampom and southwest from there) were the slowest part of the region to develop. The area was very isolated, so that starving and desperate Indians could easily ambush individual ranchers. When the large-scale killing and roundup of Indians and their relocation to reservations was largely complete in 1865, the exploitation of what James Bartlett called the “splendid grazing lands” began in earnest (“South of the South Fork” 1978, 5). This area was almost a topographical reversal of the rest of the Klamaths: the natural openings used for crop and grazing lands were often found on ridges rather than valleys. In this subregion, cattle were initially preferred over sheep, because they provided a wider range of products for isolated ranchers—work animal, leather, beef, and milk—and cattle had

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fewer predators than sheep. But beyond cows’ ability to meet the immediate needs of the family, the animals were bulky and difficult to transport. Wool could be transported out of the region much more easily than could a large bovine. Sheep soon became the preferred stock, although herders and dogs were required. Cattle outnumbered sheep about 15 to 1 in 1855, but by 1870, sheep outnumbered cattle in Humboldt County 170,000 to 26,000. As early as 1860, a good sheepdog was worth $150 if it would aggressively chase bear and coyote but not deer or sheep. Its typical reward for such heroic behavior was cold mush, with an occasional feast of meat. By 1880, sheep ranchers were shipping almost a million pounds of wool from Eureka and Shelter Cove. A rough, snowy winter in early 1890 killed all but 11 of 3,000 sheep on one ranch, along with a majority of sheep on most ranches in the southwestern Klamaths. The development of rail transportation from the south, which allowed shipment of cattle to San Francisco; burgeoning demand for beef from redwood lumber camps on the coast; and competition from wool growers in Southern California began to favor cattle production over sheep ranching by 1890. Land tenure in the eastern Klamaths was fairly stable by 1870, but in the southwestern Klamaths, the end of the Indian “problem” ushered in another problem. Gang violence was common in attempts to consolidate rights for grazing, water, and land. The isolated ranches were easy targets for hired thugs to rustle cattle and either frighten off or kill ranchers on smaller properties. One rancher described this life as a “rough, tough, half-outlaw style of living” (Jones 1981, 340). George White and his brother William Pitt were among the early settlers who decided to expand their ownership in southern Trinity. George boasted that he controlled most judges in the area, and a San Francisco newspaper judged him to be the richest rancher in Northern California. From the 1870s to the 1890s, George ruled the roost in the area, and anyone who opposed him was either harassed or killed. At least nineteen mysterious killings occurred in the Long Ridge area during this time. Poor Bill Nowlin was an early rancher who irritated George White by forcing one of White’s sheepherders off his land at gunpoint. Nowlin was arrested and incarcerated in Weaverville for a couple of months. When he was released and returned home, his house and fences had been burned, his sheep were gone, and White’s sheep were grazing his land. After a failed attempt to poison Nowlin, White sent an assassin, who was killed by the faster-drawing Nowlin. This killing earned Nowlin an eight-year prison term, but he was released after five years

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table 4. grazing permitted in klamath national forest (Number of Animals)

1908 1910 1918 1924 1936 1947

Cattle/Horses

Sheep/Goats

Hogs/Others

Total

9,200 12,500 10,000 10,061 4,714 3,200

4,100 24,000 32,000 4,818 1,508 550

3,600 2,000 800 276 0 0

16,900 38,500 42,800 15,155 6,222 3,750

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source: Armstrong n.d.

and came back to find his house, barn, and fences burned again. Nowlin stayed in the area, but his case was typical of the plight of smaller ranchers in the area. The southwestern Klamaths were a place to be avoided by the proper citizens of Weaverville and Hayfork. By the 1890s, relative peace came to the southwestern Klamaths, and the ranching community there stabilized, with some families still living on or near the original homesteads. The next biggest change for ranchers across the Klamaths was the beginning of the forest-reserve system, which eventually resulted in the regulation of grazing on public lands. Before 1906, livestock had freely grazed the high country for decades. These forest reserves were later renamed “national forests,” and ranchers needed a grazing permit to graze the high country. The Trinity Land and Cattle Company was reportedly the first recipient of a federal grazing permit. At first, there was little knowledge about proper numbers of stock, and throughout World War I, numbers steadily increased (see table 4). Control of livestock numbers began soon thereafter, and the heavily grazed high country slowly began to recover. “Recovered” meadows meant that plants covered most of the ground, not necessarily that the native vegetation had recovered. Some loss of species was likely inevitable, although we have little basis on which to reconstruct the historic diversity of the high-country meadows. After World War II, ranchers in the western Klamaths saw no future in timberland once it was cut. A new crop would take generations to grow to maturity, whereas grazing or hay production produced an annual yield. Ranchers clear-cut and repeatedly burned timberlands to convert them to rangeland. But the attempt to convert timberland to range was hit and miss: sometimes it worked well, and at other times, it simply resulted in a conversion to brush fields. Economic analyses by

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Figure 25. A worldview from Hayfork, conceptually similar to the Yurok view of the world in figure 17. (Source: Adapted from poster in Jake Jackson Memorial Museum, Trinity County Historical Society, Weaverville, CA. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

Adon Poli and E. V. Roberts of the University of California suggested that only on the lowest-site-quality lands, those that were not very productive for timber, was such conversion profitable in the long run. Conversion attempts continued until the economic value of timber increased during the late 1950s, while livestock values declined. This isolated region shapes its people as much as its people shape the land. A 1930s advertisement for Hayfork (see figure 25) closely mirrors the Yurok worldview (figure 17), yet both cultures would deny they had much in common. The town is the center of the universe. Beyond recognizable local communities or watering holes is a boundary separating the valley of Hayfork from places beyond. There is no connection to the outside world but simply roads that lead to nowhere. The physical elements, in this case a stylized sky instead of ocean, dominate the other world, and the importance of other communities decreases with distance from Hayfork. Community isolation remains higher in Trinity County, southeastern Humboldt County, and western Siskiyou County than in surrounding areas. Over time, agricultural lands have been subdivided for houses, some of the hay meadows near the gold-bearing rivers have been dredged, and dams such as Shasta and Trinity have transformed historic open country in the lowland Klamaths into lakes. Two developments in

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recent decades will continue to supplement the existing agricultural activity in the Klamaths: one illegal and one legal. The illegal industry, and by far the largest cash crop in California, is the growing of marijuana (also, “grass,” “boo,” “bud,” “ganja,” “maryjane,” “weed,” and many other names). In the 1970s, Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties became known as the Emerald Triangle (a takeoff on the opium-growing Emerald Triangle of southeast Asia) because of the high quality of the weed grown there. This area was the largest producer of marijuana in the United States at the time, but the high value of the crops, and their clandestine nature, led to confrontation and violence: booby traps, shootings, and kidnappings. Concentrated law enforcement eventually drove much of this activity out of the region or indoors and has become a model for reducing pot-growing activities. However, large marijuana-growing operations are now common across the length of California, and gardens are still tended on private and public lands in the Klamaths. Law enforcement is fighting an uphill battle. In 2005, 112,000 plants were removed from Shasta-Trinity National Forests, three times the amount that was removed across the whole of California fifteen years earlier. An individual mature plant has a street value of several thousand dollars, and the resulting profit potential has encouraged drug cartels to supplant the historic individual entrepreneur. The pressure on the growers has increased, with law-enforcement personnel seizing a million plants worth $4.5 billion across California in 2005 (a twentyfold increase since 1990), making most identifications from helicopter. Though growers have damaged some lands in the process (through erosion, pesticide use, garbage, and litter), these effects happen in legal agricultural operations, too. Roger Rodoni, county supervisor for rural southeastern Humboldt County, questions the effectiveness of spending public funds ($4 billion nationwide on marijuana eradication in 2004) with no visible reduction in activity. Yet legalization, for all the sales tax it might generate, carries social burdens as well, and the debate will continue, just as the grass will keep growing in the Emerald Triangle. The most surprising legal growth in the agricultural sector has been cultivation of grapes for the emerging wine industry in the region. On the east side of Trinity Lake, Alpen Cellars began growing white wine grapes in the 1980s on the East Fork Trinity River, and other grapegrowing operations have flourished in Lewiston and Hyampom. Alpen Cellars makes Pinot Gris and Chardonnay from East Fork grapes and a Sangiovese from Hyampom Valley grapes. Potential production (up to 4.5 tons per acre) is less than that in other grape-growing areas in

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California (which produce 7 to 10 tons per acre), but the quality is quite high. Yet this yield is much higher than Pinot Noir plantings in off years in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, which have produced under a ton per acre. In 2004, the U.S. government formally recognized a “Trinity Lakes” viticultural area, consisting of about 90,000 acres surrounding Trinity and Lewiston lakes down to Douglas City, even though only about 30 acres across that wide area are currently planted in grapes (compared to about 500,000 acres across California). This recognition will be a major marketing advantage for local grapes and wines, because it allows a designation of origin for local wines. Development of better transportation into the region, so that residents can reduce their dependence on locally grown produce, and the destruction of alluvial farmland by gold dredging and dams, has limited most modern local agricultural development. For example, only Alpine and San Francisco counties currently have lower agricultural output in California than Trinity County, at least through legal crops. The two largest regional valleys, Scott (Siskiyou Co.) and Hayfork (Trinity Co.), still are large hay producers, but the area now imports most vegetables. Conversely, the access to larger markets will be a boon for local wineries, which can now distribute Trinity Lakes wines around the world.

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a lot of logs In contrast to the limited amount of agricultural land, plenty of forestland and trees exist in the Klamaths. It might appear that the trees are growing faster than we can cut them or that perhaps we haven’t cut very many. The truth is that we have cut quite a few trees, and most cutover lands have regrown new forests. The region probably has more trees now than ever before, but these trees tend to be, on average, smaller than the average one in historical forests. The history of logging in the region is colorful and complex. But there are many shades to this history, depending on when events happened and who had the rights to harvest. The earliest loggers, of course, were the Indians, but their lack of metal technology limited the impact they could have on the land. They often used trees that had fallen and split the stem into planks for use in building houses and other purposes. Exploitation of Klamath timber by whites followed the track of the gold rush. Water-powered mills operated in Sebastopol and Santa Cruz (both near San Francisco) by the early 1840s, but operators had no way

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to build a mechanized mill in the Klamaths until the 1850s, when wagon roads finally pierced the upper Trinity River region. The earliest type of mill was a long pit over which a log was placed, with one man at the pit bottom, eating sawdust, and the other astride the log. Using a long crosscut saw known for obvious reasons as a “misery whip,” the men hand sawed planks off the log. Surely, one of the pit sawyers must have invented the phrase “This is the pits.” By the time the gold rush had attracted white immigrants, Mexico had ceded California to the United States, and despite claims from the Indians that the lands were theirs, the Klamaths became unrestricted public domain controlled by the federal government for the hopeful miners streaming in to find their fortunes. The policy of the United States was to divest its lands to private ownership as an incentive to settle the West. The Preemption Act of 1841, the Homestead Act of 1862, and the Timber and Stone Act of 1878 all provided ownership opportunities for individuals who honestly settled on the lands to which they received title. But the largest beneficiaries were the railroads that served the West as a result of the Railroad Land Grant Act of 1866. To encourage the construction of rail lines, the United States gave the railroads ownership of alternate sections of land (each a square mile) for a distance of 20 miles each side of the tracks. If the land adjacent to the tracks was already in private ownership, the strip could be extended to 30 miles from the track. This approach created a checkerboard ownership pattern of public domain and private ownership in wide swaths along railroad rightsof-way, a policy that complicates good land management even today. Fraud became rampant as ownership of “green gold” was consolidated into large companies. The intent of disposing of the public domain, as naïve as it might seem today, was to encourage settlers to live sustainably on 160-acre blocks to which they were given title. On the coast, “settlers” were brought in; each settler staked out a land claim, installed a doll house 12 by 14 inches (the law specified a 12 by 14 cabin, implying but not specifying that the measurement was in feet), and then sold the parcel to a land and timber company. Much of the valuable redwood region was “settled” in this manner, which accounts for the high proportion of privately owned land there (about 75 percent), versus 30 to 40 percent private ownership in the Klamaths, where the timber largely consisted of less valuable “whitewoods” like pine and fir. The railroad companies, like the timber companies, also violated the terms of the law, and the Oregon and California Railroad land grant is a classic example.

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Congress, in 1866, granted the states of Oregon and California the usual checkerboard ownership, with the authority to designate a company to build a railroad and receive the lands in return for the construction costs. Under this law, it was quite legal for, and in fact expected that, these companies would sell the land to recover the costs of rail construction. But no company came forward to construct the line in either state, so in 1869, Congress reauthorized the land grant, specifying a new deadline and setting forth three conditions for selling the lands: the purchaser had to be a bona fide settler, no individual could purchase more than 160 acres (a quarter square mile), and the land had to be sold for $2.50 an acre or less. In both Oregon (the Oregon and California Railroad Company [O&C]) and California (the California and Oregon Railroad Company [C&O]), these restrictions were commonly ignored. In 1870, the C&O Railroad Company reorganized as the Central Pacific Railroad Company, and in 1887, it became the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. By this time, Southern Pacific also controlled the O&C Railroad Company. In 1903, Southern Pacific realized the financial power that its land base provided and discontinued the sale of land. In Oregon, the state legislature thought that this new policy would hurt settlement of the region, and by 1908, it had convinced Congress to reclaim all unsold “O&C lands.” In 1916, after much litigation, Congress passed an act returning 2.4 million acres in Oregon to the federal government as recovered public-domain land. Management of these O&C lands fell to the General Land Office, and later to its successor, the Bureau of Land Management. In areas where the railroad checkerboard had been carved out of lands later designated as forest reserves, now called national forests, the reclaiming of the land resulted in a checkerboard where the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management manage alternate sections under different management direction, creating a bureaucratic nightmare that has yet to be untangled. The recent Northwest Forest Plan has homogenized some of the disparate management issues (which I discuss later in this chapter and in chapter 15). In California, the railroad checkerboard lands stretched from the Sacramento River valley west into the Klamath Mountains, reaching about 10 miles west of existing Highway 3. Unlike Oregon’s legislature, California’s was more effectively lobbied by Southern Pacific, which had successfully marketed the settlement of Southern California. Southern Pacific also had much more to lose in California, because it owned more than the old C&O railroad land grant that parallels

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today’s Interstate 5. Through its successful lobbying, the railroad retained its position as the largest private landowner in the state, with its holdings including the checkerboard lands of the Klamath Mountains. Southern Pacific temporarily merged with the Santa Fe Railroad, and the new entity’s land holdings became The Santa Fe Pacific Timber Company. The company sold its lands to Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) in 1987, the year of the big fires in the Klamaths. When the smoke cleared, SPI had increased its holdings by over 500,000 acres, and over 80 percent of these new holdings were in Trinity, Shasta, and Siskiyou counties. SPI is a family-held dynasty whose president, “Red” Emmerson, started in the mill industry in Arcata with his father in 1949. By 1974, the company had incorporated and gone from private to public ownership and back again. The company now owns over 1.6 million acres in California and runs fourteen sawmills; in 2003, it did $1.3 billion in sales. Emmerson is considered the largest landowner in the United States, with holdings worth $2 billion to $3 billion, although by the early 2000s, he was much less active in company management. Most of the company’s Klamath holdings are in the eastern portion, but SPI is a major player in the future of forestry in the Klamaths. SPI’s timber harvest has been much more aggressive than has that of its predecessor, Southern Pacific, and SPI has involved itself in local controversies, receiving criticism for too much clear-cutting and closure of the Hayfork mill, actions that were perhaps economically sensible for the company but were less sensitive to local people and the land. Bracketing the western Klamaths are the holdings of the Simpson Timber Company, another powerful family-held company. Forged in Washington state in 1890, Simpson expanded into California and now owns over 400,000 acres, primarily in the redwood belt west of the Klamath province. About one-third of the company’s lands are in the lower Klamath River area. When the public domain of the West was being carved up, the Klamaths were fortunate in being so remote and in having forests that, though diverse, were not as economically valuable as more accessible forests like the redwoods. Outside of patented gold claims and railroad grants, much of the Klamaths remained unreserved public domain into the late 1800s. In 1891, Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act, which reserved no actual forest but allowed the president to set aside and reserve “any part of the public lands wholly or in part covered with timber or undergrowth . . . as a public reservation.” President Benjamin Harrison promptly set aside fifteen reserves

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covering 13 million acres, and his successor, Grover Cleveland, added another 5 million acres. In 1897, Cleveland added thirteen more reserves and 21 million acres and, in response to substantial criticism of this expansion, supported the Organic Act of 1897 that essentially defined the mission of the reserves. The reserves were managed under the Department of the Interior, which had previously managed the lands as public domain. But a burgeoning Bureau of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture, led by Chief Gifford Pinchot, managed to wrestle the 63 million acres of forest reserves from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture in 1905, as part of the creation of the Forest Service. The reserves were renamed “national forests” in 1907, setting in place the modern national forest system. In the Klamath region, the Forest Service created the Klamath, Shasta, Six Rivers, and Trinity National Forests. The national forest system has since grown to 191 million acres, and the government has consolidated its administration, but more significant than its increase in size has been its shift in mission. The Forest Service recognized that recreation on national forest lands was an important use of the lands, but the national parks, in place since the 1872 creation of Yellowstone National Park, were the anointed federally managed “grounds” for tourists. The early Forest Service didn’t help its image by lobbying for control of the parks and suggesting that limited logging would be tolerated there. Gifford Pinchot, after being fired as chief of the Forest Service, added fuel to the fire by his support in 1913 of the Hetch Hetchy Dam that flooded the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, a valley comparable in grandeur to Yosemite Valley, for the purpose of supplying domestic water to San Francisco. His vocal but unsuccessful opponent was John Muir, who died shortly after losing the battle for Hetch Hetchy, and these two ex-friends immortalized the schism between use and preservation. When the National Park Service was created in 1916, friction between the Forest Service and this new competing land-management agency continued for decades. New national parks were often carved out of national forests. The Forest Service responded by creating its own system of administratively defined wilderness, beginning with the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico championed by noted conservationist Aldo Leopold. In the Klamaths, administrative designation of the Trinity Alps Recreation Area, consisting of 136,000 acres, took place in 1926, and in 1932, the area became the Trinity Alps Primitive Area, one of the largest primitive areas in the national forest system.

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In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, but controversy over proposed wilderness in California delayed establishment of most of today’s formally designated wilderness. Local citizens were concerned that the Trinity Alps would lose formal wilderness status if the two sides did not break their stalemate. Leonard Morris and Alice Jones were among the members of a committee that recommended not only retention of the original primitive area but the addition of as much roadless contiguous land as possible as formal wilderness; surprisingly, the county board of supervisors endorsed the action. The Forest Service had proposed deleting portions of the old primitive area that were in the railroad checkerboard ownership, primarily in the eastern section and the area north of Coffee Creek. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article titled “A Granny Assails Watt” about Weaverville resident Florence Morris’s criticism of Interior Secretary James Watt’s prodevelopment and antiwilderness agenda. After numerous hearings and chock-full public meetings, and election of a new California state senator, Congress passed the California Wilderness Bill, and in 1984, former governor and then president Ronald Reagan signed it. Wilderness in the region now exceeds a million acres, including the 500,000-acre Trinity Alps Wilderness, plus another 600,000 acres in the Marble Mountain, Yolla Bolly–Middle Eel, Siskiyou, and smaller Russian Peak, Red Buttes, Chanchelulla, Castle Crags, and North Fork wildernesses. In the eastern part of the Trinity Alps Wilderness, land trades since 1984 have resolved much of the checkerboard ownership, allowing the Forest Service to consolidate its ownership in the wilderness and enabling SPI to consolidate its holdings outside. National forest lands outside of wilderness have been subject to some of the most contentious debates in American society. Gifford Pinchot first enunciated a policy of multiple use through the Forest Service publication of a small booklet called The Use of the National Forest Reserves in 1905, which defined appropriate multiple uses. His goal of managing forestland for the “greatest good for the greatest number over the long run” became a mantra for the agency, but management by the forest rangers was largely custodial until after World War II. In the press of increased demand for housing, timber production became more important and was a particularly visible part of how the Forest Service was directed to manage national forests. In 1960, the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act encoded the multiple-use mandate in law but left the balance of competing uses to administrative prerogative. Stunned by a decision against clear-cutting in West Virginia, the Forest Service pushed for new

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enabling legislation and received it in 1976 with the National Forest Management Act. Congress asked for detailed forest-level management plans, presumably as a blueprint for funding, but then largely ignored these expensive plans. The forest plans quantified outputs such as recreation days and timber production with a complex computer program called FORPLAN, but the program’s strict assumptions, limited scale, and nonspatial quantification was insufficient to deal with aesthetics, fish habitat, and other issues that relied as much or more on what was left behind than on the outputs of national forests. This situation reminds me of a TV ad for a mail service in which a harried clerk repeatedly picks up a phone and says “We can do this!” but after repeating this exercise about ten times, he stares into the distance and moans “How am I gonna do all this?” The Forest Service was in a similar bind in its attempts to deal with conflicts between timber production, recreation, and wildlife. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration pushed for greatly expanded timber outputs from the national forests. In the Department of Agriculture, the new assistant secretary for natural resources and environment, responsible for supervising the Forest Service, was John Crowell Jr., former counsel for the Louisiana-Pacific Corporation, which had major redwood timber holdings in Northern California. As timber production, primarily by clear-cutting, ratcheted up, a little-known owl raised a big hoot. The northern spotted owl, known to inhabit older forests of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington, was declining in population, in part because of fragmentation of its habitat by logging. Through a succession of unsuccessful plans, the incompatibility of intensive timber production and spotted owls became obvious, and in 1990, the owl joined the list of “threatened” species under the Endangered Species Act. In 1995, the piecemeal forest-by-forest approach to management of northern spotted owls gave way to an ecosystem-based plan called the Northwest Forest Plan. The plan sharply curtailed timber production on public land across the range of the owl, lowering it from its high of about 6 billion board feet per year to less than 1 billion. It also designated large areas as “late-successional reserves” to protect old-growth dependent species. Riparian, or streamside corridors, were ruled offlimits to timber harvest. Today, ten years later, there is talk of amending the Northwest Forest Plan to keep what has worked well and change what has not. Of course, depending upon the values of the person one talks to, every piece of the plan has either worked great, needs some fixing, or has been a disaster.

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Figure 26. The Brown Bear Quartz Mill at the appropriately named town of Deadwood. The picture is undated but is likely from the late 1800s. Wood is stacked to run the boiler in the mill. (Source: Trinity 1962. Photograph courtesy of the Trinity County Historical Society, Weaverville, CA.)

Early logging centered around the gold-mining settlements that utilized the wood for mine timbers, heating and cooking, and housing. Loggers had no market outside the region because they had no way to transport the wood any distance. Radiating out from the settlements were areas that even today have never seen the saw. By the 1870s, mules were hauling in temporary mills piece by piece to remote locations like Deer Creek on the Stewart’s Fork (today’s Stuart Fork), where milled lumber was needed to build the flumes and bridges carrying Stewart’s Fork water to hydraulic mining operations. Steam-powered stamp mills at the sites of gold-bearing quartz veins required substantial wood to keep the mills operating at maximum capacity (see figure 26). But the timber industry was small in the region until after World War II, when better transportation developed and demand was high for Douglas-fir, the dominant species along with ponderosa pine in the region. One exception to this slow-starting industry was in the eastern Klamaths, where the Lamoine Lumber and Trading Company, at the

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Figure 27. Lumber production in Siskiyou and Trinity counties, 1948–2001. (Source: State Board of Equalization, California. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

turn of the twentieth century, logged mostly old-growth ponderosa pine with railroad logging systems. Lamoine’s lands were in the watersheds along what is now Interstate 5 across the crest of the Trinity Mountains, from current day Lakehead north to Castella. Temporary small-gauge railroads were constructed through the area to enable harvest of mostly large ponderosa pine, most of which was made into fruit boxes. The railroad carried “steam donkeys,” powerful steam engines attached to long spools of cable, which could haul logs from some distance to the tracks, where they were loaded onto railcars and taken to the mill at the town of Lamoine. The lumber was then shipped south by rail to Redding and beyond. Many smaller outfits in the eastern Klamaths, such as Lamoine, Northern California Lumber Company, and Weed Lumber, eventually were consolidated into larger companies such as Fruit Growers Supply Company and Sierra Pacific Industries. After World War II, timber production in the redwood region shifted from primarily redwood to both redwood and Douglas-fir, and peak lumber production occurred between 1955 and 1964 in the coastal counties. Much of the production came from private lands, because only 25 percent of the timber base was publicly owned there. In the Klamaths, where public lands predominated, a double peak in production occurred (see figure 27). The first production peak for Trinity and Siskiyou counties was consistent with the 1955–64 peak for the redwood region. I remember seeing trucks racing down the dusty red roads when I first began visiting the Trinity Alps in the 1950s; with their loads of huge pine and fir logs, the semis seemed oblivious to our poor family sedan. With the dust they created and the dust we stirred up, everything

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in our car always had a generous coating of red by the time we arrived at Trinity Alps Resort. A second peak in lumber production began in the late 1970s; production dipped in the early 1980s recession and then hit a peak almost as high as the one in the 1960s during the Reagan-era push for increased timber harvest. Beginning in 1988, the “spotted owl effect” came into play, and production has continued to decline to the present because of the harvest delays necessitated by some of the “bells and whistles” constraints set by the Northwest Forest Plan. Public-land harvest is unlikely ever to reach peaks as high as those of the 1960s and 1980s. Public-land timber is mostly reserved, and even when it is available, capacity to mill lumber is more limited now: fewer than 25 percent of the lumber mills that were operating in the 1960s still operate today. Before 1972, California had a weak forest-practices act “regulating” private forest harvest; the act essentially relied on the goodwill of private landowners to harvest using sustainable practices. The impact of logging between 1945 and 1970, particularly the effect of roads, was tremendous, and the legacy of that erosion still creates problems today in some locations. Not only were access roads placed at high density, but also logging methods here almost exclusively used tractors to pull the logs to the landings, for loading onto trucks. On steep slopes, the tractors crawled up the slope, were tied onto a load of logs, and then dragged the logs down the hill. Repeated use of the same skid trail essentially created a road network across the harvested unit that drained water right to the landing. Up to one-third of a tractor-yarded unit could be covered with these entrenched skid trails. The use of cable systems, a much less damaging yarding method for steep slopes, was common in Oregon and Washington but almost never employed in northwestern California before the 1970s. Most skid trails were not water barred (by angling a small berm of dirt across the road to direct water off the road), and loggers simply abandoned many early roads after they had removed the timber. In 1973, a new Forest Practices Act was signed into law, and with regulations to date, it is one of the most stringent forest-practices laws in the nation. Though regulations allow clear-cutting on private land, the size of any cut is restricted, and the operation must demonstrate reforestation before cutting an adjacent area. Road and skid-trail restrictions mitigate many of the effects of harvest. Monitoring of fish and wildlife is common for the industrial forestry sector (but not for the smaller, nonindustrial landowners). Some critics say that even these tighter restrictions are not tight enough, and their argument has some merit, yet the regulatory environment is very costly to landowners.

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Figure 28. Cumulative volume of stored sediment in Redwood Creek in 1947, 1964, and 1980. Between 1947 and 1964, sediment increased about 30 percent in the drainage. By 1980, the total amount had not declined, but the area had less sediment in the middle reaches and more in the lower reaches, indicating a slow flushing process at work. (Source: Hagans, Weaver, and Madej 1986. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

The cost of preparing individual timber-harvest plans that describe the activity and mitigation of impact can reach into five figures. Though today’s harvest methods are much less damaging than those of the past, they are occurring in watersheds often damaged by past practices. The incremental impact of a current operation on a landscape damaged by past practices is known as a cumulative effect. One of the best-studied watersheds for cumulative effects is Redwood Creek, which forms much of the western border of the Klamath Mountains. Home to the southern portion of Redwood National Park, Redwood Creek is covered with coast redwood near its mouth and has a mosaic of Douglas-fir forest, oak woodland, and prairie farther upstream. The upper watershed was heavily logged after World War II: more than 20 percent of the watershed was logged between 1949 and 1954. Erosion from largely unregulated logging roads and skid trails dumped enormous amounts of sediment into the main channel of Redwood Creek (see figure 28). In 1947, about 10 million cubic meters

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of sediment were stored in the river channel. By the time of the 1964 flood, the amount of stored channel sediment in gravel bars and terraces was almost 50 percent above the 1947 volume. This “slug” of sediment has been slowly working its way downstream since then. Each storm activates some sediment, moves it downstream, and then redeposits it. By 1980, total sediment load had decreased along much of the channel length to below its 1964 levels (the difference between the 1980 and 1964 lines in figure 28), although it was still well above 1947 levels. At the boundary between the upper and middle reaches, the recovery has been about halfway back to the 1947 level, whereas at the boundary between the middle and lower reaches, recovery is about one-third of the way back to the earlier level. Estimates are that the slug will persist for twenty-five to one hundred years, eventually working its way to the ocean. Along its journey, it will continue to raise the level of the channel, decrease the average bedload size, widen the channel where it currently sits, and decrease the number of pools. At the mouth, little change in sediment storage occurred between 1964 and 1980 because of delivery of sediment from upstream; about 5 million cubic meters of additional sediment sit in the lower reaches of Redwood Creek. So current harvest, under much-improved practices, nevertheless takes place in a watershed that has suffered from previous land use, and it should be evaluated from that perspective. Unfortunately, little technology is available to do an adequate job of identifying cumulative effects, and the professional foresters who prepare timber harvest plans tend to ignore such effects. Sustainable management demands better methodologies and training.

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chapter 11

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Dam the World

On the approach to Trinity Dam (see figure 29), I am awed by the sheer magnitude of this engineering marvel. The canyon is filled with tons of earth, forming a dam a half mile wide at its top and a half mile thick at its base. It can hold 2.76 million acre-feet of water (an acre-foot is a volume equivalent to one-foot deep over an area of one acre), a volume difficult to imagine. This amount is a bit less than a cubic mile of water but comprises one of the largest lakes in California. Now commonly known as Trinity Lake, the lake was originally known as the Fairview Reservoir and then was renamed Clair Engle Lake after the congressman who ushered through the legislation in the late 1950s that allowed the Bureau of Reclamation to build the dam. During construction, most of the land upstream of the dam below dam elevation was skinned off to bare dirt. Some places, like Carrville and Trinity Alps Resort, were above the 2,370-foot-elevation contour and were spared. Other places below that contour, such as the original Trinity Center and Minersville, were either razed or moved. The old cemetery at Trinity Center, which contained many graves more than a century old, was moved uphill. Most Native American sites were simply inundated due to lack of information about their locations. The project was the largest clear-cut I ever saw. The damming of the Trinity, which was completed in 1962, was not the first such project on the Trinity and was certainly not intended to be the last. But Trinity Dam, along with its small, immediately downstream companion Lewiston Dam, is the most permanent. 164

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Figure 29. Trinity Dam above Lewiston, California. (Source: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.)

The first dam on the Trinity was built in the gold-rush days. Known as Arkansas Dam, after the company that designed and built it in 1851, it was engineered about 2 miles south of Junction City as a means to clear the riverbed of water to allow placer miners to remove gold from downstream pools. The dam’s builders constructed a race on one side of the floodplain to contain the river flow, exposing the gold-bearing gravel of the river for almost a mile. The first dam and its successor were both washed away by high water; the poorly engineered structures gave way in the first rains. The third attempt in 1854 was more successful as a dam but less successful as an investment. The dam successfully diverted the river, but the excavations of the dry channel proved to be monetarily disappointing, and the dam was abandoned in 1857. The second known dam on the Trinity was an act of nature, created by a large landslide in the vicinity of Burnt Ranch. In early February 1890, a rare but characteristic flood event took place in the Klamaths. A large snowfall was followed by a “pineapple express,” a warm, rainy storm moving in from the Pacific. Such storms drop a lot of rain, even at high elevation, which melts the snowpack and chokes the streams with runoff. The raging Trinity River, already at flood stage, undercut the bank of an unstable area, and a huge landslide began to rumble down the south side of the canyon. Another slide had taken place along

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the same path about ten years earlier, killing a number of miners working on the gold-bearing bar below and creating a temporary dam on the Trinity River that breached within hours. The 1890 slide filled the canyon with enough material to create a 100- to 150-foot-high dam, causing major damage both downstream and upstream. The landslide produced its own tsunami that rushed downstream and swept away a Chinese mining cabin that was supposedly 300 feet above the river. Reportedly, only two of the five or six Chinese miners who lived there were home at the time, and they were swept to their deaths. The slide became known as China Slide. It backed up the Trinity River, and the swollen channel, choked with debris from the slide and from upstream, became a large lake, increasing in depth and flooding houses on upstream flats during the first day. The lake extended from Burnt Ranch past Taylor Flat, now known as Del Loma. The water created a 13-milelong lake that stabilized by late afternoon as the floodwaters finally breached the dam. The water level was about 100 feet deep at the dam at that time, and the river slowly began to erode the dam, receding to about 75 feet deep by day four. It took about ten years for the river to regain its old bed. Today, China Slide is identified on topographic maps but is unmarked on the highway except for the occasional slide debris that continues to waste away from upslope. Driving west on Highway 299, one can see the slide just past the Burnt Ranch transfer-station road, and a turnout just past the slide gives the visitor a panoramic view of the river and the slide. The third big dam occurred in the Salmon River during the big flood of 1964. In December 1964, the circumstances were much the same as in 1890. A pineapple express inundated the snow-covered backcountry, and the steady rain created a swollen river that undercut an unstable slope about 7 miles upstream from the confluence with the Klamath River. Just like the China Slide, the Blommer Slide of December 22 was so massive that it filled the Salmon River canyon and created a dam 150 feet deep. With the steeper gradient of the Salmon River, though, the lake was only 3 miles long when the dam catastrophically failed. Floyd Long, who owned the store near the mouth of the river, had retreated to a cabin up the hill about 5 p.m. as water entered the store. At about 10 p.m. he noticed that the flood-stage river quickly dropped about 6 feet, even though the heavy rain continued unabated. An upstream blockage was his logical conclusion, and it was confirmed about 20 minutes later when the dam broke. The roar of the wall of water and debris was preceded by a hurricane-strength wind, pushed

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ahead of the torrent and breaking and uprooting almost every tree in its path. Though the Department of Water Resources estimated the time of breach at about 5 p.m., Floyd’s story in a letter to Cliff Pierce, which was mailed out on the first Marine helicopter to reach the Salmon River, is the best evidence available for the time of the dam’s rupture. This slide and the massive debris torrent that followed became only a footnote in the chronicle of devastation created by the flood of 1964. That flood swept two couples away from their home downstream at Bluff Creek as a logjam broke at the Highway 96 bridge. Two of the people were found suspended in trees downriver, and the other two washed up on a beach north of Eureka. Today, overgrown traces of the old Highway 96 bridge and the store are barely visible from the Salmon River road. California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR) jumped on the opportunity to exploit the 1964 flood as justification for more dams in the North Coast country: “Each time the dark swirling waters find more works of man built to slow and control them. But in California, man is not yet to that inevitable point in time when he is master of the flood situation, and he is particularly defenseless in the North Coast” (California Department of Water Resources 1965, 1). Whereas the DWR appeared to focus on local interests, the reality was that for three decades state authorities had argued that water in the state did not occur where it was needed (Southern California) and that the water projects were primarily for water diversion to the south rather than for flood control. The primary areas to be exploited were those river systems west of the Sacramento River drainage that flowed unimpeded to the sea, including the Eel, the Klamath, and the Trinity rivers. Somehow, if the water of those rivers could be diverted east to either the Sacramento River or a variety of aqueducts and reservoirs in the Sacramento River drainage, they could then be diverted around the delta region where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers converged, thereby supplying water farther south in the San Joaquin Valley and also over the Tehachapi Mountains to Los Angeles. The state argued that coastal dams would help control floods in the North Coast but claimed it could not find economic justification for single-purpose flood-control dams. At the time of the 1964 flood, plans had been under way for a decade to dam every North Coast stream and to push that water south. The story of California is essentially a story of water. The northwestern California portion of the story began in earnest in 1933, when the state legislature passed a plan to dam the Sacramento River north of Redding and to release the flows more uniformly into the river,

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increasing historic summer flows and buffering the winter high flows. The water would move by gravity to the freshwater delta east of the saltwater San Francisco and Suisun bays and then would be pumped south into the San Joaquin Valley before it was lost to the sea. In these Depression years, the state was not able to market its bonds, and the project lay dormant for two years. President Franklin Roosevelt revived it by signing an emergency relief proclamation authorizing the Bureau of Reclamation to construct a large dam on the Sacramento River. Shasta Dam was finished in 1945 as the cornerstone of the Central Valley Project (CVP), and the canal system that sent the water south from the delta by a massive system of pumps began operation in 1951. As a young boy, I remember seeing this artificial river flowing down the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, but I had no idea where all that water came from or why it flowed up the gentle gradient of the valley. The federal project was also illegally providing water to San Joaquin Valley farmers, because under the 1902 Reclamation Act, the Bureau of Reclamation could provide water only to farmers who owned 160 acres or less and resided on the land. Though later legislation in the 1980s increased the acreage limitation to 960 acres and eliminated the residency requirements, these new requirements still were too restrictive for the corporate farmers of the Central Valley. California had a mantra of growth, and the populist vision of the Bureau of Reclamation was too myopic. California needed its own water plan that was not subject to federal regulations, and this time California would pay for most of it. In 1944 and again in 1952, California offered to purchase the CVP from the federal government but was refused. The state’s independent planning for water resources began after World War II with passage of the State Water Resources Act, but simultaneously the Bureau of Reclamation continued its grand water plan for the West. Both institutions planned to harness the “excess” water of the north state and ship it south. The bureau’s plan, however, was more regional in scope, with plans to ship water between states, and had also been in process several years longer than the state plan had. In California, the bureau focused on diverting the Klamath River system inland and south. Diverting it south through Shasta Valley into Shasta Lake was relatively easy, but the real water lay to the west where precipitation (figure 3) and runoff were much higher. The flow of the Klamath near its mouth is much greater than at the point that it crosses Interstate 5. The Klamath diversion was first proposed in a document called the United Western Investigation: Interim Report on

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Reconnaissance, which Marc Reisner, in his book Cadillac Desert, called “the best kept secret in the history of water development in the West” (275). The diversion was but one of many grand schemes that might be described as engineering on steroids. The centerpiece of the project would be an 813-foot-high dam near the mouth of the Klamath named Ah Pah dam, in the language of the Yurok people whose lands (and those of the Hupas) would be flooded. It would stand almost as tall as the Transamerica Pyramid building in San Francisco but of course be much more massive. It would flood 40 miles of the Trinity River, the lower Salmon River, and 70 miles of the Klamath River. It would then pump all this water upstream in the Trinity and through a large Trinity tunnel to the Sacramento River. It and its adjacent reservoirs would capture 15 million acre-feet of water for the south. What saved the Klamath from the Ah Pah dam had nothing to do with the dam’s local impact. Oregon and Washington interests were outraged that the bureau’s “final solution” might well involve diverting Columbia River water to the south. Southern California interests also fought the Klamath diversion, thinking the plan was simply a way to divert their attention from the potential loss of Colorado River water, which they were using far in excess of their allotment. The bureau was authorized in 1955 to complete Trinity Dam on the upper Trinity, which would divert about 2.5 million acre-feet to the south, but it was never able to revive the large-scale Klamath diversion. Soon after the completion of Trinity Dam, the bureau published a new plan that focused on the Colorado River basin. This plan called for damming the Grand Canyon on both sides of Grand Canyon National Park and constructing two more dams on the Trinity River, leaving open the possibility of the Ah Pah dam as well. But the water amounts proposed by the plan clearly could not be met without diverting the Columbia, and in 1965, Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson slipped a rider onto a fish and wildlife bill that prevented the bureau from doing feasibility studies without congressional approval. When the bill passed, it prevented the bureau from surprising Congress with requests for project authorization, because it required congressional approval for preliminary feasibility studies. Though Jackson’s concern was to prevent diversion of the Columbia River system, his rider also slowed down any further bureau studies of the Klamath River system. Instead, California continued the fight to divert the North Coast rivers through its own California Water Plan. Its intent for the North Coast streams was to “pirate” the water that would

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otherwise flow to the sea after successful diversion and then transport it south where it was needed most. Just as nature had built lakes from streams by creating earth-fill dams through landslides, so had it diverted water from one stream to flow down another. Geomorphologists call this process “stream pirating.” It occurs when one stream erodes into the watershed of a second stream and captures the flow upstream from that point, leaving the second stream without its original headwater. Stream pirating can occur in a variety of ways. Where geological formations include very soft bedrock, water can erode much faster through this rock, essentially move its headwater, and divert the upstream portion of any adjacent watershed into which it erodes. A second pirating option is a glacially controlled diversion, whereby meltwater streams in an ice-filled valley begin to erode a low-lying ridge along one side of the valley. One of the best examples of this second form of pirating is in the Trinity Alps. Robert F. Sharp of the California Institute of Technology wrote in 1960, “Any geologist working in this area who fails to report the diversion of the former headwaters of Coffee Creek into the South Fork of the Salmon River at Big Flat will be characterized by his successors as totally blind” (339). As one moves westerly up Coffee Creek from the Trinity River, the creek bends sharply to the south into a wide, glacial valley now filled in with coarse gravel and in the summer, shimmering with corn silk and sedge and the occasional dude ranch. But the creek becomes smaller and then just disappears, leaving the wide valley called Big Flat without a stream. At the end of the public road another mile up is a Forest Service campground, and to its side is a typical roaring stream exiting the high country of Josephine Lake and heading straight down the valley. But when the stream passes the campground, it turns sharply to the west and descends through a narrow gap into the Salmon River drainage. Big Flat is now the headwater of Coffee Creek, a stream that once continued several miles upstream to the south. Sharp hypothesized that in some past glacial period, the meltwater stream on the west side of the valley glacier ran across a low point of the western ridge of the valley and began to erode the ridge (see figure 30). Because the meltwater eroded about 750 feet of resistant metamorphic bedrock and has now created a fairly open and stable gap, Sharp thinks the event happened before the last glacial period that ended some 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. A typical camper at the Forest Service campground is likely unaware that a major pirating episode occurred there or that he or she would have been sitting on a thousand feet of ice when it happened.

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Figure 30. Upper Coffee Creek seen from the west. The upper basin used to flow north (top view) and was the headwater of Coffee Creek. During glaciation, a flow began to the west (middle view), and erosion allowed the South Fork of the Salmon River to pirate the headwater. Today this area is the headwater of the South Fork. (Illustrator: Jack DeLap.)

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Humans did some stream pirating in the Trinity basin when they used giant monitors for hydraulic mining. The most elaborate diversion system was a series of ditches, tunnels, flumes, and siphons to take water from the Stuart Fork and carry it to Oregon Mountain, some 29 miles away. A first, much shorter ditch was designed to divert West Weaver Creek. It was extended to Rush Creek in 1893 and was named the Chaumont Quitry ditch for the father of the Baroness de La Grange (another story has the ditch named for the engineer who designed it, but the baroness’s maiden name was Chaumont-Quitry). The baron and baroness owned the company with rights to the La Grange gold deposits, and they needed a good supply of water to hose the mountain away. The abundant water of the Stuart Fork encouraged Baron de La Grange to organize an expedition up the Stuart Fork to the “twin lakes” (Emerald and Sapphire lakes), and on his return from his ten-day trip, and after a bit of recuperation, he decided to extend the Chaumont Quitry ditch. The baron constructed a small dam at the mouth of Emerald Lake to raise the water level, and the diversion began downstream at Deer Creek, a couple of miles beyond the earlier Buckeye diversion above Oak Flat. Through a system of flumes and ditches, La Grange’s ditch extended down the east side of the Stuart Fork, picking up additional water at Deep Creek, and proceeded to Bridge Camp, where it crossed the river in a 30-inch inverted siphon and later an accompanying 18-inch siphon. In November 1893, to celebrate the completion of the ditch, the baron tossed a live rabbit into the siphon, and the poor lagomorph, drowned and crushed by water pressure, emerged dead into the hands of the baroness waiting on the opposite side of the river. From there, the ditch carried water along the western flank of the river, passing through a 9,000-foot tunnel to Rush Creek, where it joined the older Chaumont Quitry ditch. Two more tunnels and several siphons eventually brought the water to West Weaver Creek, where it entered a reservoir at the top of Oregon Mountain. The hydraulic pressure of a gravity feed from the reservoir powered the giant monitors for the mine, which was the largest hydraulic mine in the world at its time of peak production. The entire 29-mile ditch system became known as the La Grange ditch. The system required tremendous maintenance, and after abandonment by its ditch tenders, was inoperable by the early 1920s. Today, remnants of the trestles, tunnels, and ditches remain, and at the terminus of the eastern side ditch on the Stuart Fork is a small wooden cross, representing the end of a ditch and the end of an era.

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The California Water Plan was the master water pirate of all time. The state described it as an “amazing venture.” But it had to be paid for by bonds authorized by the voters of the state. In 1958, Democrat Edmund G. “Pat” Brown became governor, following Goodwin Knight. Although the plan had been fostered by Republican Knight and his predecessor, Earl Warren, Brown saw it as his legacy: “I wanted to build that goddamned water project. . . . I wanted it to be a monument to me,” he said in later years (Reisner 1986, 361). The state legislature, through the Burns-Porter Act, authorized $1.75 billion in bonds, well below what they knew the plan would actually cost. Brown, a Northern Californian, strongly supported the bond issue in the 1960 election, even though it largely benefited Southern Californians. He defended this stand by stating that if the bonds didn’t pass, Southern Californians would move to where the water was and despoil Northern California. Of course, the water plan as initially proposed would have despoiled Northern California more than any Southern Californian could, so Governor Brown’s desire for a personal monument was more likely the real reason. Surprisingly, Southern California water interests initially opposed the bonds. They were afraid of losing their hold on Colorado River water and opposed subsidies for southern San Joaquin Valley corporate farmers. But they came around and helped carry the Southern California counties in favor of the bonds. Only ten of the fifty-eight counties voted in favor of the bonds, but the populous Southern California counties had the votes, and the bonds passed by less than a 1 percent margin. California’s plan was initially more provincial in design than those of the Bureau of Reclamation, focusing first on a large dam on the Feather River, a major tributary to the Sacramento River near Oroville. The state legislature approved the Feather River Project in 1951, and during the years needed for specific design work, the State Water Resources Board developed the California Water Plan, with the Feather River Project as its initial unit. The Oroville Dam would augment flows from Shasta Dam down the Sacramento and help generate power to pump water over the Tehachapi Mountains to Southern California. But beyond the Feather River Project, the California Water Plan was mostly conceptual, dealing with the storage and diversion possibilities in each large hydrologic unit. In recognition of the critical role that water would play in the state’s growth, the board was bureaucratized as the Department of Water Resources in 1956, the year that the California Water Plan was released to the public.

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Figure 31. Dams proposed on northwestern California rivers by the California Water Plan of 1957. (Source: California Department of Water Resources 1957. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

The North Coast rivers were a central theme of the California Water Plan. Each revision of the plan tended to be a variation on the Bureau of Reclamation Klamath diversion. Over the next decade, a number of alternative dam and water-conveyance proposals were released, and every one contemplated damming almost the entire length of the Klamath River (west of what is now Interstate 5) and the Trinity River. One dam would back up water to the foot of the next dam, so that water coming down the Klamath River could be pumped up the length of the Trinity and then conveyed via tunnel to the Sacramento River system. The water would then be shunted south, primarily to feed agricultural interests to the south. The names of the dams and lakes changed at various times, but the plan remained the same: save the great waste of water to the sea. The first iteration of the plan called for dams along the Klamath, Smith, Van Duzen, Mad, and Trinity rivers (see figure 31). As in the

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Bureau of Reclamation plans, little actual siting information was available, so engineers placed dam and reservoir locations wherever they wanted. There were a lot of good engineering reasons why dams in the most unstable terrain on the Pacific Coast were foolish, but that fact did not stop planners from pursuing the engineering opportunity of a lifetime. They proposed unstable dam sites with caveats: “Recent geologic exploration at the Slate Creek dam site [main stem Klamath] has unearthed unfavorable foundation conditions which indicate that it may be more economical to select an alternative site” and “However, preliminary geological examination indicated conditions which appear somewhat unfavorable to the most economical construction and, in consequence, further study is in process to find a more favorable alternative [Ranger Station dam site on the Mad River]” (California Department of Water Resources 1957, 167, 168). The voters of California appear to have saved the main stem of the Klamath from the California Water Plan by passing an initiative in 1924 that prohibited dam construction west of what is now Interstate 5; later reinterpretation of the initiative’s legal implications was the ultimate salvation. The Bureau of Reclamation’s Ah Pah dam would not have been constrained by state law, but it was less clear whether state law would constrain state agencies. For the initial years of the water plan, the DWR interpreted this law to apply only to private individuals, and not to the state. Yet after the first iterations of the plan, the main stem of the Klamath began to disappear from the radar screen. By the mid-1960s, the maps showed as many planned but abandoned dam sites as new proposed dams. Five dam sites were abandoned on the main Klamath. Proposed or enlarged reservoirs on the Van Duzen and Mad rivers would flow through tunnels to the proposed Eltapom Reservoir on the South Fork Trinity River, which would flood Hyampom Valley, and then move through a proposed War Cry tunnel to Burnt Ranch Reservoir on the main-stem Trinity River. Pumps would push this water upstream to Helena Reservoir, which would back water up clear past Douglas City, where it would be pumped through a tunnel, parallel to the existing Clear Creek tunnel that services Trinity Lake, over to the Sacramento Valley. Unlike the Ah Pah proposal and the first water plan, the new plan would spare the Hoopa reservation at the mouth of the Trinity River. This project was a major contraction from previous plans and would net only 3 million to 6 million acre-feet of water. In addition to flooding almost every settlement in the vicinity, it would have

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required complete relocation of Highway 299 where it parallels the Trinity River. In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, and the DWR apparently thought it had gained a new life. The Bureau of Reclamation (irrigation), the Corps of Engineers (flood control), and the DWR had joined forces in an interagency effort to tame the North Coast rivers after the big floods of 1964. Within a month of the floods, DWR issued a bulletin documenting the damage and extolling the virtues of flood-control dams. In 1967, alternative new plans were proposed for the lower Trinity and Klamath rivers. Although the previous proposal for the Humboldt dam near the mouth of the Klamath was not resuscitated, the new plan suggested that this project should not be dropped from further consideration. The new plans were “neutral” on the issue of dams on the main stem of the Klamath; a DWR bulletin that year noted that no new dams were being proposed on the main stem west of Hamburg. The Hupas were not so fortunate. On paper, a proposed Beaver Reservoir would again flood Hoopa Valley, although this action was clearly illegal without consent of the federal government, because the Bureau of Indian Affairs managed the Hoopa reservation in trust. Indian-allotted lands, those that had passed to individual Indian ownership, could be condemned by the state, so individual Hupa landowners or members of other tribes that had no formal reservation land had no special federal protection (which, of course, for most Native Americans is an oxymoron). The bulletin suggested that perhaps a trade or lease could be negotiated, without federal legislation, and that the Indian issue might be legally complex and emotionally difficult, but not impossible. With an old movie cowboy in office, almost anything was possible for the state of California. The 1967 plan contained nine options. The Beaver Reservoir was the key element in eight of them, which didn’t look good for the Hupas if one were a betting person. One of the compelling reasons to flood the Hoopa Valley with a dam near the confluence with the Klamath River was that it opened the door to a wing-dam diversion of the Klamath River. Construction of a wing dam would not be constrained by the 1924 law prohibiting a full-channel dam, and the water could be diverted into the Beaver Reservoir and then upstream (see figure 32), fulfilling at least part of the original promise of the Klamath River to deliver water south. With the exception of the Beaver Reservoir, most of the options were similar to those in earlier plans, calling for pumping upstream and a variety of optional tunnels to move the water into the

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Figure 32. One of the nine options in the 1967 California Water Plan for the northwestern rivers. PP = pumping station; PH = hydroelectric power station. (Source: California Department of Water Resources 1967. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

Sacramento River drainage. The plan also contained a number of options for moving the water south, once it was out of the coastal area. But then a cowboy rode to the Indians’ rescue. Some of the worst flooding in 1955 and 1964 had occurred on the Eel River because of development on downstream floodplains. The Eel, like

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many of the coastal streams in the North Coast province of California, flows southeast to northwest along fault lines and is separated from the Klamath province by South Fork Mountain, one of the longest continuous mountains in the world. In the aftermath of the 1964 floods, floodcontrol dams were proposed along the Eel, with the Corps of Engineers in charge of planning. The only dam to survive early planning was the large Dos Rios dam, which would store twice as much water as Shasta Lake but have minimal effects on downstream floods on the main Eel. A local rancher, Richard Wilson, calculated the downstream effect of the dam on a Middle Fork flood and determined that it would reduce a 12-foot crest of the river to 11 feet, 6 inches; his arguments were watertight. But more importantly, the lake would drown the town of Covelo, which included the Round Valley Indian Reservation. Governor Reagan had to make a decision, and in 1969, he decided against the dam, reportedly saying that the government had already broken enough treaties with the Indians. The death of Dos Rios, together with the spiraling cost of finishing the original plan of the California Water Project, brought the era of large dams in the Klamath region to a close. William Warne, who had worked for the Bureau of Reclamation and headed the California Water Plan, chose to ignore his failure to tame the rivers of the North Coast, instead taking credit for a grand integration of nature and culture in his 1973 history of the Bureau of Reclamation: “The people accept the great project as a part of their way of life. This may well be the ultimate accolade bestowed upon a bureaucrat; his work is so well done that his handiwork, in the thoughts of those whom it serves, becomes one with the mountains and the valleys, the rain and the sun. They accept it and cannot do without it” (160). The people of the Klamath Mountains did not accept Warne’s dedication and have been able to live without it. Wild and Scenic Rivers legislation, passed by Congress on October 2, 1968, the same day that coastal Redwood National Park was created, finally stopped the arrogant bureaucrats who tried for almost four decades to completely dam the North Coast. In January 1981, just before the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus proclaimed “wild and scenic river” status for most of the threatened reaches of the Klamath, the Trinity, the Smith, and the Eel rivers, ending forever the dreams of the dam builders. But the battle for water continues to the present. As much as 90 percent of the flow of the Trinity River above the dam, in the early years of its operation, was diverted out of the Trinity basin and east through Clear

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Creek tunnel to Whiskeytown Lake and then to the Sacramento River. Diversion has averaged 74 percent since the inception of the dam (until the implementation of the Trinity River Restoration Program [see chapter 16]). The Trinity River below the dam, after 1964, became about as exciting as the flow from a hose. The whitewater I saw as a child became an overgrown thicket of willow and alder, and the habitat for rearing anadromous fish precipitously declined. The Klamath downstream began to look like a gray water drain, soapy and full of excess nutrients from subsidized agriculture in the Klamath basin. In late summer 2002, a massive number of salmon died in the lower Klamath, and the water wars became habitat wars. How much reclamation is necessary to metamorphose into restoration? In addition to restoring a fully functional natural stream flow, what must we do to allow native organisms to persist at viable levels?

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chapter 12

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Modern Myths and Monsters

When novelist James Hilton visited Weaverville, he remarked that the area was the living embodiment of the Shangri-La of his famous novel Lost Horizon. First published in 1936, and the first-ever paperback in 1939, the book describes a remote, secluded paradise of great beauty and tranquility. The Klamath Mountains are remote, secluded, and beautiful, yet along with tranquil times have come turbulent ones. Native cultures have been disrupted, sensational killings have occurred, and mysterious beings have at times appeared. The modern (post–gold-rush) history of the Klamaths is more than one of gold, timber, and great dams. Though modern culture is in part a reflection of these events, it has also been influenced by myth and monsters.

mysteries in the mountains All mountainous terrain has its unknown places. When the mountains are as remote as the Klamaths, unknown places are often joined by unknown beings. Such is the lure of the place: the surprise that may lurk around any corner, stirring the imagination and making the heart beat faster. Traditional unknowns include animals of the woods we know: black bears, cougars, rattlesnakes, and the like. But nontraditional unknowns, humanoid and other, also have their place, and the Klamaths have more than a fair share, a strange mix of the natural and supernatural. 180

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Although Mount Shasta is not geologically part of the Klamath Mountains, it has great views of the Klamaths to the south and west, and the communities nearby reflect the cultural mix of the region. In the late summer of 1930, Guy Warren Ballard visited Mount Shasta to unravel a rumor that a society of divine men, the Brotherhood of Mount Shasta, lived on the mountain. Though Native Americans believed that the mountain itself was a spiritual being, Ballard and his followers saw and channeled human incarnations on Mount Shasta. The Brotherhood of Mount Shasta, representing a branch of the Great White Lodge (referring to light-derived whiteness rather than racially derived whiteness), introduced itself to Ballard as he rested on a trail. The Ascended Master Saint Germain spoke to him, and after consuming a creamy liquid offered to him by the Master, Ballard left his body and immediately reappeared in southern France. Ballard had many more such “Beam-me-up, Scotty” experiences on the southern slopes of Mount Shasta in succeeding months. He visited Yellowstone, the Tetons, Peru, and the Amazon, a regular world traveler on the cheap. The Ascended Masters gave him advice on eliminating discord and imperfections in one’s life, which he published (although some allege the books were actually written by Guy’s wife, Edna) in a series of books under the pseudonym Godfré Ray King. One of Ballard’s vivid encounters was with a friendly talking panther (of tropical origin), which eventually died in a fight with a ravenous local mountain lion that was going to eat Ballard. The “I AM” movement that Ballard founded, which was quite popular in the late 1930s, spawned other sects inspired by Saint Germain (who was not actually a saint but a count in the 1700s in France: his name was Saint-Germain) and the other Ascended Masters. Foremost among them was the Church Universal and Triumphant, headed by Elizabeth Clare Prophet and located just north of Yellowstone National Park. The group was in the news continually in the 1990s because of allegations of firearm stockpiling (supposedly to defend against the apocalypse) and brainwashing. Other sects related to “I AM” were Astara, founded on memories of life in ancient Egypt and headed by Earlyne Chaney. Chaney and her husband met a Master on the south side of Mount Shasta at Panther Meadows and described seeing a huge brilliant cathedral on the summit of the mountain. Nola Van Valer founded the Radiant School after she happened to meet a spiritual master on the slopes of Mount Shasta several months ahead of Ballard in 1930, although she did not reveal her claim to have temporally

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trumped Ballard until much later. Norman Westfall met Saint Germain and other Masters on Mount Shasta in 1940, but Godfré Ray King did not accept his Johnny-come-lately visions. Westfall went on to change his name to Mah-Atman-Amsumata and to claim an exclusive right to represent the teachings of Saint Germain and the other Masters. He is best remembered for his nonfiction account of the King of the Lemurians. Lemurians were dwarfs from the ancient continent of Lemuria who channeled spiritual wisdom that contained elements of Atlantis, Krishna, angels, and the like. Of course, some stories grow over time, and Lemurians appear to have grown as well. More recent legend depicts the Lemurians as graceful and tall, bearing long flowing hair, wearing white robes and sandals, and having a walnut-sized organ growing out of their foreheads. Living in gold-lined caves inside Mount Shasta, they possess supernatural powers that enable them to disappear at will or to will intruders away. The channelers’ view to the west must have been underwhelming, because the humanoid incarnations occurred only on the south side of Mount Shasta. But the Klamath Mountains have their own legends, some fictionalized and some apparently real. One of my favorite local novels is The Turquoise Dragon by David Rains Wallace. Wallace concocts a former dope-growing forest ranger who gets caught in a scheme to extirpate an extremely rare (in fact unknown to science) salamander called the “turquoise dragon” from the remote reaches of the Trinity Alps. George Kilgore, the ex-ranger, inherits information about the rare creature’s location from a murdered friend and winds his way into the backcountry of “Limestone Creek” to discover a creature seemingly made of “turquoise and lapis lazuli, with ruby belly and topaz eyes” (68). But his friend had planted the salamander there to stop a dam project, so the real native habitat of the salamander remains unknown until near the end of the book. Although Limestone Creek is fictional, Wallace describes it well enough, with real landmarks, to place it several miles southwest of Cecilville. Hired thugs poison the creek to kill the salamanders so that the dam project may proceed, and the source of the endemic amphibian turns out to be in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness about 50 miles to the north. The story has real wildlife interest because of the rich variety of salamanders in the Klamaths. In fact (sometimes stranger than fiction), a new species of salamander—the Scott Bar salamander— was discovered in 2005 where the Scott River meets the Klamath River (see chapter 6). Of course, the novel features a beautiful herpetologist (she studies reptiles and amphibians), along with a few murderous

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cocaine dealers, one of whom collects exceptionally rare creatures. Wallace’s ability to describe the wild country of the Klamaths and the desperate attempts to save the dragon make for a wonderful story. When I finished reading The Turquoise Dragon, I recalled a story I had read when I was in high school about an expedition to the Trinity Alps to find a giant “dragon” that a miner reported seeing in a lake deep in the primitive area. In about 1920, the miner saw a giant alligatorlike “lizard” floating under the surface of a lake not far from Wallace’s fictional Limestone Creek. Sallie Tisdale in Stepping Westward also mentions reports of giant salamanders 5 or 6 feet long in the Klamaths (the region has a real species of salamander called the giant salamander, but it is only a foot or so long). I’ve never been able to relocate the story of the expedition that sought the miner’s lizard, but I can offer a close approximation. After the report filtered out of the backcountry, a retired army colonel mounted an expedition from Sacramento to reach the lake and capture the creature. The lake was somewhere along the SalmonTrinity divide. The expedition reached Weaverville and then struck out for the backcountry, heading up the North Fork of the Trinity River. Of course, the trip was much rougher than expected. Some of the group’s stock slipped off the trail to the canyon bottoms, and several of the colonel’s party deserted and headed back down the canyon. The colonel and his remaining stock and crew finally reached the lake, worried about how they would capture a giant dragon with their remaining resources. Fortunately for them, they never found the dragon, although they observed a large submerged log that moved back and forth under the water. The colonel quietly retreated to Sacramento and resumed his retirement, surely not wanting to publicize such a grand failure. In 2003, I decided to resurrect the hunt for the gigantic salamander by mounting a carefully timed expedition into the area. Not sure of the exact lake, I chose Cecil Lake, which is at the head of the North Fork of the Trinity River and comes closest to matching Wallace’s description of the fictional Limestone Creek. One problem that I quickly disposed of was that Cecil Lake drains into the Salmon River, not the Trinity, though it is right at the ridgetop, and a five-minute scramble allows a magnificent panoramic view to the south across the entire North Fork drainage. I reasoned that the colonel probably had poor maps and decided that traveling up the North Fork would be easier than circling around the old Oregon-California stage road and across the CallahanCecilville divide to get to the lake. My trip was much easier than the colonel’s, because the road to Cecilville is now paved, and another hour

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of winding up old logging roads past Cecilville now takes travelers within spitting distance of the lake. Cecil Lake is at about 5,500 feet elevation, tucked into the northfacing ridgeline separating the Salmon River drainage from the Trinity River drainage. As I hiked up in mid-June, I dodged patches of snow clustered around the trunks of red fir trees. Lichens begin to grow on the trunks about 8 feet up, which shows the average winter snow depth in the area. I wasn’t sure where the lake was, so I simply followed the largest rivulet in the area, continuing to gain elevation. Finally, I saw the beginnings of a small amphitheater with a large snow patch at its base, a perfect setting for the several-acre Cecil Lake. Working my way through the trees, I saw the topography flatten and then spied the crystal blue lake. A reptilian head poked out of the shallows, but the creature did not move. It was wooden: in fact, it was wood. Cecil Lake was very shallow, and a few red firs and mountain hemlocks had fallen into it and remained partly submerged, their eroded ends emerging from the water. No one would have mistaken these branches for live animals. In fact, the lake was so shallow that an adult could walk all the way across it in some directions without being submerged. In the winter, the water probably freezes all the way through, an event that would not necessarily be fatal to an amphibian but is probably not conducive to survival of a giant member of the class. I ate my lunch in the company of dragonflies, apparently as close to a dragon as I was going to get on this trip. The weather was cool but clear, and I thought of stripping down and taking a swim, but the water was too shallow to swim in. Someone had walked over much of the lake bottom, leaving very large footprints. The wader must have stirred up the mud of the lake bottom, and I puzzled at this lack of wilderness etiquette. Visitors for a day or two after this walk were sure to encounter a muddy pond rather than a beautiful clear little subalpine lake. After lunch, I walked around the lake and up to the divide, which was a rocky knife-edge ridge. Sword ferns and stonecrops hugged protected areas among the rocks, and off to the west, a forest fire (probably from 1987) had burned through the red firs, killing some and leaving others. In the distance to the east, I could see the core of the Trinity Alps, and to the south and the west stood ridge after ridge of wild country, protected in the large Trinity Alps Wilderness Area. The setting was perfect for an unknown creature like a giant dragon, although dispersal from lake to lake would have been quite difficult for the creature. Maybe the terrain was better suited to a fully terrestrial unknown creature. I scrambled

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Figure 33. Foot impression at Cecil Lake. The coin is a quarter.

down off the ridge and crossed the outlet of the lake, when I saw something extraordinary. There on the muddy edge of the small outlet of the lake was the imprint of a large, bare foot (see figure 33). The back half of the print had been pressed into mud underwater and had washed away. The front part was about 5 inches wide, and the projected length was about 12 to 14 inches. The print appeared to show a reverse arch, given the extra depression behind the big toe. The number of toes was not clear: at least four and likely five. The size was not out of the possible range of length for a human foot, but it was quite large. I couldn’t believe that a human had made this track, given the number of sharp-pointed sticks, rocks, and debris in the area. A human would have at least worn water sandals. Only one explanation made sense, given my solitude and the remoteness of the area: Bigfoot, the hairy backwoods primate! That explanation fit with the footprints crisscrossing the lake and the feeling I had, increasing by the moment, that I was being watched. I sniffed the air, much like Smokey the Bear sniffing out forest fires. But I smelled neither the acrid smoke of a fire nor the alleged stench of Bigfoot. Quietly and quickly, I retreated down the slope to the nearest road and wended

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my way back to the safety of my car and the world of the known. As I headed back to Seattle the next day, I thought of the motel manager who had greeted me the previous evening with a bout of the flu and a malfunctioning swimming pool that was an algae-clogged mess. Bigfoot had much better lodgings than I did. The legend of Bigfoot has parallels around the world, but the Klamath Mountains are truly the center of the Bigfoot myth. If Bigfoot is just a hairy Lemurian, he has expanded his range considerably beyond Mount Shasta. And, from most accounts, he is in serious need of a bath. The center of Bigfoot sightings is Bluff Creek, a rugged and remote tributary of the Klamath River. The notorious film of Bigfoot was shot here in 1967 by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin. It is the only known film of Bigfoot. Patterson was an avid Bigfoot hunter, but Gimlin appears to have been along for the ride. The men chose Bluff Creek on the recommendation of Ray L. Wallace, who told them they had a good chance of seeing a Bigfoot in this area. This source immediately raises some suspicion about the lead, because Ray Wallace was a grand orchestrator of pranks. In 1958, he had a friend carve large wooden footprints out of pieces of alder and used them to walk around a site where his crew was doing road construction. The crew reported the find, and a local newspaper reporter called the creature “Bigfoot.” The story soon received national and international press, and Bigfoot was born in legend, if not in the flesh. Wallace maintained a straight face until his death in 2002, when his family revealed the carved wooden feet. Ray also admitted to a magazine editor that the Patterson film was a hoax and that he knew who was in the Bigfoot suit that day when Roger Patterson filmed the creature. Patterson and Gimlin had ridden horses into the headwaters of Bluff Creek. Patterson had a film camera, and Gimlin had a rifle for protection. In late October 1967, they bumped into Bigfoot squatting along the bank of Bluff Creek near its headwaters. The horses spooked, and Patterson fell off his horse. Gimlin dismounted and held his rifle. Unlike the Bigfoot “hunters,” he was reluctant to shoot unless he absolutely had to. Patterson was able to retrieve his camera from the saddlebag and record a modest amount of jumpy footage as he skittered across the floodplain of the creek. The Bigfoot was a female with pendulous breasts, weighing anywhere from 900 to 1900 pounds and sporting 40-inch-long arms and an 80-inch waist and chest. In the film, she looks back over her shoulder toward the camera as she disappears into the woods. Though experts agree that the film itself is real, the question of

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whether the subject of the film is real persists forty years later. Some of the film is in good focus, and the rest is somewhat out of focus because of Patterson’s efforts to get the camera rolling and his unfamiliarity with the rented camera. Some who have seen the film are impressed with the rippling of the muscles as Bigfoot marches off, but others see the flapping of a loose-fitting suit. One wonders why an imposter would risk being shot, knowing the pursuers had a rifle, but such is the mystery of Bigfoot. Even those who agree that Bigfoot’s appearance was a hoax offer varying stories, depending on whether Patterson was part of the plan or the victim of it. As part of the plan, he allegedly arranged with Hollywood makeup artists to obtain a Bigfoot suit. The chief suspect for the building of the suit is John Chambers, who worked on Planet of the Apes and Lost in Space. If this story is true, it explains why Patterson found Bigfoot in Bluff Creek and why Gimlin did not shoot at it. The other storyline claims similar origins for the suit but presents Patterson as the victim of the hoax. If the Patterson-Gimlin film is indeed a hoax, it is a beauty. For many believers, this film offers key evidence of Bigfoot’s authenticity, and the film has not been convincingly debunked. Even if the film is a hoax, like many other images purporting to be Bigfoot, this fact would not disprove Bigfoot’s existence: the myth lives on. Legends of large, hairy primate creatures abound throughout the world. The Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, hides out in the Himalayas. Sasquatch hides out in the Pacific Northwest. Other “ape-people” have been reported around the world. But nowhere is the density of sightings higher than in Northern California. Although many local Native Americans claim to have seen Bigfoot, the creature is remarkably absent from Indian myth in northwest California. The closest mythical creature is the Yurok’s woge, but the woge were small humanoid beings who withdrew to escape human influence, either leaving the country or becoming landmarks, birds, or small mammals. Noted folklorist Alan Dundes suggests that the woge may be the Yuroks themselves as they became disenfranchised by the white man. The Yokuts of the San Joaquin valley represented a “hairy man,” or Mayak datat, in pictographs on Painted Rock, but this location is far from northwestern California. Although the Yokuts were of Penutian-language stock, like the Wintus of Northern California, no hairy men appear in northwestern Californian tribal myth. Various rumors that “Omah” was the Yurok and Hupa name for Bigfoot appear to be just that. The modern white man’s search for Bigfoot seems to grasp for Indian history in an attempt to make Bigfoot more real. But the natives had many mythical creatures

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that served a societal purpose. And, of course, if Bigfoot were real, he or she would have less reason to appear in Native American myth. In reality, segments of modern culture demand Bigfoot’s existence, want to believe it, and perpetuate it as modern American myth. Most “sightings” are in the form of tracks, some are howls, and some are actually visual sightings. In 1995, I attended a book reading by Robert Michael Pyle, author of Where Bigfoot Walks, and was treated to a tape recording of a screeching, wailing Bigfoot, recorded by a Native American gentlemen who refused to reveal the exact location of the event. That howl counts as a sighting in the rules of Bigfoot lore, and because it was recorded, it gets high points for authenticity. The first reported Bigfoot sighting, a visual one, was in 1886, south of Happy Camp, about 12 miles as the crow flies (or as Bigfoot walks) from the Patterson film site. Two sightings in the 1930s were by Dave Zebo, who saw tracks on Weaver Bally Mountain near Weaverville. The trail went cold until 1947, when a couple saw two Bigfoots (Bigfoot? Bigfeet?) near the Pit River east of the Klamaths near Fall River Mills. After Bigfoot acquired a name in 1958, the sightings increased: twentyone in the last two years of the 1950s, seventy-six in the 1960s. The number of reports tapered off to sixteen in the 1970s, seven in the 1980s, eight in the 1990s, and a handful after 2000. Apparently, Bigfoot is now more endangered than the northern spotted owl. The pattern of sightings is closely associated with the logging history of the region. The lumber production (figure 27) of Del Norte, Humboldt, and Trinity counties, for example, closely matches the sighting history of Bigfoot. Did better access mean that more people were around to see Bigfoot? Or is Bigfoot a creature of the early seral landscape, preferring logged areas over old growth? My guess is that the potential for acclaim affects the pattern: At first, every report is guaranteed to receive publicity; then, when the potential for publicity declines over time, people make fewer reports. The lack of recent sightings seems only to have intensified the search for Bigfoot. In September 2003, the first International Bigfoot Symposium took place in the center of Bigfoot habitat: Willow Creek, California. Willow Creek advertises itself as the gateway to Bigfoot country, and Highway 96, leading north along the Trinity River to its confluence with the Klamath and then up the Klamath, is called the Bigfoot Scenic Byway. I once saw a Bigfoot-sized brown animal on this highway, in 1995 or 1996. As Is headed north toward Happy Camp, I saw it crouched near the centerline of the two-lane highway. As I approached

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at 65 miles per hour (55 mph if the Highway Patrol is reading this), it heard the hum of my Toyota pickup and stood up. I probably came within 200 yards of it, and it appeared to be 6 or 7 feet tall. It then lumbered off into the woods, alternating between an upright and fourlegged stance as it ran. In the 1950s, a black bear was shot in the Stuart Fork for garbage stealing, and it more than filled the back of a full-size pickup. I hadn’t forgotten my Highway 96 creature as I downloaded my conference registration form off the Web. The conference advertised the “new respect” scientists had garnered for evidence of the existence of an unknown primate living in North America. Arriving in Willow Creek after three weeks upstream in the Trinity Alps, I carried many preconceptions of the people who would attend, none of whom I thought would be like me. Based on Bob Pyle’s book, I expected mostly old guys who didn’t want to find Bigfoot as much as they wanted to be Bigfoot. But as I walked into the auditorium of the Trinity River School, I was pleasantly surprised by the attendance and by the diversity of the gathering. Almost 250 people had packed into the audience on a hot, sticky day: about 50 women, some kids, and another 50 to 75 people younger than thirty-five. The attendees included a few outfitted Bigfoot hunters, with cargo pants, field shirts, Leatherman on the belt, and boots, but the audience was quite mixed. The opening speaker was to have been Dr. Jane Goodall, who has studied the great apes in Tanzania for decades. This bid for respectability was thwarted in the late spring when Dr. Goodall either came to her senses or realized Willow Creek was a long way to come for such a small group. Speakers lamented that she was perhaps not “on board” as they had hoped. Nonetheless, they carried on without her. One thing everyone agreed upon was that Ray Wallace was a hoaxer, but they also agreed that this fact had no bearing on the rest of the evidence. I was somewhat disappointed with the rest of the evidence reported in numerous “scientific” talks. Most speakers suggested that the fact that no one had disproven Bigfoot’s existence was good evidence that he did exist. The newest line of evidence, presented by Jimmy Chilcutt, an entertaining police fingerprint expert from Texas, was dermal ridges on the casts of some footprints. Chilcutt’s assertions that these ridges would be hard to fake and that they did not match those of other primates were believable. Dr. Jeff Meldrum, a professor from Idaho State, discussed the pattern of Bigfoot prints, suggesting that the creature’s flat, flexible foot may be the norm for hominids throughout history. However, he was

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noncommittal when I showed him a photograph of my Bigfoot print (figure 33). Most of the other talks were either less convincing or altogether ridiculous. A Bigfoot hunter from Washington summarized the most recent financed expedition to find a Bigfoot in southern Washington, near Mount St. Helens. Outfitted with thermal imaging equipment, the expedition failed to find a Sasquatch but did find several pieces of evidence that will be useful in the documentary planned by the expedition financiers, an Australian film company. The filmmakers left fruit in the road and came back some eighteen months later to find half a beehive in the exact place where they had left the fruit. They recorded an “angry” response by a Sasquatch from their position on a boat on a lake but unfortunately had not played back the recording in the intervening three years. They were worried that waves splashing against the boat might have affected the sound quality. The most remarkable find was an impression of an apparent primate in mud, appearing to lounge while eating fruit that the expedition had left at a bait station. The filmmakers removed hair from the impression and sent it for DNA testing, and they had a plaster cast, called the Skookum cast, made of the impression. After three years, no results of the DNA tests were yet available. Why the team found no footprints leading to the fruit is unclear, and the cast of an animal supposedly lying on its side had, to be charitable, many interpretations. Overall, this story was as muddy as the substrate in which the Skookum cast was made. The most surprising aspect of the symposium was the believability of the local people reporting on their sightings of Bigfoot. They weren’t trying to make money, nor had they pursued a Monty Python–like quest for decades, and their stories seemed honest and true. Did they really see Bigfoot? I wasn’t sure, but I did believe that they saw something that they didn’t understand in a place they understood well. I arrived at the symposium thinking I would put Bigfoot to rest, but like a phoenix, the creature rose again in my imagination. I hope we never find Bigfoot. If we do, we would set off a frenzied search for and harassment of the remaining creatures. Not finding Bigfoot keeps the creature alive, either in the forest or in our imaginations. Amazon.com currently lists forty-six nonfiction Bigfoot books, along with eighteen children’s books and a few videos. Whether real or imagined, Bigfoot remains a metaphor for wild land and our desire to retain the element of surprise in our encounters with the wilderness.

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murder at chanchelulla gulch The western hound’s tongue, Cynoglossum grande, together with some real hounds, was part of one of the most sensational crime stories of the 1950s in California, with remote Trinity County reluctantly playing a central role as staging ground. In April 1955, a fourteen-year-old Berkeley girl, Stephanie Bryan, was kidnapped near the Claremont Hotel while on her way home from middle school. Although the police investigated a number of possible sightings, the only clue that soon surfaced was the discovery of her French textbook in the Berkeley hills, along Franklin Canyon Road. A thorough search of the hills after the discovery yielded no further evidence, and the investigation stalled. Months later, in mid-July, an Alameda woman found the girl’s purse in a box in the basement of her home. Recognizing Stephanie Bryan’s name from the newspapers, Mrs. Georgia Abbott called the Berkeley police, who hurried over to retrieve the purse and interview her and her husband, Burton. Mr. Abbott seemed unconcerned about the discovery of the purse, even when FBI investigators later that night unearthed from his basement Stephanie Bryan’s glasses, two library books checked out in her name, a book on parakeets she had purchased the day of her disappearance, two of her notebooks, and a torn bra. After the discoveries at the Alameda home, hundreds of spectators ringed the sidewalk and nearby park for days, in anticipation of further discoveries, perhaps even the body of the unfortunate victim. Burton Abbott’s calm demeanor during this discovery phase was in stark contrast to the media frenzy surrounding the case. Although Abbott was the central and only suspect in the case, he claimed to know nothing about how Stephanie’s belongings came to be buried in his basement. I was glued to the newspaper every day, as I had just turned ten years old and had started a newspaper-delivery route for the Oakland Tribune. The Tribune decided to make this case a centerpiece, hoping to outsell the rival San Francisco papers in the process. Along with most other Bay Area citizens, I was privy to all the lurid details, although none of the circumstantial evidence had yet led to a body. Police investigators who interviewed Abbott linked his visit to a family cabin on an old mining claim in Wildwood, along Hayfork Creek in the southeastern portion of Trinity County, to the time Stephanie disappeared. Trinity County! How, in the land I cherished, could someone have committed such a dastardly deed on a young girl who was about the same age as my sister? Abbott, as even his wife called him, had ostensibly left

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Alameda for a fishing trip to Wildwood on the Thursday Stephanie was abducted, spent the weekend at the cabin, and returned to his studies at the University of California at Berkeley by Monday. His return route had been along the section of road where the French book was found. Abbott claimed to be as puzzled as anyone about the discoveries, and he maintained his innocence. Meanwhile, FBI agents drove to Wildwood and intensively searched the area around the cabin, the scene of a grisly murder years earlier in which the victim was dismembered and buried. Hounds owned by a local rancher had located the earlier grave site not far from the cabin. The search, concentrated right around the cabin and mostly on flat ground, uncovered no evidence that might link the scene to the disappearance of Stephanie Bryan. With the discovery of Stephanie’s belongings, all of the region’s newspapers had one or more reporters working full-time on the story: the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, and San Francisco News, and the East Bay’s Oakland Tribune. One Examiner reporter was skeptical of the limited FBI search around the Wildwood cabin and flew to Hayfork with a photographer to search the area himself. After a fruitless search the first day, the two men refused to give up and decided that hounds would be helpful to locate the source of some unusual smells that had briefly wafted across their path that day. They found the same local rancher, Harold “Bud” Jackson, who had located the earlier murder victim, and he agreed to bring his two hounds, which were crosses between blue ticks and bloodhounds, to the area late the next day, accompanied by a couple of other men. As dusk settled on Chanchelulla Gulch, the hounds suddenly picked up a scent and disappeared up the manzanita-covered slope on the west side of Hayfork Creek. The rancher followed the hounds past the site of the earlier murder victim’s grave and up the hill to a small clearing near a large ponderosa pine tree, where he stopped abruptly. The younger hound stood next to a depression in the ground that appeared to have been disturbed by a bear. Protruding from the dark, disturbed ground was part of a pleated skirt, and beneath that, Stephanie Bryan’s body. The discovery of the body prompted the immediate arrest of Burton Abbott for the murder of Stephanie Bryan. He was charged with firstdegree murder, although the evidence was entirely circumstantial. The trial began in November 1955, one month before catastrophic December floods inundated Yuba City and Marysville and wreaked havoc on the landscapes of the North Coast. While the trial was in full swing, a warm, tropical storm entered Northern California just before Christmas

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and dumped 5 to 10 inches of warm rain over the snow-covered mountains. The rain-on-snow event triggered a level of flooding not seen for almost a century in the North Coast region. The Trinity River, still wild and undammed in 1955, rampaged for a week, tearing out roads, bridges, and any other thing designed for more tranquil times. My favorite restaurant, which spanned the Stuart Fork at Trinity Alps Resort, was washed completely away during the storm and was never rebuilt. Burton Abbott’s cabin on the edge of Hayfork Creek survived the deluge, although it surely would have had water lapping at the floorboards. The Abbott trial and the flood vied for top headlines as I delivered the Oakland Tribune during that wet winter. The assistant district attorney described Trinity County as “just mountains. . . . Mountains, trees, and creeks, a virtual wilderness, a place as completely isolated as can be found in this state. . . . A place of refuge for Abbott, a place where he can run away and hide without creating any suspicion” (Walker 1995, 535). I thought that his words were a good description of the place I spent my summers, but was the solitude I found so enchanting equally inviting to criminals? Were the dark forests and wild woods that stretched to the horizon havens for the dark side of man? I didn’t really know, but I thought about this possibility as I delivered my daily papers that winter, distracted by the need to toss the next paper on a dry spot on the porch and avoid the neighborhood dogs, which considered me a close second to the postman in entertainment value. As winter in the Bay Area continued and repairs of the storm began, the trial came to an end. On January 25, 1956, at 5 p.m., Burton Abbott was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The night he was convicted, the Oakland Tribune issued a special edition, rare in those days, and I made six dollars hawking papers on foot in the dark, shouting “Abbott Convicted! Read All About It!” I felt like a kid character in a film noir, excited by my cameo role in a gritty urban-crime movie. My stash of sixty papers was gone in less than an hour, and any doubts I had about the ethics of making money on a tragedy were erased by a week’s worth of profit in a brief hour of work. I slept well that night, confident that justice had been served and that summer and Trinity were not far away. Abbott’s mother and friends steadfastly maintained his innocence and pursued any lead that might help overturn the conviction, which had been based on entirely circumstantial, if fairly convincing, evidence. At the center of each alternative explanation was the assumption that

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Abbott had been framed, with the real killer setting up the evidence so cleverly that it led police to Abbott like “a trail of corn,” the title of Keith Walker’s 1995 book about the case. One scenario had the killer first burying the body in Marin County and later exhuming it and reburying it near the Wildwood cabin. Although no one ever found such a grave in Marin County, the Abbott family pursued the lead anyway, at which point a small plant, the western hound’s tongue, became important. Shortly after Abbott’s conviction, inebriated locals burned down his cabin. Friends of Abbott visiting Trinity County found flowering hound’s tongue at the Wildwood grave site near the charred cabin. Named for its leaves, which look like the tongues of hounds, the plant in flower has clear blue petals with an interior rim of white, and these flowers attracted the attention of the visitors because they saw it on the grave diggings but nowhere else. Their visit occurred during the second growing season since the grave had been discovered. When the group brought the plant to the botany department at the University of California, the botanists told them that the Latin name, Cynoglossum grande, means “large dog’s tongue” and that the plant was common in Marin County. In so doing, they literally sowed the seeds of an alternative theory: the Marin County plants, with small nutlike seeds, had been transported north with the exhumed body when it was reburied in Trinity County! The seeds had germinated directly on the grave site where they had fallen from the body, which explained why the plants were found nowhere else in the area. Unfortunately, this theory had one large hole: western hound’s tongue grows in an area that extends from the Santa Lucia Mountains far south of Marin County to Siskiyou County, substantially north of Wildwood. It is native to the Wildwood area as well as to Marin County, and its common habitat is similar to that at the grave’s locality: dry wooded slopes and canyons, according to Jepson’s classic botanical guide, Munz and Keck’s later updated flora of California, and the sinceupdated Jepson Manual. Members of the Abbott family apparently never recognized the wide range of western hound’s tongue, and they viewed the presence of hound’s tongue at the grave site as firm evidence that the body had been moved there from another location. Even if the body had been moved, this fact would have neither helped nor hurt the case for Burton Abbott. Burton Abbott’s appeals were denied, and he was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin in March 1957, unrepentant to the end. I won the seventh-grade spelling bee that month and received a certificate from

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the San Francisco News, a newspaper that would survive only two more years before merging with the Call-Bulletin and later the Examiner. Various accounts in the News and elsewhere suggested that Abbott had confessed to the murder of Stephanie Bryan, but each version required interpretation of his remarks. The full truth will never be known, contributing to the mystery of the north woods where Bryan’s body was found. No sign leads one to the property where Abbott’s cabin stood and the body was buried, which is how it should be. A second book on the Stephanie Bryan case was published in 1997 by Harry Farrell. That two books on the case would be published forty years after Abbott’s conviction seemed odd to me, and when I read them, the strong feelings I had at the time of the event came back. I decided to find the site of Abbott’s cabin and see for myself what was left of the scene. I had a few clues. I knew that the cabin was somewhere near the point that Chanchelulla Gulch enters Hayfork Creek, and I had two pictures from Farrell’s book: a courtroom mockup of the landscape showing the location of the cabin and the hillslope leading to the grave site and a photograph of the grave site showing three large ponderosa pine trees. Local Forest Service maps showed no private land where Chanchelulla Gulch enters Hayfork Creek, so the cabin must have been an old mining claim that reverted to the government after the cabin burned down. By getting close to the site, I hoped to finally put my feelings to rest. In June 2003, on a beautiful clear day, I left Weaverville on the road winding toward Hayfork and turned up Hayfork Creek toward Wildwood a few miles north of town. This area was the site of a Japanese attack on America during World War II, not by troops but by balloon bombs manufactured by schoolgirls in Japan and floated by air currents of the jet stream over to the West Coast. One of these bombs got snagged in a tree near here in February 1945. The idea of the bombs was to create large forest fires that would frighten the public and detract from the war effort. The design was ingenious: a large 30-foot-diameter balloon, made of several layers of thin paper, was filled with hydrogen and carried beneath it a bomb pack with ballast and barometers. The barometers stabilized the balloon on its long journey from Japan. If the pressure rose, indicating the balloon was falling, a plug would be released to cause a sandbag to drop so that the balloon would rise. When approaching the coast, with most of the ballast gone and barometric pressure rising, the balloon would release its load of high explosives and incendiary bombs and trigger a fuse that would destroy the

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balloon, leaving no evidence of the carrier. The 1945 Hayfork incident showed that the bombs didn’t always work, and a bomb in February wasn’t likely to get much of a fire going. But the Hayfork folks were lucky. Not knowing what the contraption was, they were standing around the base of the tree when the gas bag exploded and dropped the bombs to the ground. The bombs didn’t explode, leaving the locals intact and providing a complete bomb package for the military to analyze. Other such bombs fell along the coast but never created much of a problem during the war. Witnesses were sworn to secrecy, and press censorship prevented news about the bombs from reaching either the public or the Japanese. Unfortunately, after the war, an Oregon family discovered another unexploded bomb package near Lakeview, Oregon, and this one did explode, killing several people. In 1955, Burton Abbott had approached his cabin from the opposite direction than I did, via Red Bluff and Highway 36. He turned onto the Wildwood Road and drove north, stopping at the Wildwood Inn for a drink before heading down to his cabin. I arrived from the south and decided to drive up and past Wildwood to see if the location of the cabin was obvious. The Wildwood Inn was still there, but the cabin site was not obvious to me. I circled around and headed north, still looking for the cabin site. Only one stretch looked as if it might be right. The road turned from the north to the west, as did the one in the landscape mockup. I saw more trees and less brush than the trial accounts suggested, and I saw no large pines, but I decided to stop and look around. As I parked my car and started up the hill, I figured the large pines had probably been cut down in the years since the trial. The area I walked through had been logged of most of its larger trees, and a rather dense young Douglas-fir forest had regenerated after the selective logging. The grave was supposed to be about 330 feet up from the road, so I did not have a long walk. Halfway up, I saw nothing that rang any bells, although a scattering of dead ceanothus and manzanita under the young Douglas-firs suggested that the site had been more open in the past, because these species require a lot of sun to survive. As I continued up the hill, wondering where I should go next, I was startled by a large form in the distance: the column of a massive old ponderosa pine trunk, a classic old “yellow-belly.” As I approached, I suddenly hesitated, stunned that I might have actually found the grave site. As I looked down to catch my breath, I spotted a western hound’s tongue at my feet. I had to be at the right place. At the large ponderosa pine, I glanced to the north, where I saw the other large ponderosa pines that

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were in the photograph. The grave site had to be directly behind me to the south, and I slowly turned around to face the old forest opening, only to find no opening. Young trees grew around a small depression in the forest floor, covered in pine needles. Here was the grave site, still starkly visible after fifty years. I gently removed the pine needles and saw clods of red clay, as distinct as if they had been turned over yesterday. The depression was about 6 feet long and 4 feet wide, and although it had been filled in, it appeared to have been about 2 feet deep. These dimensions were close to those of the excavation site, although the original grave was smaller and shallower. One small Douglas-fir had taken root at the edge of the excavation, clearly having germinated after the site had been disturbed. Its annual rings showed a pith date of 1960 at a height of 8 inches, and allowing for several years to grow to that height, the germination date was likely 1956 or 1957. These trees were now about 8 inches in diameter at breast height. The large old pines, at 4 to 5 feet in diameter, had grown only a couple of inches in diameter since the murder. I sat down, somewhat stunned that I had walked right to the site, and at the same time felt uncomfortable that I had disturbed the site at all. I was depressed by my find, but a burden of my own making finally lifted from me. I sat still, interrupted only by the chatter of Steller’s jays, and then quietly walked back down the hill. At the road, I wondered what had become of the old cabin. About seven years after the cabin was burned down, the 1964 flood, even larger than the 1955 flood, came through the Klamaths and would likely have taken the Abbott cabin anyway. Today, the site has a rusted water heater, chunks of old dishes and cups, and more recent trash on the Hayfork Creek floodplain. Most people traveling along this road, or fishing the stream, have no idea that a cabin once stood here or that two terrible murders occurred at this place. Looking back up the hill, I thought the Forest Service must have known of this site, because the old timber sale had completely skirted the area of the grave site and left all three of the old yellow-bellies. This trinity of large pines still stands guard over the grave site, and the hound’s tongue still blooms there in the spring.

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chapter 13

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Principles of Future Sustainability

To ensure a sustainable future for the Klamath region, we need some broad, overarching principles to guide shorter-term, more site-specific actions. These principles are necessarily strategic, as opposed to the more tactical, “how to get there” actions. People who are concerned about the region tend to agree more on overarching principles than they do on the specifics of action. For example, everyone would, I think, agree that sustaining anadromous fish runs is important, yet the farmers, tribes, commercial fishermen, and others disagree about what actions are necessary to assure continuity in fish runs. The dialogue needs to begin with some principles of sustainability. The central axiom, or point at which to begin the discussion, is that in the Klamath Mountains, as in every other natural region, the only constant is change. We must manage a changing landscape: it changes with active management, and it changes without active management. Thus, we must essentially manage natural processes rather than attempt to reach a stable end point at which continued stability is guaranteed. Such a time and state will never arrive. So the search for sustainability is essentially the management of processes, and through improved management that is updated and changed to meet the circumstances of the time, we can improve the health of the land. Ecosystem health is a difficult concept to define. For humans, health is often defined as the absence of disease. A number of indicators help us determine whether a person is sickly or in good health, such as body 198

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temperature, blood pressure, and the ability to walk and exercise free of pain. We can derive similar indicators for ecosystems, but ecosystems are not organisms. They exist at a variety of temporal and spatial scales that make comparisons to human health quite tenuous. To the extent that organisms are present, we can evaluate the “health” of either individuals or populations, but for many animals (anadromous fish and spotted owls, for example), the scale of evaluation has to be much larger than that for other organisms. We know that a forest full of sick and dying trees is not healthy, but a forest totally free of sick and dying trees is not healthy either. Many birds, small mammals, and amphibians utilize dead wood, so some measure of “disease” is essential for wildland biodiversity. “Healthy” creeks contain dead wood. Trees that fall into creeks provide habitat diversity, creating pools and dissipating erosive energy. Scientists have developed indices that define stream integrity by comparing existing conditions to pristine conditions; this approach appears to hold promise for nonaquatic systems as well. But seeing ecosystem health as analogous to human health, as seductive as this approach may be for its communication value, has too many limitations to adopt as an overarching guiding principle for ecosystem management. Aldo Leopold developed his concept of a land ethic more than half a century ago. In A Sand County Almanac, he broadly defined “land” to include the physical and biotic elements of the ecosystem (animals, plants, water, soils and the like). He defined an “ethic” as a limitation on one’s freedom of action, “a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct” (224–25). A thing is right, Leopold suggested, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Today, we consider this broadly quoted statement somewhat naïve, unless we define stability more broadly as sustainability rather than stasis. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and few standards will please everyone. But Leopold was right, which is why his essay on the land ethic has persevered so long. He understood that alteration and use of natural resources are inevitable but believed that humans have an ethical responsibility to treat the land with respect. Land is more than property, and a land ethic is imperative. Much of the development of land legislation and regulation since Leopold’s time has sought to implement a land ethic. If Leopold were here today, I think he would be proud of how far society has come but would exhort us to continue the fight. Leopold’s use of the word integrity can lead us to a finer-scale definition that can

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guide future land use. Integrity means “wholeness,” “completeness,” “soundness.” One of the best interpretations of ecosystem integrity came from forest ecologist Jerry Franklin in 1993. He defined sustainability as containing two principles: maintain the genetic potential of the land, and maintain its productivity. Actions compatible with these two principles would, in his view, be sustainable, and, as I interpret this view, maintain the integrity of the ecosystem. Preserving genetic potential simply calls for making sure species don’t go extinct as a result of land-management actions. Leopold’s metaphor in Round River was similar: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering” (146). This rule doesn’t mean that we need to maximize natural populations of all species, but we have an ethical responsibility to prevent our actions from forcing extinctions. This ethic is embodied in the Endangered Species Act, for example. To the extent that we manage lands to avoid jeopardizing species’ existence, our options for land management expand. Franklin’s second principle is to maintain productivity of the land: its ability to produce goods and services (timber, wildlife, and the like). We should be able to pass on the land to future generations in as good or better shape than we found it. We’ve not done such a great job in the past, because we have focused too much on what we took out of the land and not enough on the condition in which we left it. Some mining spoils look much as they did fifty years ago, and clear-cuts on land of very low productivity may take centuries to recover. But we are making strides in the right direction, even as opinions vary about how far we have come. Sustainability is a trinity: ecological, social, and economic. To receive the support of society, long-term plans must ensure all three types of sustainability. But how do we start? In the late 1990s, the secretary of agriculture appointed the Committee of Scientists to advise him on planning regulations for national forests, and I was one of the scientists. We committee members argued that though human and ecological needs are inseparable, ecological sustainability is the foundation of social and economic sustainability. This idea does not mean that we should maximize biological diversity at the expense of social and economic issues, although some people on both extremes of the pendulum of values try to define the issue that way. It simply means that resource use is acceptable within certain bounds that compromise neither genetic potential nor productivity. We suggested that national forest planning

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should acknowledge and incorporate the following features of ecological systems: . The significance of natural processes . The dynamic nature of ecological systems

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. The uncertainty and variability of these systems . The importance of cumulative effects. The first two features require definition of the major processes that operate on the landscape during and after a natural disturbance and recognition of the historical ecological roles of disturbances. These natural events are not generic; they are part of the ecology of place. They include, at times and in places, disruptive and destructive events such as floods and fires, but trying to prevent or dilute the power of such disturbances ignores the fact that extreme events have been historically important to ecological integrity. Now that Trinity Dam has been in place for almost half a century, the Trinity River’s highs and lows have been replaced with a much more uniform flow, which has devastated fish runs. Re-creating the historic variability of fish runs is one of the major goals of river restoration. Conversely, excluding frequent, light fires from Klamath forests has encouraged larger, more destructive fires in some places. We have made some significant strides in improving our understanding of these natural processes, but we have not done an adequate job of incorporating those implications in land management. We have crippled our ability to manage ecosystems sustainably by setting up complex schemes to manage individual elements of those systems. We have substantial legislation and regulation to protect individual species, if they are at risk, and often even if we don’t know whether they are at risk or not. We have placed similar constraints on water resources, air pollution, logging, and so on. But each set of regulations, and sometimes the people who apply the rules, acts in ignorance of the other parts of the system. The micromanagement of each element, individually and exclusive of other elements, prevents successful ecosystem management. In the world of biological conservation, we call plans that recognize and incorporate ecosystem processes “coarse-filter” approaches. “Finefilter” approaches are more species or resource specific. In reality, the two must be linked in successful ecosystem management. A coarse-filter approach attempts to manage ecosystem processes in a way that creates

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a semblance of natural conditions. These natural conditions are largely based on historical conditions, recognizing that any past point in time is just a snapshot of the ecological condition. A range of natural variability is inherent to such definition. We are foolish to expect that future ranges of target conditions will be the same as the ranges under historic conditions, but the historic conditions are a good starting target; these conditions supplied the habitat diversity that sustained the native biota. We know that most ecosystems in the Klamath Mountains have deviated from natural conditions because of the region’s profit-driven land history, and we know that managing for natural processes now will not be sufficient to sustain all the plants and animals here. Some will not be provided for in a coarse-filter approach and will “slip” through the filter. Dams have permanently altered some habitats. The concept of the fine filter is important because it offers a more species-specific approach that “catches” the ecosystem elements that fall through the coarse filter. So the two filters work in tandem. Our current management approaches in altered ecosystems often overemphasize the fine filter to the point that the coarse filter cannot operate. A local example from the 1990s illustrates this dilemma: the interaction between fire, wood rats, and the northern spotted owl in the Klamath region. Prescribed fire was proposed in the Klamath National Forest to underburn old-growth forests to prevent more severe wildfires from entering the stands later. A local federal wildlife biologist opposed the plan, because the prescribed fires would consume small sticks that wood rats use to build nests. Because wood rats constitute about 70 percent of the diet of spotted owls in this region, the biologist concluded that prescribed fire would hurt the owl population by reducing wood-rat numbers. This logic might work in a static system but is bound to fail in a dynamic ecosystem. The prescribed fire would consume sticks but also create sticks by top-killing smaller trees and shrubs; little sticks for wood-rat nests will always be around in a fire-managed ecosystem. Prescribed fire would also help sustain the older forest by preventing high-severity wildfires from killing all the old trees. In this way, it would assist the owls, which depend on the older forest structure for nesting. After intense fires, conditions are great for wood rats, because they love brushy habitat, but habitat for spotted owls is gone. Thus, the fine-filter approach to the prescribed fire made only one tenuous link, between sticks and wood rats, and one that was likely wrong. In a longer-term context, a plan to sustain owl habitat in fire-prone environments must recognize and incorporate the fact that fire is going to occur: a coarse-filter conservation plan

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for Klamath forests must deal with fire. To the extent that a coarse-filter plan fails to provide adequate habitat for some species, land-management strategies should adopt a fine-filter plan. However, if the planning begins at the fine-filter level, the fine filter essentially trumps the coarse filter, and ecosystem management is likely to fail over the long term. A successful coarse-filter plan is dynamic. Another element of ecological sustainability is uncertainty. Frank Egler, a prominent ecologist of the twentieth century, reportedly remarked, “Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, they are more complex than we can think.” We are arrogant to think that we can predict the outcome of any action we propose. Though outcomes certainly are not random, an element of uncertainty always precludes precise prediction. The existence of such uncertainty points to the importance of monitoring management actions. The resulting information has to be fed back into the management loop so that planners can change the goals or implementation strategies and tactics as appropriate. This approach to monitoring and feedback is called adaptive management. It is the most-talked-about and least-implemented part of ecosystem management. A recent (2003) National Academy of Sciences report on the upper Klamath basin fishery concluded that the participating agencies accepted adaptive management as a principle but could provide virtually no working examples. They pointed to the Trinity River Restoration Program as a useful model for the rest of the basin. Future management will also reflect what has come before. Cumulative effects are those that occur from the incremental impacts of past and current actions. They are often associated with watershed issues but in fact encompass a much larger sphere of natural-resources actions. A good example is the case of the sediment in Redwood Creek (end of chapter 10). Events many decades ago placed a slug of “extra” sediment in the channel that has slowly been working its way downstream. Future activities in the basin need to acknowledge this impact and not exacerbate it. Most cumulative impacts occur at larger scales and affect many landowners. One landowner may have created most of the cumulative effects, whereas another landowner contemplating a management action may have to alter the design of a project to avoid adding to the effects. I’m reminded of two industrial forest companies in Washington that owned second-growth timberland around many spotted owl nest sites. Wildlife agencies required landowners to maintain 40 percent of the land within a large circle around the nest site in mature forest cover for owls. The more aggressive company with a shorter timber cutting cycle (rotation) moved

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in and clear-cut as much of its land as it could, whereas the other company, with a much longer rotation, opted to wait for its stands to reach that longer rotation. Once the more aggressive company had finished its harvest, the 40 percent threshold of mature forest had been reached, constraining the less aggressive company from harvesting trees at all in many of its “owl circles.” We have no trouble determining which company had the better-defined land ethic. Cumulative effects are difficult to define. They involve accelerations of natural processes that are themselves quite variable. If each piece of gravel in a stream deposit were color-coded by source, then one could easily separate human-induced erosion from natural sources. In forest practices, a clear-cut followed by a decade of dry to normal winters may produce little accelerated erosion from the cut or any associated roads, but one that occurs just before one or more large storms may cause portions of the local landscape to fail. One must assess actions on one land parcel in relation to other land parcels, and currently we have few institutional processes that can either adequately assess the effects of those actions or that can schedule the timing and intensity of land use to be compatible with ecological sustainability. Anyone who has dealt with natural-resource issues soon comes to realize the importance of social and economic factors. Sustainable use within the Klamath region is important for conservation, because the benefits that people derive from use will provide incentives for them to conserve these resources. Of course, the debatable issues are how much use is advisable and whose social and economic benefit it should serve: that of the national public, because much of the region is federal land; the corporate or industrial world; or the local people, whose lives are closely intertwined with the land? I argue that all these stakeholders are important and serving them all is not incompatible: local decisions can mesh with national policy goals. Social sustainability and economic sustainability, like ecological sustainability, are very scale dependent. Collaborative planning at local levels is emerging as a powerful agent for social consensus. Local collaborations have developed out of frustration that the status quo was not working for anybody. Local people representing wide ranges of interests have come together with state and federal representatives to design frameworks for ecologically sound and economically and socially responsible management. One such group has formed in the Applegate River basin in the Siskiyou region of southern Oregon. This Applegate Partnership jointly developed a vision statement: “The Applegate Partnership is a community-based project

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involving industry, conservation groups, natural resource agencies, and residents cooperating to encourage and facilitate the use of natural resources principles that promote ecosystem health and diversity.” By breaking down historical communication barriers and acknowledging common goals, the group has been effective in supporting Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) projects, coordinating activities on private lands, and attracting interest and funding for social assessments, natural-resource projects, and monitoring efforts. Agency personnel no longer act primarily as resource technicians and now act more as facilitators, educators, and partners. Though this approach may not be possible everywhere, it has promise. Similar partnerships have developed in the Klamath Mountains. The Salmon River Restoration Council formed in 1992 to focus on similar issues on the Salmon River area. Although the Salmon has a smaller population (about one thousand people) than does Applegate (which is also closer to large population centers), the council has been very active, providing more than six thousand volunteer days and two hundred workshops. Council members have been successful in helping to restore the Salmon River ecosystem while diversifying the local economic base and fostering communication among diverse interests. The Hayfork-based Watershed Research and Training Center is a community-based effort to provide a foundation for new, diversified jobs in this area that received a double whammy in the 1990s. The traditional logging-based economy was hit both by the Northwest Forest Plan, which substantially reduced the timber volume produced from public lands, and by closure of the Sierra Pacific Industries mill in town. The center seeks to experiment with new technologies for forest restoration that will increase the ecological sustainability of surrounding lands, while providing economic and social stability close to home. Led by a local woman, Lynn Jungwirth, the center has formed local and regional partnerships and lobbied in Washington, D.C. It has developed lowimpact log yarding machinery that removes small trees, in line with forest-restoration objectives, without damaging the residual stand. The center is a catalyst for social and economic recovery in the Hayfork area, and its vision should be more widely adopted throughout the Klamaths. Models for ecological sustainability are also being implemented locally. The final chapters suggest some directions to move us toward a sustainable future. Not all of them are mine, and not every reader will agree with all of them, but some are already being implemented and substantially improving the health of the land.

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chapter 14

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Hard Times for Hardrock

Early miners simply helped themselves to the mineral riches in the rivers and gravels of the Klamath region. No federal or state laws regulated the removal process during or immediately after the gold rush, although the miners were removing minerals from the lands of native peoples, which were considered to be in the public domain. For twenty years, simple mining codes provided order in the goldfields. Miners had exclusive rights to claims they had discovered, including water rights. They had to stake their claims with notices and names and had to limit the number of claims they held. Early California law simply deferred to local mining codes. As the easy gold petered out, a more comprehensive policy for hardrock minerals became necessary. Mining operations were trespassing on federal land, homesteading was not possible on mineral lands, and foreign investors were staying away for fear of federal seizure of assets, as had happened in one California mercury mine during the Civil War. Thus was born the General Mining Law of 1872, an amalgamation of several 1860s acts with a few twists. Also known as the Hardrock Act, the law legitimized miners’ appropriation of federal assets. All federal lands were “free and open” to prospecting. Individual claims were limited to 20 acres, but groups of individuals could aggregate their claims on adjacent parcels to accumulate a total of 160 acres. A claim was valid if the claimant could reasonably determine that the mineral in question (including gold, silver, gems, and other minerals) was present and worth extracting. A valid, or unpatented, claim created a major property 206

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right, allowing the claimant not only to remove any and all minerals but also to build a home, graze livestock, cut trees, and divert water on public land. Active work on the claim equivalent to $100 in annual improvements was required under the act. With $500 in improvements, the claimant could patent the claim, or take full title to it, for $2.50 per acre for a placer claim and $5 per acre for a lode claim. Incredibly, the fees established in 1872 have not increased at all since then. However, because of legal and administrative costs, the actual cost to a patent claimant today is closer to $40,000. The Hardrock Act is still the law of the land, although it was passed in an era when settlement of the West required substantial incentives. Though the Hardrock Act is still in place, it has been partially replaced by newer legislation. In the 1920s, legislators removed the fuel minerals (oil shale, coal, and the like, with the exception of uranium) from the provisions of the act. National parks and wilderness areas were more recently protected from prospecting, but people can still mine active claims on these lands (although access to claims that require road building can be denied). In 1974, the Forest Service enacted regulations requiring operators who would significantly disturb surface resources to file a plan of operations, which the agency must approve through an environmental assessment process. The Bureau of Land Management followed suit in 1981 but requires only a “notice of operations” for areas less than 5 acres and a “plan of operations” for areas larger than 5 acres. Reclamation is required, and California state law passed in the 1970s mandates posting of a bond in an amount sufficient for reclamation if the operator fails to follow the plan for reclamation. Operators must obtain permits not only from the Forest Service or BLM but also from the California Department of Fish and Game and from the county in which the claim is located. In 1976, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, essentially a revised organic act for the BLM, was signed into law and required claimants to file affidavits proving that they made $100 worth of improvements. Of course, in the 1870s, $100 was equivalent to a couple of months of hard work. Since 1992, the $100 has been a fee directly paid to the government to keep the claim active, unless the claimant qualifies for the “small miner exemption” that allows proof of labor equivalent to the $100 to substitute for this fee. Many claims were abandoned once the claimants had to pay money out of pocket for frivolous mining claims that were mostly for recreational purposes. The annual filing fee reduced claims from about 1 million nationwide before

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1992 to about 350,000 in 1993 and 235,000 in 2002. Trinity County has about 7,000 active claims, and assuming that each claim is for 20 acres, the total area is about 140,000 acres, mostly in riparian areas. So the potential for significant impact from renewed operations is high, even with the number of claims in decline. Were the price of gold to skyrocket, many of these claims, plus new ones, might be activated. Mining is not a renewable-resource activity, so it is inherently unsustainable in the long run. It consists of removing nonrenewable resources, whether gold, silver, mercury, or other elements. Suggestions for sustainable mining are not tenable, but improvements in the techniques of mining could help avoid damage to other resources. Though mining can have significant negative effects on renewable natural resources, such as water, fish, wildlife, and forests, techniques are available to mitigate mining impacts and make such operations more compatible with the conservation of other affected natural resources. Environmental protection from mining would be strengthened with reform of the Hardrock Act. What form the reform should take has been the subject of bitter debate. Charles Wilkinson, a noted scholar of mining law, has suggested a number of elements in a reformed hardrock law: . Remove the right to patent, or to obtain fee title to, areas being mined. . Replace the claim with a lease similar to leases for oil and gas

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resources. . Require claimants to pay a royalty to the government for the minerals they remove. . Eliminate existing claims to areas that have no mining activity. . For each application, determine whether the public benefits of mining outweigh those of not mining. These provisions would not eliminate mining and would not prevent small miners from making diligent efforts to remove minerals. Given the bonding required now even for small miners, the major effect of reform on the small miner would be the royalty payment. If the payment were based on net profit rather than gross proceeds, reform would have less financial effect on the serious small miner. It nevertheless would create a new cost for both small and large miners: a payment for a resource that is now given away essentially for free. One possibility would be to waive royalties up to the amount of the reclamation bond, at which time the royalty payments would kick in. Mining is not totally free at

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present, because applicants must either pay the government for the cost of environmental analysis of mining on public lands or contract out the analysis with subsequent federal review. Among the other reforms that people have proposed are limitations on the number of claims that a single person or corporation (currently unlimited) can hold, a requirement that operations commence within a certain time after the permit is issued, establishment of a sunset date on legal claims that have been inactive for a time, and creation of a federal mine-reclamation fund to restore land and water resources damaged from past mining. One of the problems of unlimited claims was solved with the assessment of the $100 annual fee per claim. The commencement issue and sunset provisions are complex, given that market conditions may drive activity. Critics of reform claim that if the market were to drop right after an operator received approval for a lease or permit, there would be no financial incentive to mine, and the whole lease/permit process would be in vain. They argue that a sunset provision would be unfair. But most all other resource extractions have spatial and temporal restraints on activity. Mining reform would be useless if it didn’t control the amount of mining activity allowable at one time. On both public and private land, logging is spatially driven and scheduled over time through regulation, although the timber industry still thinks it is overregulated and environmentalists think it is underregulated. The intensity of mining activity at one time, such as placer mining in stream gravels, needs to be controlled. One solution would be to give agencies discretion in spreading the impacts of mining and reclamation over time (most restoration work can cause at least temporary damage). They might set up a firstcome, first-served system in which claimants with the earliest permits have the first right to activity for a period of time, going to the end of the queue if they defer. The amount of activity would vary by the condition of the watershed and the type of activity (suction dredging could be more widespread than placer mining of stream terraces, for example). In any reform legislation, the agencies need the authority to deny a permit in a sensitive area. Current Superfund legislation holds any new operator on an old mine site responsible for past environmental hazards as well as any new hazards the miner creates. It might be more environmentally efficient to combine the reclamation bonds with a federal mine-reclamation fund to allow new operators to open old mines and remediate existing environmental problems there rather than start anew somewhere else.

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Critics will argue that Wilkinson’s proposals, and my embellishments, would create a new maze of red tape and delay, which is true. The need to tighten environmental regulations is, in a sense, testament to the absence of a land ethic. Mining has been relatively unregulated compared to fishery and forestry. Sustainable ecosystems require attention to all aspects of their future; regulation cannot effectively address mining using a claim-by-claim approach any more than a timber-harvest plan can focus on one small area of timberland at a time (see chapter 15). The “right to mine” must become a “privilege to mine,” supported by regulations appropriate to a real ecosystem-management approach. The Klamath region still suffers from the unregulated activities of the past. The worst example is the Iron Mountain Mine complex just northwest of Redding. The vegetation that was devastated from early copper smelting (figures 23 and 24) has recovered in part, but it is not close to the levels of plant cover or species composition that existed before mining began. This area receives 70 to 80 inches of precipitation a year and should support complex mixed-conifer vegetation. Yet the area, covering hundreds of square miles, supports a sparse vegetation cover that is scrub woodland at best, more indicative of droughty sites. Erosion removed productive topsoil, and the smelters poisoned the soils with heavy metals. Vegetation recovery, if it happens at all, will require centuries. The acid mine waters that have continuously seeped from these mines are so toxic that the Environmental Protection Agency has designated the site a Superfund site. The subsurface pyrite (iron sulfide), once exposed to water and oxygen through tunneling operations, begins to oxidize to superacidic levels (a minus pH!). Because of the heat generated from the chemical process, Iron Mountain is truly a “hot property,” generating subsurface temperatures over 120oF. Dottie Smith, a Shasta College historian, visited Iron Mountain in the 1980s. She told me that she saw “no signs of animals or birds. There wasn’t a blade of grass . . . nothing. It was dead. When I got home, I took my shoes off and threw them in the garbage. I never want to go back. I like trees and green things.” To see if things had changed much since then, I visited the site in 2005. More precisely, I tried to visit: the front gate is an imposing barrier, plastered with No Trespassing signs. Progress is evident at Iron Mountain. The effluent from the mines is now diverted into an acid-neutralization plant, which began with a capacity of about 60 gallons per minute and now handles 2,000 gallons per minute. Clean upstream surface water is diverted around the site,

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and the site is also finding use as a repository for other mine wastes. A large pile of ore, filled with heavy metals, that sat next to Keswick Reservoir has recently been moved to Iron Mountain, where it has been buried and capped so that water will not enter or leave. Appreciation of this progress must be tempered with the realization that remediation is an experimental technique, not a totally proven technology. No one yet has a solution that will permanently clean up 90 percent of the problem without further maintenance, and people debate the efficacy of the suite of remediation methods, from plugging the mine to expanding water treatment. Yet flows of cadmium, copper, and zinc into the Sacramento River have fallen by 80 to 90 percent since the 1980s, and the cost of present and future cleanup (to 2030 a.d.) will be $1 billion. The bulk of the cost will be borne by the mining companies who inherited ownership of the site. Yet the problem will continue through the next 3,000 years unless we find a more permanent solution. The generation-long mining history leaves a legacy of damage that will affect at least the next hundred generations of Klamath region citizens. Although copper is the mineral that has generated the longest-lasting problems for the region, copper mines are not alone on the list of abandoned and hazardous sites. The Siskon Mine, an abandoned gold and silver mine that drains into Copper Creek (then Dillon Creek) and then the Klamath River, is a good example. It was an active mine in the 1950s, taking ore from open pits on the ridge and trucking them downhill to a mill site adjacent to Copper Creek. The ore was milled there, and gold and silver were concentrated using cyanide slime. The processed tailings went into a pond near the stream, with a dam separating the pond from the diverted stream channel. The dam apparently failed regularly in winter storms, “cleaning” the pond for the next year’s tailings. When the mine closed in 1960, maintenance of roads and the mill site stopped, and the dam soon failed for the last time, probably in the 1964 flood (see the top of figure 34). The bunkhouses and mill buildings were removed in the 1970s. Tailings have been eroding into the stream since. The buildings at the mill were removed in the 1970s, but each year during the mill’s operation, about 10 cubic yards of tailings entered Copper Creek, polluting it with arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, molybdenum, selenium, silver, and zinc. Other tailings are in the hundred-year floodplain and could mobilize in a flood. The heavy metals in the stream have affected Chinook and federally threatened coho salmon and steelhead in Copper Creek, Dillon Creek, and the Klamath River. A bit of

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Figure 34. Restoration of stable conditions at the Siskon Mine off the Klamath River. Top: prereclamation landscape. Bottom: stable, restored conditions. (Source: Polly Haessig, USDA Forest Service, Klamath National Forest, 1312 Fairlane Road, Yreka, CA 96097.)

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good news is that the tailings have a low leaching potential, so preventing movement of the tailings can solve the erosion problem. The Forest Service has completed a $500,000 reclamation project at the Siskon Mine, using the Superfund regulatory process with appropriated dollars from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The federal government, under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (more commonly known as Superfund), has the legal right and obligation to respond to releases of hazardous substances on public lands. The tailings around the mill site were consolidated by contractors and then capped with local soil from clean fill piles on-site and from borrow sites along the old mill road. A gabion wall now stands at the stream edge to stop the erosion of the tailings. The gabion wall differs from the usual retaining wall one might see along a road or bridge abutment in that the interior of the wire cages that are filled with rocks has dividers, which offer more stability against scour. This wall will hold back the tailings, preventing their movement into the stream and stabilizing their surface so that the cap will not erode either. A “revet mattress” has been constructed in front of the gabion wall to protect it from scour during flood flows. The capped tailings at the Siskon Mine were mulched, fertilized, and seeded before being covered with erosion-control matting; once stabilized, the surface will be planted with trees. The area will still be permanently scarred by the open pits on the ridge, but the tailings at the downhill mill site will no longer erode into the stream, and the rehabilitated area adjacent to the stream will begin a permanent recovery. Restoration was completed at the site in November 2004 (see the bottom of figure 34). Mining proceeds with far more sensitivity now than it did in the 1850s or the 1950s, but we still must ask why mineral production on federal land in the twenty-first century remains largely based on nineteenthcentury rules and fees. Reform of this system would ensure that the Klamath region does not face the situation that the Cabinet Mountains of Idaho now face. Federal officials there, under current law and regulation, have generally conceded that individuals and companies have a “right to mine,” and though government agencies can require various resource-protection measures, they cannot cancel a proposed project. While the authority of these agencies continues to be debated in court, the Revett Silver Company is planning to drill a large copper and silver mine called the Rock Creek Mine under the Cabinet Mountains, which would discharge millions of gallons of wastewater per day, placing pollutants into the Clark Fork River and then to Lake Pend Oreille.

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New regulations promulgated right at the end of the Clinton administration (January 2001) allowed the BLM to declare the site too sensitive to mine, but two months later, the Bush administration suspended the new rules and left the federal administrators with little choice. The first round in court was a victory for the plaintiffs, with U.S. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy ruling in early 2004 that the BLM had abdicated its duty as an environmental steward. However, in October 2006, the Fish and Wildlife Service cleared the Rock Creek Mine by ruling that the mining will not adversely affect endangered fish and wildlife. The most surprising turn of events, though, occurred in March 2004 when famed New York jeweler Tiffany and Company paid for an open letter in the Washington Post in which it asked the Forest Service to block the mine and advocated reform of the 1872 mining law. Noted environmental philosopher Wendell Berry has spoken of our “profound failure of imagination” (201), not perceiving the wheat beyond the bread, the farmer beyond the wheat, and the farm beyond the farmer. Tiffany’s imagination fully recognizes where its precious metals come from and publicly embraced a land ethic. The company supports the use of more environmentally sound mining practices to obtain the gems, silver, and gold it uses in its classic jewelry. My guess is that the “gem” Tiffany is now fighting for will eventually create a sea change in Congress for reform of the hardrock law. The change may not happen immediately, and the inertia of 130 years of legislative inaction will be difficult to overcome. But as surely as the sun rises in the morning, hard times are coming for hardrock.

Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

chapter 15

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Forests for the Future

The future forests of the Klamaths, both public and private, need to be managed much differently than in the past to deal effectively with issues of site and scale. Some of the needed change has already occurred: site issues governing timber harvest have been dealt with through three decades of forest-practices regulations, and the importance of natural disturbances is better recognized now. Questions of scale are receiving attention on both public and private land, with some success and some major challenges. Some 60 percent of the region’s forests are publicly owned, managed primarily by the Forest Service with a few percent managed by the Bureau of Land Management. About 30 percent are owned by industrial forest enterprises, and about 10 percent have nonindustrial owners (generally defined as individuals who own less than 2,500 acres and have no processing capacity). In the past, the intensity of management was highest for nonindustrial owners, and these lands typically had the highest percentages of commercial forestland that was cutover and nonstocked (not reforested). Some land was converted to grazing land (see chapter 10). Industrial lands tended to be intensively managed, but much of this area was replanted with trees after logging. Public lands had the most conservative management, and much of the remaining old-growth forest was on these lands when intensified cutting levels began in the 1970s and 1980s. Loggers pushed roads into new areas, and funding for road maintenance did not always follow the funding for timber removal. 215

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The 1990s ushered in a new era in forest management on both public and private lands. Threatened species such as the marbled murrelet and the northern spotted owl took center stage and affected forest management on all lands. The response on California public lands was implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan, and on private lands, it was tougher forest-practices regulations in a state where the regulations were already the most stringent in the nation. With these actions as a starting point, I offer some suggestions here for increasing the chances of sustainable forest management on three types of ownerships.

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publicly owned forests The publicly owned forests of the Klamath region are primarily within the Klamath National Forest and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, with a bit in the eastern part of the Six Rivers and the northern part of the Mendocino National Forests. All four forests are within the boundaries of the Northwest Forest Plan. The Northwest Forest Plan is a bioregional conservation plan for 25 million acres of federal lands within the range of the northern spotted owl; it focuses on management of entire ecosystems, not just owls. The range of the owl includes all of western Washington and Oregon, the eastern Cascades of both states, and the northwestern California area south to Marin County. The northern spotted owl, first recognized as a species at risk, became a standard bearer for anadromous fish, old-growth forest remaining on public lands, and other species that are seemingly dependent upon old-growth forest. The planning began with a strategy for owl conservation based on the theory of island biogeography. This theory postulates that in oceanic systems, terrestrial (island) biodiversity relates both to island size and to distance from an immigration source. Thus, one would expect a small, remote island to have fewer land-based species than would a large island near a mainland, because of the hostile nature of the matrix (the ocean) for the migration of terrestrial species. As adapted to terrestrial ecosystems, this theory means that larger reserves are better than small ones, reserves should be placed to allow genetic interchange with more than one nearby reserve (via individuals moving between reserves), corridors should link reserves, and circular-shaped reserves are preferable to linear ones (to minimize edge effects). The Interagency Scientific Committee (ISC), in 1990, provided the first bioregional attempt at owl protection. In addition to managing a large network of reserves specifically to

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maintain older forest habitat for owls, the plan called for using uncut forests on both sides of streams to provide linkages between reserves and for maintaining some cover in areas that were not in reserves (observing the flexible and innovative 50–11–40 rule: 50 percent of the land between reserves must contain trees averaging 11 inches diameter with more than 40 percent canopy cover). These two provisions sought to soften the potentially negative effect of the matrix (the land between the reserves). The ISC report was the first to deal with the owl at a scale sufficient to project with some probability the likelihood that owls would persist for another century on the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. Other, precursor plans to the Northwest Forest Plan, and the Northwest Forest Plan itself, drew heavily on the groundbreaking work of the ISC. Above all, the ISC plan sent a signal to managers of public lands that current targets for timber cutting could not be sustained. After President Clinton held his Forest Summit in Portland in 1993, the team that assessed the options for the Northwest Forest Plan considered no strategies that maintained high timber yields. All seven of the original options, and all ten of the final options, included reductions of 75 percent or more from 1980s harvest levels. The Northwest Forest Plan was an altered version of option 9 of the assessment. It envisioned several types of management on the 25 million acres of federal lands in the plan, designating more than 75 percent of the area as reserves of one form or another: Legislatively and administratively withdrawn areas: 36 percent of the area, mostly national parks and wilderness areas. Timber harvest is generally prohibited by law, but naturally occurring fires may be allowed to burn in some cases. Late-successional reserves (LSRs): 30 percent of the area, managed to produce and maintain old-growth conditions. The plan allows operations like thinning that will hasten the development of older conditions by increasing the growth of residual trees, but generally in stands that are eighty years old or younger. Prescribed fire is allowed under some conditions. Managed late-successional reserves: 1 percent, where small areas of old growth are protected, managed mostly to protect owl pairs outside of other protected designation areas. Riparian reserves: 11 percent, adjacent to streams, initially designed as two tree lengths wide each side on fish-bearing streams and one tree

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length wide on other perennial streams. These standards could be relaxed after an analysis of each watershed was completed, but have not been to date, even though most all watershed analyses have been completed. Adaptive management areas (AMAs): 6 percent of the land base, where experiments with creative and innovative practices are permissible, with the possibility of applying them later to other lands. Matrix lands: 16 percent of the land base that has not been assigned to another category and where more intensive timber harvest is allowable but not mandated. These areas are the source of the projected timber-harvest levels in the plan; retention of some green trees is required in every cutting. The Northwest Forest Plan is now more than a decade old, giving us an opportunity to consider how it has played out during that decade, particularly in the Klamath region. The buffer widths that the plan established for riparian reserves, originally intended as a starting point for site-specific and generally narrower buffer widths on streams, have become a default standard in all three states. The burden of proof has shifted away from defining why a wider buffer is necessary to proving why a narrower buffer would be effective, so not a single watershed analysis has reduced the default buffer widths. Adaptive management areas, which the plan envisioned as places to try innovative practices free of the restrictions in the other designated areas, are now subject to all the same standards and guidelines applied to other areas. Managers thought that the research arm of the Forest Service should fund the AMAs, and scientists thought the opposite, so AMAs lost support from both sides and are managed now mostly as matrix lands. The Hayfork AMA, one of the largest, was intended to experiment with community forestry models, stewardship contracting (innovative contracting), partnerships, and socioeconomic testing of value-added markets (high-value products from small timber and hardwoods). Late-successional reserves in the northern, wetter zone are functioning as they were intended, but in the drier eastern Cascades and Klamaths, forest fires are nipping away at these areas because of the preponderance of fire-prone forest structures currently in the LSRs. A policy of surveying for little-understood flora and fauna (called “Survey and Manage”) was implemented in 2000 and added significant costs and delays to projects in the matrix. Survey and Manage has been costing the agencies over $30 million a year. The Survey and Manage

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protocols consider all species about which little is known (including lichens, fungi, and invertebrates) to be “at risk” until proven otherwise (a policy that is almost the opposite of the Endangered Species Act, which lists species when evidence suggests a real threat). These finefilter requirements have made any timber harvest or application of prescribed fire costly and difficult to implement. Under Survey and Manage, if a snail or slug on the list has been discovered midslope in a proposed prescribed-burn unit, establishment of an unburned buffer midslope, which could not be reasonably protected against the fire, has been required, so the prescribed-fire project has typically been cancelled. Prescribed fire to increase the resistance of mature forest to wildfire has not, therefore, been applied much, and thinning for similar purposes has also been constrained. Harvest levels projected in 1995, which were about 25 percent of 1980s harvest levels, have not materialized, instead dropping to 10 percent or less of those levels, because the original predictions of timber output did not incorporate precautionary constraints. Unlimited old growth may not be the best outcome for the northern spotted owls of the Klamath region. A trade-off apparently exists between the presence of mature to old-growth forest, which is ideal for nesting, and the presence of other types of vegetation, which is optimal for foraging. The dusky-footed wood rat, which is the main prey species for the owl here, is more abundant in these other types (brush, young forest). Blocks of older forest with lots of edge (see figure 35) are much better suited to northern spotted owls (measured by both survival and reproductive success) than are blocks that are either all “other vegetation types” or all mature to old-growth forest. This pattern of so-called forest fragmentation appears to closely mimic the historical landscape patterns caused by fire. Although we do not know exactly what those patterns were, they appear to look more like the top row of patterns in figure 35 than the bottom ones and seem to produce better landscapes for spotted owls. Spotted owls now face two new threats in their range: stand-replacing fires in the drier forest types, which used to burn more frequently but with less intensity than they do now; and the barred owl. The barred owl is a slightly larger and more aggressive owl than the spotted owl; it is native to eastern North America but has been able to migrate successfully across the continent through Canada and has moved south through the range of the northern spotted owl along the Pacific Coast during the past thirty years. Even in unfragmented habitat, like Olympic National Park, the barred owl has displaced the spotted owl from the

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Figure 35. Fitness of habitat for reproduction of the northern spotted owl in the Klamath Mountains. Each circle is roughly a mile in diameter. Black represents mature to oldgrowth conifer forest, and white represents all other vegetation types. Fitness is higher in heterogeneous landscapes than in areas in which the forest is either all young conifer/other vegetation or all mature/old-growth conifer. (From A. B. Franklin, D. R. Anderson, R. J. Gutierrez, and K. P. Burnham, “Climate, Habitat Quality, and Fitness in Northern Spotted Owl Populations in Northwestern California,” Ecological Monographs 70, no. 4 [2000]: 539–90. © 2000 by Ecological Society of America. Reprinted with permission. Illustrator: Cathy Schwartz.)

best habitat. Wildlife managers have been concerned enough to suggest a campaign in which government-trained hunters shoot barred owls, at least in portions of the Klamaths, to save the spotted owl. The future of the northern spotted owl is uncertain, but the available signs point to even more risk to a sustainable population. A sustainable future for the forests of the Klamaths will require more active management of public forests to move them closer to the types of structures created by natural disturbances, especially historic forest fires. Before the reader begins envisioning clear-cuts across the landscape, let me define what I mean by active management. Active management is a continuing program of light-on-the-land management to mimic natural processes, particularly fire. Fire tends to thin from below, kill small trees, and consume fuels, and similar actions should be the focus of management. Very little regeneration harvesting, which seeks to

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open a stand for seedlings to regenerate, will be necessary. But more extensive thinning programs, whose focus is to reduce fuels and remove small trees, will help protect the older trees. We have plenty of recently regenerated forest in the Klamaths right now, both from public harvest in the 1980s and from continuing private harvest. Several years ago, I conducted a study of a portion of the Umpqua National Forest in southern Oregon that showed that natural disturbances have produced stand-replacement events in about 0.2 percent of the land annually for the past fifty years, compared to 1.1 percent caused by clear-cutting. This ratio of 6 to 1 suggested that we do not need more regeneration harvest now or in coming decades; I suspect a similar trend applies in the Klamaths. Achieving a more natural balance of even-aged and multiaged forests will require us to shift our focus from future clear-cutting (or cuts to retain green trees and encourage substantial regeneration) toward thinning operations and prescribed fire to create multiaged stands from single-aged stands. We may not yet know the ideal mix, but we do know the best direction and intent of management. Public land management also needs to recognize that private lands will be more intensively managed. Particularly with the preponderance of checkerboard ownership, public-forest management should work to minimize the combined cumulative effects of active management of both private and public ownerships. The worst possible end result would be a checkerboard ownership that is obvious from space: clear-cuts on the private land and no management at all on public lands. A wildfire resulting from extreme weather would incinerate young industrial plantations and cause public lands to burn with higher-than-normal severity, so the checkerboard pattern would be muted, but the scorecard on ecological services like clean water and wildlife habitat would read zero. A landscape with softer edges would be preferable, coming closer to the way that nature once managed these forests. Size, shape, and spacing of stands of varying character are important. Real historic landscapes had spatial gradients of fire severity, linking, for example, an old-growth patch to a patch killed by fire. Rarely were the sharp edges we see in recent-decade clear-cuts present on the Klamath landscape. The issue of natural shaping is addressed in current Forest Service law (the National Forest Management Act of 1976) but has been largely ignored. In places that experienced historic stand-replacing fires, even-aged stands would have resulted. Future regeneration harvests, either by clear-cutting or low retention of green trees, should blend

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Figure 36. A Douglas-fir stand in the Klamath Mountains that retained high overstory cover, ten years after being burned by wildfires in 1987.

into surrounding areas, including private lands, rather than be designed as angular blocks on the land. Given the overrepresentation of young stands at present, this need will likely not arise much in the next few decades. The “average” historic stand in much of the Klamath Mountain matrix land, dominated by Douglas-fir, was neither young, even-aged forest nor complex, multilayered old growth. It was an intermediatestage forest that might be called “old growth” (because it contained a lot of old trees) but often lacked the multiple canopy layers of undisturbed forest (see figure 36). From above, it appeared to have a continuous canopy, but fire intervened often enough that the forest was often single canopied. Stands that began after a stand-replacement event developed into the several-aged stands in the presence of several fires and “recycled” through the several-aged category with recurring low- to moderate-severity fire, perhaps for centuries. Stands in moist and cool locations (some riparian, some north aspect) developed the complex, multilayered structure and persisted, although probably on a small proportion of the landscape. They were not totally free from fire, but fire occurred there at the lowest severities. Stands in less-protected areas, if they developed a more flammable complex structure through absence of fire or were simply in hotter, drier topography (with steep, south aspects)

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were usually recycled via a high-severity fire to a single-aged regeneration unit. Fires during unusual weather might have the same effect. The challenge of creating and maintaining this complex mix of stands is enormous. No one has yet accomplished this feat. In the short to midterm, a variety of operations, including the use of prescribed fire and some timber harvest, will be appropriate: to move single-aged stands to multiaged stands while helping to produce bigger trees; to maintain multiaged stands through variable thinning regimes, usually thinning from below but not always lightly; and to encourage stable openings more typical of the historic forest. Stands as old as 100 to 150 years appear to respond to thinning, so the opportunity to create large trees is not limited to very young stands. Given the current large proportion of young stands, little need will exist for regeneration harvest during the careers of the current generation of land managers. Fire can’t be used everywhere, but underburning is an important tool in the kit, one that has not been used in the past as much as it might be in the future. Fires can be applied under moist weather conditions in spring and fall to limit flame lengths to 1 to 3 feet, a height sufficient to kill small trees and consume fuels but likely to do little harm to the mature-tree overstory. Where smoke constraints or escape possibilities are high, then harvest to mimic fire may be the most appropriate tool. And, of course, wildfires will continue to occur in the Klamaths. Historically, they created some high-severity patches and a local concentration of snags on the landscape. On old clear-cuts, snags are almost never seen, and they can be very limited after timber-salvage operations on wildfires (especially on private land). In the future when wildfires create large patches of dead trees, avoidance of total salvage may help replenish this important source of woody debris that was spatially and temporally variable, but nonetheless present, on the historic landscape. This occurrence implies, conversely, that some salvage of dead trees in fireprone areas may be needed to enable active management of the emergent young stands twenty or thirty years later. With hundreds of thousands of acres in wilderness, land managers should expand the use of naturally ignited fires in the Klamaths. Although some plans exist at present to allow such fires, they need to allow more operational flexibility so that a higher proportion of the fires can burn. Fire in wilderness is as much a natural process as wind or rainstorms, except of course that natural ignitions were for centuries augmented by Native American ignitions. I like to envision lightningcaused fires burning down from the ridges and Indian fires burning up

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from the valleys. The risk is that an occasional fire will start well inside a wilderness and burn its way out. Use of prescribed fire around such potential borders, and even inside wilderness, can reduce the probabilities that such events will occur. A focus on public-land fuel treatment near the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is already mandated by the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, but the commitment of private landowners will also be necessary to protect developed areas successfully. We have developed a much better idea of how natural disturbances affect forest structures in the various forest types of the Klamaths, and we can use this information to achieve an appropriate mix of stand structures in the nonwilderness landscape. We also have the opportunity to tailor the mix to take into account the projected stand structures on surrounding private lands. Visualization software is now available that can show, at a stand or landscape level, what such structures will look like in five, ten, or fifty years; this tool offers a powerful way to show the public the results of such management. Previous forestmanagement plans focused on outputs: how much timber will result, how many recreation days, and the like. New forest-management plans need to focus on what we are creating and maintaining on the landscape. The outputs are still important, but they flow from the sustainable landscape. One concern with active management is how to predict cumulative effects. If we actively manage forest in a watershed that has been damaged in the past, will the additional impact of these ground-disrupting activities create unacceptable erosion or stream quality? Analyses of some watersheds are already in hand and will help guide future activities. Innovative means of removing trees with new flexible equipment can allow thinning with little impact on the land, and access can allow rehabilitation of areas known to need help, such as those with old, poorly maintained roads. Prescribed fire can forestall stand-replacement burning, so it can forestall the effects of wildfire. Some change in regional vegetation may be inevitable if global warming continues. In warmer, drier environments, an even more aggressive fuels strategy will be necessary to maintain large, old conifer forest. The key to success is to apply “fire-safe” principles in managing Northwest Forest Plan forests, particularly in the drier forest regions like the Klamath. We know that current fire problems partly stem from past mismanagement: removal of too many large trees, buildups of surface fuels and ladder fuels, and to a lesser extent, filling in of the overstory canopy so that fires can move from tree crown to tree crown. Fire-safe

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principles give top priority to reducing surface fuels and ladder fuels and thinning tree crowns where appropriate, but they also call for keeping the larger trees that are more fire resistant (because of thicker bark and taller crowns). These restorative actions would represent a net investment in the natural resources of the region. The activities will produce some revenue, but much of the rehabilitation and prescribed fire work will cost money and recover none directly. From a public perspective, however, this approach may be cost-effective. We now spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to suppress individual wildfires, for example. If we could begin to treat our forests to fragment continuous fuels, we could save public dollars now spent on fire suppression. But for a time, we will probably need to invest in forest restoration and spend suppression dollars at current levels. We need to be much more cost-efficient in fighting the large wildfires: the $200 million spent on the Biscuit fire of southern Oregon in 2002 and on a fire in the Pasayten Wilderness of Washington in 2003 could have funded a remarkable, decades-long restoration program for the Klamaths. Most likely, however, the agencies will have to start restoration actions slowly and ramp up activity as people gain trust in the pilot projects. When the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted, its goals were not only to assure ecological sustainability but also to sustain the affected communities. Wood produced as a by-product of restoration can provide social and economic benefits, although never again at the high levels of the 1980s. Innovative timber yarding techniques, such as those developed by Hayfork’s Watershed Research and Education Center to remove small logs from stands with little environmental impact, will be critical if forest managers are to be able to treat substantial areas. Meanwhile, the Federal Payments to States program, which expired in 2006, should be continued to recognize the ecological investment local communities make when they implement the Northwest Forest Plan. Formerly, 25 percent of the revenue from federal lands, primarily from logging, went to the local counties in which the revenue was generated. With the Northwest Forest Plan, these amounts declined precipitously, so Congress stepped in with a stable but temporary funding formula. If the program does not continue past 2006, and the system reverts to the 25 percent revenue level, it will cost the counties of Trinity and Siskiyou $14 million per year. For urban counties, this level of funding may seem a drop in the bucket, but for these counties, it would deliver a tremendous economic blow,

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given that they have already lost the direct economic benefits of the higher harvest levels from public lands. These monies also fund forest-restoration projects across the region. Each county has a resource advisory committee (RAC) appointed by the secretary of agriculture, whose role is to improve collaborative efforts and provide recommendations for project funding. Between 2001 and 2005, for example, Trinity County spent close to $5 million on watershed restoration, fuels reduction, and trails improvement. The RAC process and the work the committees oversee across the Klamaths are viewed as a major success. It would be a shame to see these programs disappear.

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Industrial Sector Much of the industrial forestland in the Klamath Mountains is fragmented and on the California side of the border, a legacy of the railroad checkerboard of the nineteenth century. Sierra Pacific Industries is by far the largest industrial landowner, so its actions will largely determine the effects on the industrial land base of the region. SPI, like all other forest landowners in California, is constrained in its forest management by the California Forest Practices Act, the Z’berg-Nejedly Forest Practices Act of 1973. Before that time, little regulation of forest practices took place. Since the early days of the act in 1974, the regulatory manual has grown from 30 or 40 pages to 205 pages in 2006. California claims it has the most stringent forest-practices regulation in the nation, and overall this claim is probably correct (some of Washington’s provisions are currently more restrictive than California’s). Development and processing of a timber-harvesting plan, which must be done by a professional forester registered to practice in California (the only state with this requirement), can cost $10,000 to $100,000 or more. But the key question is whether this costly regulation is effective in protecting public resources during timber harvest. Were the Klamaths a more pristine landscape with little history of timber removal, I would largely agree with the argument that current regulations are effective. But past practices, much less regulated than those of the present, have left unhealed scars on lands that must absorb the effects of current and future activities. Road building, more than vegetation removal, has caused the most trouble. Plans for future activities have to consider the activities of the past. Planned activities must

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also be specific to place; some areas harvested in the past were either engineered well or were resistant or resilient to damage, in which case current forest-practices regulation will do little damage. Other sites have a worse land-use history or were more sensitive, in which case future activities could exacerbate cumulative effects. In the end no set of regulations can govern all forest practices or account for all land-use histories. Existing regulations do provide exceptions and alternate prescriptions, but sustainable forestry requires a land ethic. Without it, a thousand pages of regulations will not provide ecological sustainability. Recent comparisons of SPI to companies like Collins Pine have been unflattering. Collins Pine is a northern Sierra Nevada, family-held company that practices uneven-aged management, using selection harvest, and has won “sustainability” status from the Forest Stewardship Council, one of the tougher certification councils, for the land it manages. It costs Collins Pine 5 to 10 percent more, on average, to produce its certified lumber. But the company has the advantage of operating on relatively flat ground, quite unlike the steep topography of the Klamaths. Like most large forest-industry companies, SPI has a large technical staff, including wildlife biologists, hydrologists, geologists, and botanists. It has the potential to become a leader in sustainable forestry if it chooses to do so. Sustained yield plans (SYPs) are one way that the forest industry could improve the coordination of its activities on its own lands and in concert with adjacent checkerboarded lands. The SYP process is outlined in the regulations dictated by the California Forest Practices Act. It is an optional process for landowners that covers the same issues that a timber-harvest plan (THP) does, but in a more comprehensive way. The SYP, if approved by the state, clears all THPs submitted under the SYP for watershed or fish and wildlife issues for ten years. SYPs must address cumulative effects. This process, by expanding the spatial and temporal framework for THP analysis, is a large step in the right direction. However, it doesn’t solve the problem of defining cumulative effects. Language such as “practicality and reasonableness,” though understandable, leaves a large gap in standards and does not require the applicant to relate its activities to other sources of cumulative effects. Until the state takes responsibility for staffing a group on cumulative watershed effects, which a scientific committee recommended in 2002, addressing cumulative effects will remain a slippery endeavor. The forest industry will likely continue its predominately even-aged management practices, including clear-cutting, in the Klamath Mountains,

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but clear-cutting is an optional management technique and is not required for successful regeneration of the tree species native to the region. The companies also recognize that partial-cut operations do not face the size limits or waiting periods that clear-cut operations do. Actually, small openings within thinned forests are sufficient to regenerate species like ponderosa pine, mimicking the ways the species develop in nature. Though industry recognizes fire-safety issues, industrial practices will often decrease fire resilience rather than increase it. To prevent wildfires, operations need to move away from dense forests dominated by small trees toward more open forests dominated by large trees. Yet clear-cuts remove large trees, taking away the most fire-resistant element of the current forest and leaving the resulting plantation sensitive to fire for decades. Selective cutting that removes the largest trees has the same effect. A focus on regeneration leads to more intensive cutting, which is economically more profitable but seldom improves ecological condition. A recent study of sediment sources for the upper-middle Trinity River drainage estimated that landslides produced about half of the sediment input to streams, with half of that sediment being related to management activities. Harvest-related surface erosion was 11 percent of the total, and road-surface erosion was 13 percent. Mining produced 4 percent of the sediment. Thus, even with much-improved forest practices, the combination of past and current harvest is still detrimental to streams. I offer two suggestions for forest-practices regulations that would help reduce these cumulative effects. The first is to limit the amount of area that can be disturbed in a given period. The current rules imply that the total area disturbed is important by restricting clear-cut size and requiring separation of clear-cut areas from one another. But other types of cutting have no area limitations, although their environmental effects may approach that of a clear-cut. (A hardwood conversion, for example, is essentially a clear-cut, but it involves no conifers and has no acreage limits.) Freshwater Creek, west of the Klamath region, is a good example. Only about 15 percent of the second-growth redwood watershed was clear-cut in the 1990s, an area equivalent to about a sixtyfive-year cutting rotation that seemingly results in a reasonable amount of disturbed area in a decade. But other operations also took place during this period: 5 percent of the land area was harvested with an “alternate” prescription; 15 percent, with commercial thinning; 6 percent, with selection harvest; and 7 percent, with other types of cuts. Overall, these activities would affect some 50 percent of the watershed area in a decade.

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Within every square mile, roughly 2 miles of road were built during this period, and tractor-skid trails covered about two-thirds of the area harvested. Regulators consider each THP separately, and none of the plans for these activities suggested cumulative effects; reviewers would have considered hydrologic function and sediment production differently if the whole picture had been on the table. Though the whole might have been more than the sum of its parts, no one was required to sum up the parts. If such a summation had been available, the effect of disturbing so much land in so little time would have been evident, enabling a better estimate of how water would behave in this watershed. My other suggestion relates to the method of logging. During the first sweep through the Klamaths after World War II, loggers used tractors almost exclusively to remove, or “yard,” trees, dragging them downslope and directly down stream channels to a landing where they were loaded for transport to the mill. Cable technology, although widely used in Oregon and Washington, was not used in California. Tractor yarding effectively roads a third of the logged area, and skid trails lead downhill, concentrating runoff to the landing. Cable yarding can create more surface disturbance than tractor yarding does, but the disturbance is usually shallow. Logs are usually yarded uphill so that water disperses in a fan pattern as it moves downhill. Some cable systems can suspend the logs in the air to reduce ground disturbance. The forest-practice rules allow both methods but limit tractor clear-cuts to 20 acres and cable clear-cuts to 30 acres, apparently in acknowledgment of their differential impact. Tractor yarding is allowed on slopes as steep as 65 percent, or less on very erodible soils. These grades represent very steep slopes; a steep, paved county road is generally less than a 10 percent grade. Cumulative effects would be substantially decreased if loggers had to use cables or helicopters to harvest steep slopes. Tractor yarding is the cheapest method for the operator, but when one adds in the cost of addressing cumulative effects, it is likely not the cheapest for society. Cable yarding should have first priority on slopes steeper than 40 percent. Of course, like most simple solutions, these suggestions are not panaceas, and they raise their own questions: How should we define a watershed to determine what areas are affected by industrial activity? Should the rules designating the permissible percentage of disturbed area apply to the watershed as a whole or to each owner? What if the existing road pattern was designed for downhill tractor yarding? If cable yarding were required, new ridgeline roads might be needed. Exceptions are inevitable with one-size-fits-all rules, and I would support

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exceptions, particularly if new operations invested in rehabilitating old continuing wounds. But if we are ever to address cumulative effects in the Klamath region, limits on the amount of disturbed area and a transition to more environmentally sound yarding practices will be needed.

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Nonindustrial Sector Owners of nonindustrial forests are difficult to characterize as a group, other than to say they are small operations, have a variety of management objectives, have more of their personal net worth tied up in land and timber, and as a group are usually fragmented, making any kind of coordinated approach to watershed management difficult. Some owners focus primarily on timber production, whereas others have amenity values or wildlife protection as their major management objective. Most studies indicate that this forest sector nationwide is continuing to fragment, with more owners and smaller parcels, exacerbating the challenges of coordinated resource management. Two major problems occur in the nonindustrial sector, given that we want to maintain the societal benefits of the ecosystem services (such as clean water and wildlife habitat) that these lands provide. How can we fit these small parcels, which in the aggregate can be large areas, into a more coordinated management framework while recognizing the owners’ myriad objectives? What incentives can we offer to keep these lands from fragmenting further over time? In America’s Private Forests, Connie Best and Laurie Wayburn provide a comprehensive scheme for improving conservation on private forestlands. They offer a matrix of actions to increase the efficiency of scale in the conservation market and suggest cultural changes that would help integrate conservation into forestry. Given the limited amount of nonindustrial land in the Klamath region, leadership in such activities is likely to emerge elsewhere, but local landowners can use emerging opportunities to their advantage, and to the advantage of society. Small landowners in California have the option of creating a nonindustrial timber management plan, or NTMP, in lieu of filing an individual timber-harvest plan for every operation. The NTMP is an opportunity to promote long-term management planning rather than the piecemeal THP approach. It gives the state, as well as adjacent landowners, a sense of long-term direction on each parcel. However, the NTMP is an expensive planning process. The plan must adopt uneven-aged management,

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so it cannot include large-scale clear-cutting, and it must commit to long-term sustainable management. Though such plans are not a panacea for cumulative effects, they are an excellent start for coordinated community forest management. Nonindustrial landowners also qualify for a variety of cost-share programs that offset management costs. For nonindustrial operators that submit a long-term forest plan, the California Forest Improvement Program provides as much as 75 percent reimbursement for the costs of reforestation, soil and water protection, and wildlife habitat improvement. Up to 90 percent of the costs of rehabilitation work following natural disasters are reimbursable. Federal cost-share programs are also available. The first federal cost sharing with states was largely for fire protection, and this focus shifted to incentives for timber production in the 1950s. Now, a broader array of programs fund stewardship objectives, through relatively small grants to the states, with a renewed emphasis on reducing fire hazards. The Forest Legacy Program purchases easements, which it then sells or donates to a third party, to protect significant environmental values on private land. The Forest Stewardship Program encourages better management by providing planning and technical assistance to nonindustrial landowners. Its main cost-sharing provision, the Stewardship Incentives Program, is currently unfunded by Congress but could be reauthorized. Tax policy is a critical component of a successful land-conservation policy. States such as California have recognized the value of wildlands and the services they provide: ecological services such as clean water and wildlife as well as production of goods such as timber. Lands zoned as Timberland Production Zones are taxed at a lower rate than are areas outside of such zones, and for twenty-five years, the timber tax has been based on timber cut rather than inventory. The previous system fostered clear-cutting, because owners of uncut lands had to pay an annual timber-inventory tax. Clear-cut lands were removed from the timbertax rolls for forty years (although the land itself was taxed at a low level). Today’s system taxes the owner at the time of revenue generation. Conservation easements may be a partial solution to fragmentation. Even when families choose to keep forestland intact, when a generation shift occurs through death, they may log or subdivide their parcels to generate funds to pay the immediately due estate taxes. Currently, federal estate-tax laws are under revision to reduce this tax burden through 2010, at which time the more regressive taxes will possibly reappear. But a more permanent solution is to designate a conservation easement

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that permits the owners to donate development rights to a third party, such as a land trust. The donation has immediate and long-term tax advantages, while allowing families to maintain ownership, live on the land, and continue sustainable active management. In a perfect world, we would be able to coordinate the activities of public and private forest landowners to achieve sustainable outcomes. Without such coordination, sustainability is still a reachable goal, although its scale may be limited and its success more problematic.

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chapter 16

Restoring the Rivers

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Ecosystem restoration can take two paths: passive and active. Passive restoration stops the practices that are creating the need for restoration. Active restoration takes actions to restore either the structure or function of the ecosystem. For the rivers of the Klamath region, passive restoration is under way on much of the federal land managed under the Northwest Forest Plan, by slowing the scale and intensity of harvest activities. Active restoration is occurring both in the rivers and the uplands, driven more by endangered fish and tribal rights than by altruism. But it is nevertheless happening, ushering in a new era of ecosystem restoration across the region.

the rivers The Trinity The Trinity River once had a thriving population of anadromous fish. When it was dammed, the watershed above the dam was no longer available for the fish. They could migrate only up to Lewiston Dam. Because 75 percent of the river’s flow, on average, and in some years, up to 90 percent of the flow, was diverted across to the Sacramento River, the lack of flow in the Trinity, and absence of any high flows at all, devastated the spawning beds and rearing areas below the dam. Although the plans to dam the entire length of the Trinity River never 233

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materialized, the one completed dam complex destroyed 90 percent of the fishery. In 1981, the secretary of the interior reduced the average annual diversion of over a million acre-feet of water by 219,500 acre-feet until a federal-state study could determine the amount of flow needed to restore salmon and steelhead runs. Historic flow not only involved more water but also varied considerably between seasons. Flows of as much as 15,000 cubic feet per second were common past the site of the dam in winter storms, and sustained flows above 5,000 cfs were common during spring snowmelt. The water, sediment, and vegetation of the river corridor were closely linked. The high water flushed sediments down the river and created and destroyed river bars. Gravel and cobble bars were common and these shallow waters were favored locations for salmon and steelhead fry. The small fish emerging from eggs in the gravel could hide among the cobble where water velocities were not too high. After dam construction, gravel delivery from upstream ceased, and the gravels downstream silted in. The channel became more rectangular, with steep banks. The now-stable river channel created a sediment berm that soon was armored with riparian vegetation (see figure 37). By 1970, only six years after completion of the dam, the dynamic nature of the river channel had been seriously compromised (see figure 38). The turbulent, wild river, even in summer, that I knew as a child was now no more than a canal. The effects were most serious from Lewiston Dam down to the North Fork of the Trinity River, where flows from undammed tributaries mitigated the impact of the upstream dam. Studies continued on the stream, and the alternatives they suggested ranged from maximizing the restoration of predam flows to simulating the effect of the flows on river dynamics solely through mechanical means. Although the Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) was authorized in the 1984 Fish and Wildlife Improvement Act, a record decision in 2000 announced a new phase in the program: flows would be increased from roughly 25 percent of historic levels to 50 percent. Flows would be managed for the benefit of riparian processes, and the decision proposed active sediment management to increase coarsesediment input and decrease fine sediment. The decision was challenged in court by the people at the end of the pipeline, particularly the Westlands Water District in the southerly San Joaquin Valley. Over time, other litigants began to drop out of the action even though the plan would affect power generation and water supply in areas south of the

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Figure 37. Pre–Trinity Dam and Post–Trinity Dam channel morphology along the downstream reaches of the Trinity River. TRD: Trinity River Dam. (Source: Adapted from the Trinity River Restoration Program. Illustrator: Jack DeLap.)

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Figure 38. Development of berms along riverbanks downstream of Trinity Dam. (Source: Trinity River Restoration Program.)

Klamath region. In 2004, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the program, allowing all aspects of the program to proceed. Restored flows and channel rehabilitation are now under way. One might criticize the plan for restoring only half the flow of the Trinity River at Lewiston, but that view relies on a glass-half-empty / glass-half-full argument. The fact is that the Trinity will never be a completely wild river again, but by restoring elements of the natural flow regime, we can enable the river to produce healthy populations of salmon and steelhead and help other riparian-dependent wildlife, such as yellow-legged frogs and western pond turtles, while still serving Central Valley Project obligations. The interagency TRRP used a “healthy alluvial river” model to assess the alternatives. It defined ten attributes. These rather complex descriptions essentially define a more natural river-flow regime and a dynamic, changing channel. Change that comes closest to mimicking the natural

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flow regime is most likely to mimic natural levels of biodiversity. The management alternatives were scored on their ability to achieve each of the following attributes: . Channel geomorphology is spatially complex. . Flows and water quality are predictably variable. . Channel-bed surfaces are frequently mobilized. . Channel-bed surfaces are periodically scoured and refilled. . Fine- and coarse-sediment budgets are approximately balanced. . The channel periodically migrates. . The channel has a functional floodplain. . The channel is occasionally reset during very large floods. . Riparian plant communities are diverse and self-sustaining. . The groundwater table fluctuates naturally with changing stream

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flows. The chosen proposal scored 66 out of 100, with the perfect score being a river that functioned as the predam Trinity River did. The current situation, described by the “no action” proposal, scored 8. The proposal is a promising solution, and if it succeeds, it will be one of the largest-scale river-restoration projects in the world. The proposal deals with all four river-building processes: water flow, vegetation, channel morphology, and sediment. It builds on experimental projects that took place in the Trinity River in the early 1990s. Success in increasing the average flow to 50 percent of annual flow would double today’s flow. The flow will be allowed to vary by year and by season. Years will be classified as normal (20 percent of years), wet or dry (28 percent of years each), or extremely wet or dry (12 percent of years each). The plan calls for increasing the proportion of total flow reserved for the river from extremely wet to extremely dry years, even though total flow decreases along the same gradient. Releasing water from the dam will produce high spring flows from 6,000 cfs (dry years) to 11,000 cfs (extremely wet years) to simulate the spring snowmelt that historically emanated from the Trinity Alps and Mt. Eddy area. A ramping up of flow in spring will help the outmigration of steelhead smolts, and summer flows will maintain proper temperature regimes for the salmon and steelhead smolts. Four downstream bridges have been rebuilt to accommodate the higher peak flows the plan envisions.

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The flow regime will also help restore the floodplain dynamics of the historic river. Channel morphology will become more complex. Streamside (riparian) vegetation will become more dynamic, being initiated at some places and being washed out at others to prevent the creation of stable berms. Although partially restored flow regimes can do part of this work, channel rehabilitation is also necessary. The plan calls for using heavy equipment to remove riparian berms and move the material out of the floodplain (see figure 39). Portions of these channels are visible from Highway 299. Restored point bars in a more natural flow regime will maintain frequently disturbed, ephemeral riparian vegetation there, with more stable vegetation farther back on the floodplain. Sediment management is also an important part of the restoration effort. Fine sediment originating from land-management activities is still above natural levels in the South Fork and main-stem Trinity River, but significant improvements have been achieved, especially in the Grass Valley Creek watershed. Below the dam, coarse sediment is underrepresented in the Trinity River, as historic deliveries from upstream slowly fill Trinity Lake behind the dam. Sediment coming from tributaries downstream of the dam (see figure 40) is currently not transported downstream because of reduced stream flows, so it settles out at the confluence of the Trinity and the tributary, creating deltas and backwaters in the channel of the Trinity River. The restored flow regimes will help transport the fine-textured delta material downstream. Cobble and gravel will be added to the river reach immediately downstream of Lewiston Dam to replenish spawning gravels, and to a lesser extent, in the next 15 miles of the river channel. In normal water years, above 2,000 cubic yards will be added, with ranges from none in extremely dry years to 67,000 cubic yards in extremely wet years, when peak flow releases from the dam will be highest. Needs for active floodplain management will decline over time as the restored flow regime does much of the work in the channel. Cobble and gravel additions will continue indefinitely. A formal adaptivemanagement program called Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management is moving ahead in parallel with restoration, to enable scientists and planners to learn by doing and to adjust management actions in the face of scientific uncertainty. Monitoring will track the progress of the river restoration and, of course, its objective of increasing salmonid populations. Such feedback will allow the fine-tuning necessary to predict the river’s response to management.

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Figure 39. Restoration of a more natural floodplain. (Source: Adapted from the Trinity River Restoration Program. Illustrator: Jack DeLap.)

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Figure 40. The delta built by Rush Creek as it enters the Trinity River and the resulting backwater of the Trinity River upstream. (Source: Trinity River Restoration Program.)

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The Klamath Efforts to restore the Klamath River’s anadromous fish populations are also ongoing but have been much more contentious and have made much less progress than the Trinity River Restoration Program. If the Trinity River program is successful, it will help the lower 43 miles of the Klamath River below its confluence with the Trinity. But another 150 miles of the Klamath flow between there and the Iron Gate Dam, and yet another 50 miles are above that point, with many tributaries, most of which historically supported anadromous fish. The Klamath problem involves more than anadromous fish. The shortnose sucker and Lost River sucker, found in the upper basin, are classed as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act, joining the “threatened” coho salmon. Efforts in 2001 to provide adequate water levels and flows

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restricted water supplies for irrigation by farmers on 220,000 acres served by the Bureau of Reclamation’s Klamath Project in the upper basin. This action generated an immediate outcry from the farmers and a much publicized “turning on the faucet” visit by Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton in 2002. In September 2002, roughly 35,000 of a returning run of 130,000 adult Chinook salmon (compared to perhaps a million returning fish historically) died in the lower Klamath River. Though all parties agreed that the fish died from a massive infection by two pathogens, charges flew back and forth about what and who was responsible. The fish died in a low-flow period with high stream temperatures, but according to the 2004 National Academy of Sciences report on endangered fishes of the basin, such conditions were not unprecedented. The report was critical of the federal lead agency’s approaches to fish conservation, calling them “disjointed, occasionally dysfunctional, and commonly adversarial” (331). It noted that the adaptive-management approach on the Trinity River could serve as a useful model for the rest of the basin.

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the uplands Restoration actions in the rivers, if they are to be useful, require properly functioning tributary streams. Those tributaries, in turn, require properly functioning uplands. Upland restoration is occurring across the Klamath region. Along the Klamath River, watershed restoration is under way on the Yurok Reservation, at Bluff Creek, at Elk Creek, in the Scott River, and in the upper basin. The Salmon River Restoration Council has been a regional leader in empowering local residents to steward private and public lands. Its activities include land restoration, monitoring of fish populations, and comprehensive education programs. In places where past or current management has created continuing sources of fine sediment, active restoration can be an important part of river restoration. Nowhere in the Klamaths is this fact more evident than at Grass Valley Creek. Grass Valley Creek drains roughly 28,000 acres, from the TrinitySacramento divide at Buckhorn Summit into the Trinity River at the southern edge of Lewiston. It contains some of the most erosive soils in the region, formed from the 120 million-year-old Shasta Bally batholith, a large granitic intrusion. Signs of road failure along Highway 299 east of Buckhorn Summit illustrate the unstable nature of these soils. The entire Grass Valley watershed was privately owned–80 percent by the

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forest industry and 20 percent by small private owners–until the 1990s. Logging and road building significantly increased after World War II, at which time no forest-practices regulations existed. Most of the logging was overstory removal, taking all of the large trees and leaving whatever was left. Erosion rates in the decomposed granite, which were probably always higher than rates in other watersheds, significantly increased, and tremendous loads of sand-sized material moved into Grass Valley Creek and eventually into the Trinity River. The 1955 flood created high flows on the undammed Trinity River, allowing it to pick up that material and dissipate it downstream. Ten years later, the 1964 flood on the dammed Trinity had a quite different effect. Instead of reaching an expected peak flow substantially higher than the 70,000 cubic feet per second in 1955, the release from Trinity Dam in 1964 created a flow of only 240 cfs. The estimated 1 million cubic yards of sand pouring out of Grass Valley Creek stopped at its mouth and were deposited in the Trinity River, clogging the gravels that had historically served the needs of spawning anadromous fish. By 1980, legislation enabled upland restoration to begin. Construction of Hamilton Ponds at the mouth of the creek aimed to trap and excavate sediment before it reached the Trinity. Buckhorn Sediment Dam was constructed well upstream, south of Highway 299, to trap sediment originating in the steep headwall areas of the watershed. Both sets of structures aimed to enable dredging of sediment before it reached the Trinity and continued to clog the spawning gravels for steelhead and salmon. The shallow Hamilton Ponds have to be dredged periodically, whereas the Buckhorn Dam, which impounds much more water, can hold back much more sediment. But these structures did not address the source of these sediments: failed roads and unvegetated slopes. A more direct restoration program was needed. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, sediment inventories by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (formerly the Soil Conservation Service) identified 1,164 problem areas in the watershed, or about 1 problem every 25 acres. Many of these problems originated before 1960 but were still producing sediment. Hope and help came from many sectors. Trinity County mandated higher road standards for construction of new roads in areas of decomposed granite. The Board of Supervisors restricted off-road vehicles as well. The Trinity River Task Force received $25 million in federal funds to purchase and restore lands in the watershed. The task force purchased about 16,000 acres of cutover Champion International timberlands in 1993 for $9 million, and with

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the help of the Trust for Public Land, transferred these purchased acres to public ownership by the Bureau of Land Management. Roughly $5.8 million was reserved for watershed restoration. Participants in the Grass Valley Creek restoration project had to learn as they went. Uncertainty is a constant in restoration work. Practices effective in one watershed might not work in another, and the true test of restoration is how the watershed weathers a big storm. From 1992 to 1996, a multiagency team spent 85 percent of the restoration funds and learned a great deal. Restoration activities, particularly planting of vegetation, continues at a lower rate today, and monitoring of the success rate of various treatments also continues. The project team adopted adaptive management from the start, and participants applied the lessons they learned to improve their practices and contribute to the success of the restoration. One of the startling aspects of watershed restoration is the effectiveness of heavy equipment: tractors, backhoes, and excavators. I was marginally involved in the strategic planning for the restoration of Redwood Creek on logged lands that legislation placed in Redwood National Park in 1978. We envisioned hordes of people scrambling around with shovels, willow wattles, and tree seedlings. But the team that actually began the work and continued it into the 1980s soon found that the erosion problems created by heavy equipment needed to be solved by heavy equipment. Much of that expertise eventually spun off into a watershed-restoration consulting business and was applied in the Grass Valley restoration work. When the project began, the Champion lands had not yet been purchased, so the focus was on stabilizing actively eroding roads and stream channels, primarily below the Buckhorn Dam, where any sediment would move downstream to Hamilton Ponds and the Trinity River. The project team placed small log dams in channels, but the dams were costly and were difficult to anchor into the unstable slopes on either side of the streams. In addition, permanent roads were redesigned with appropriately sized culverts. Roads were graveled and graded (outsloped) so that water would not accumulate along inner ditches. Water bars were installed to channel any overland flow off the road. Other roads were “put to bed” by ripping the roadbed and restoring the contours of the original slope. Widespread planting of Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine took place. One year later, the log dams were replaced by dams made of a mix of soil and cement; the new dams were cheaper, were easier to form to the

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channel, and required less maintenance. Nonnative grass mixtures that had been planted for stabilization were replaced by native mixes, and wetter areas were planted with willow cuttings. With the purchase of the Champion lands, broader uplands restoration became possible. The targets were roads, old skid trails for dragging logs to roads, and old landings for loading logs onto trucks. In these areas, sediment had not yet migrated to streams; a particular goal in these areas was to remove fill dirt where roads crossed stream channels. The storms of early 1995 showed that skid-trail rehabilitation was ineffective, and this part of the project was abandoned. Very little sediment was emanating from old skid trails. The use of small sediment traps and grade-stabilization structures increased in small subwatersheds. Some of the early tree planting failed because of poor soils, lack of protection for exposed seedlings, and in some cases, poor choices of species. Tree species mixes were then better tailored to site (incense cedar, for example, on north-facing slopes, and ponderosa pine on the drier sites). Grass and shrub mixes were preferred on the harsh sites where tree planting was unlikely to be immediately successful. A nativeplant nursery produced native shrubs like ceanothus (which changes atmospheric nitrogen into forms usable by plants, enriching soil fertility) and plugs of native perennial grasses. Combinations of fertilization, seeding, and mulching appeared to work well to establish dense stands of grass and reduce surface erosion. Excavated crossings in decomposed granite materials posed special problems. With other bedrock, or a mix of granite and metamorphic rock, the channels were able to armor themselves with that native rock. But in the decomposed granite, unacceptable erosion occurred when the excavated crossings had no protection from imported rock or from channel-lining material anchored on both sides of the excavated section. The project managers decided to protect all excavated channels in decomposed granite that had significant surface flow, drained areas larger than 10 acres, were longer than 50 feet, and had no stable bedrock along the excavated section. Outsloping roads, and removal of abandoned roads, appeared to work well in preventing future erosion. By the mid-1990s, project participants had decommissioned 44 miles of road, reconstructed 19 miles of road, treated 11,000 acres, and planted hundreds of thousands of trees, shrubs, and grass plugs. But success is not measured by these statistics but by sediment yields. We have no equivalent watershed to use as an untreated baseline, and the untreated portion of the upper watershed is not comparable either; it is

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steeper and has a higher proportion of decomposed granite. In the mid1990s, the untreated 25 percent of the area was producing 50 percent of the sediment, which was being trapped behind the Buckhorn Dam, so the other 75 percent, the area that was treated, was producing the other 50 percent of the sediment, most of which ends up in Hamilton Ponds. Not every watershed is going to need the intensive restoration that continues in Grass Valley Creek. Not every watershed will receive roughly $200 an acre for restoration either. Other applications of these treatments will likely be more limited, tailored to the chosen site to maximize effectiveness in reducing sediment yields. Hope comes less from the absolute amount of progress than from the turnaround in approach: from ripping up the land to restoring it. I sat at the inlet of Hamilton Ponds in the spring of 2004, contemplating a white delta of granitic sand that would never reach the Trinity River, with my dog curled up by my side. A large steelhead with a beautiful rainbow slash on its side jumped twice directly in front of us on its way downstream, and Zoe alertly cocked her head, as Aussies do. I knew that this sight was a reward for restoration, a reward earned by many people working together to achieve a sustainable future.

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chapter 17

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Steward’s Fork

Encouraging trends are emerging in the Klamath region. Sustainable resource practices and innovative approaches to preserving natural resources are not only being applied here but are being generated here. The Trinity River Restoration Project’s efforts to provide a sustainable future for the river and its fish, reclamation of mining sites, the success of the local resources advisory committee in its forest-restoration projects, and the rise of community organizations willing to cooperate in resource-management activities are all healthy signs that the region has not only come to the steward’s fork but is progressing along a sustainable path. California is a remarkable state in its ability to create unrealistic expectations. Peter Schrag has written about this phenomenon in Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future. Essayist Richard Rodriguez has echoed this idea, that California has always held out the expectation of paradise but that disappointment has more often been its theme: disappointment during the gold rush, among those hoping to get rich and leaving broke; disappointment with natural disasters—earthquakes, fires, and floods; and disappointment with people—riots, population growth, and stalled traffic. The Klamaths are not wholly Californian, but they must share that disappointment. Yet along with disappointment are glimmers of hope, in a context of challenges that will require continual adaptation and adjustment in resources management. 246

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Americans, as perhaps only we could do, have created a culturally bifurcated view of nature: we see pristine nature and despoiled nature, the latter of which is associated with work. Historian Richard White discusses this idea in his provocatively titled essay “Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?” Somewhere along the line, we began to devalue work in or with nature. We labeled pristine nature “good,” by default designating managed nature as “bad,” because it has a human imprint, which we perceived to be associated with destruction. The destructive potential of work was a recurring theme during the land-preservation battles that began in the 1960s: In wildness was the preservation of the world, so lands not preserved would be, by inference, destroyed. This bifurcation is a fallacy for two major reasons: First, Native Americans actively managed the landscape for millennia, and in the Klamaths, they used fire regularly; it was their most important tool. Humans, for better or worse, have been a part of Klamath nature for a long time. Managed nature and pristine nature, in the Klamaths, were inseparable until the gold rush. Second, pristine nature is not a vignette frozen in time. Change has always been a part of Klamath ecosystems: change is the only constant. Even for lands designated as preserves, the major challenge is managing change. The biodiversity of natural rivers demands occasional floods, and upland biodiversity, particularly in the Klamaths, demands fire. Human involvement in ecosystem change is not inherently evil. Native Americans created and maintained landscapes that met their needs in sustainable ways. The emerging modern field of restoration ecology demands active management to move ecological processes and states back along more sustainable paths. Restoration is at once work and nature. Examples of work with nature that, in the long run, are not destructive show us a path out of this conundrum. Nature and culture are essentially intertwined, and if we are to manage our natural resources successfully into the future, we must recognize and value this partnership. The relationship of nature and culture will not be the same everywhere: for example, in wilderness, culture will have less interaction, and on private land, it will typically have much more. But rather than see culture and nature as night and day, black and white, we should allow for infinite tones of gray, most of which provide for sustainable practices. Understanding the appropriate tone for a particular place requires knowledge of culture, but it also requires knowledge of nature, which seems to be fading from American culture. I have a recurring dream

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about the Stuart Fork that visits me about once a year, and like most dreams, it takes liberties with reality. The real Stuart Fork road currently ends about 5 miles upstream of Trinity Lake and about 2 miles up from Trinity Alps Resort. This stretch is a mixture of public and private land (the old checkerboard sections from the railroad grants) and travels along a gradient from where culture dominates to where nature dominates, into the Trinity Alps Wilderness. In my dream, roads have been pushed up the streams and ridges into the wilderness, dust is blowing around, and vacation homes are rising around Emerald, Sapphire, and Mirror lakes at the head of the glaciated basin. The homes jut out on the ridges for maximum view, and they are mostly in view as I drive up the developing valley. At Deer Creek, 6 miles into the “former” wilderness, I am car camping and surrounded by a glut of people. A creek that doesn’t really exist is on the west side of the river and has been recently dredged and hydraulically mined. It appears as a raw, unvegetated scar coursing down the mountain. A small mill constructed of rough-hewn boards is behind me, belching smoke and processing either timber or minerals (a small mill did exist in this vicinity during the La Grange ditch construction). I float to the ridgetop, and beyond to the east has grown a large city in an area that was once wilderness. There are still wild lands around the city, but the residents seem oblivious to them. They are well dressed, and wear headphones while they drive colorful new cars from one fast-food franchise to the next. I ask them if they know what they have lost, and they seem not to hear me. The scene is right out of a zombie movie, except the inhabitants haven’t yet been buried. I know this dream is neither about the loss of wilderness nor a desire that everywhere be wilderness. It is about a land ethic, one that applies equally to wilderness and to intensively managed lands. The real meaning of this dream is that a land ethic is being lost in America, not by active choice but by apathy. Today’s children, in particular, know less about nature, and much less about the origin of natural-resources services (wood, wildlife, water, and even wilderness) than their predecessors did. As the public becomes more myopic about nature, it is less able to make informed judgments about land policy (longer-term directions) and land management (shorter-term actions) and is more susceptible to demagogic sloganeers on both ends of the spectrum. If one does not understand the land, a land ethic has no meaning. We have reduced the time that children spend with nature and lessened their ability to understand it. Richard Louv has called this phenomenon

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“nature-deficit disorder” and says it has many causes. The ability of kids to wander around the neighborhood with unstructured playtime is far less than it was in the 1950s. Neighborhoods are not as safe as they were then. Children who do have opportunities to interact with nature face a series of other hazards: getting lost (who can read a map?), falling into fast water, being attacked by animals (much overemphasized by television news), and risking bites by mosquitoes that carry West Nile virus or ticks that carry Lyme disease. Yet the threats to the safety of children in cities are far more dangerous: indoor air pollution, contaminated soil in playgrounds from past industrial activity, or an out-of-control car. Will nature become a virtual reality? Many children are more excited by the visual stimulation of television and video games than by anything they see in nature. For about seven dollars a month, you can now sit at your computer and hook into a Bigfoot search that continues twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fed to you on a broadband Internet stream. You have a choice of several camera teams walking along trails in Bigfoot country at any one time and “never have to leave the comfort of your home.” You can read a few canned stories by Bigfoot experts if you get bored with the trail mix. Your subscription does not guarantee that you will “personally witness” a Bigfoot encounter; in fact, can anyone personally witness anything via a webcam? Hunting via computer has been operational in Texas for several years. If you sign up and pay a fee, you can travel (via video monitor) to a hunting blind that has a rifle set up so that you can aim the rifle (via the mouse) at a farm-raised game animal. One click, and you win a trophy: a mouse that roars. Internet hunting has created such controversy that a number of states, including California, are considering legislation to ban the practice of hunting over the Internet. Both examples show the increasing ability to distance oneself from real nature, creating a virtual nature that pales in comparison to the real thing. If we are to make intelligent decisions about natural resources, we need to involve ourselves both as individuals and as communities. A wise choice of a steward’s fork requires some knowledge of landscape history as well as its desired future; we need to understand that ecology is a science of place, that every choice is a choice for change, and that the results of even the best management are uncertain. David Montgomery, in his book on the history of salmon, summarizes the themes of salmon conservation as the four Hs: habitat, hydropower, harvest, and hatcheries. He begins his book by adding a fifth H, history, and concludes

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with a sixth H, a choice of two options: hubris or humility. The first four have affected the Klamath region more or less, but the important ones are the three Montgomery added: history, and hubris or humility. History informs us of where we have been, and the current state of natural resources is a product of that history. As we choose a steward’s fork into the future, I can only hope that we approach it with humility. Perhaps the most humbling obstacle before us is climate change. Fossil fuel consumption has increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, which along with other “greenhouse” gases creates a heat-trapping effect. The globe is warming. At a recent conference, six former Environmental Protection Agency chiefs, five of whom are Republicans, agreed that global warming is occurring and that the United States is not doing enough to mitigate that effect. If not mitigated, global warming could have substantial effects on the earth, and the Klamath region, even given its remoteness, will not escape these effects. Current science allows us only to speculate about the changes ahead. We have a better idea of what temperature changes may occur, although these effects will vary depending on whether the earth’s people adopt policies to limit future carbon emissions or do nothing. Temperature is likely to increase only a few degrees (3–6oF). Though this rise may seem innocuous, heat-wave days (temperatures above 90oF) in the Sacramento Valley will almost double in the current half century (to 2050). In winter, rainfall will account for a higher proportion of total precipitation, and the average snow-line elevation will increase. Summers are likely to be hotter and drier. Projected changes in precipitation are much more uncertain. Until 2003, projections showed precipitation generally increasing across California, but projections published in the following two years show mostly decreases in precipitation, from +6 to −70 percent depending on the carbon scenario and projection model. Given the lower and upper conservative bounds of current models, the average change in precipitation for the next halfcentury would be −21 percent (with “aggressive” emission-reduction policies) to −70 percent (with no control of emissions). These changes will have cascading effects on the vegetation, wildlife, and hydrology of the region. Much of the area currently dominated by conifers will increasingly be dominated by evergreen hardwoods. Some forested areas will become woodland or shrub dominated, and some high-elevation species might even disappear in this substantially altered environment, including many of the rare “relict” species of the region. Driving this change will be altered disturbance regimes. Fires will become

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more frequent and larger, especially inland from the coast. Whether they will be more or less intense will depend on fuel-management policies, most of which will likely grow out of the need to control global warming by constraining carbon emissions. For forests, this goal will call for storing carbon in live trees and in wood products and for using biofuels (small trees, shrubs, and the like) in place of fossil fuels. Insect attacks may increase if trees are of lower vigor. Alien biota, such as diseases like sudden oak death, or aggressive herbs or shrubs may invade the region and spread widely. These trends are not certain, but by recognizing these potentials for change, we may be able to mitigate their impact. Will this change be gradual, so that only those who have lived in or visited the Klamaths for many decades will notice it, or will it occur very rapidly? We can’t be certain, but two recent examples to the south suggest that rapid, catastrophic change is possible. In the Southwest, pinyon-juniper woodlands suffered a major dieback in 2002 and 2003, due to drought and warmer-than-normal temperatures. Twoneedle pinyon died at a regional scale (4,500 square miles). Around Lake Arrowhead in Southern California, a year without precipitation devastated the pine forests of the region. The conditions there were similar to those projected for the Klamath Mountains under global-warming scenarios. Loss of the more drought-sensitive species in the forest types of the Klamath Mountains could occur rapidly, increasing the dominance of drought-resistant, evergreen hardwoods, particularly if fires and insect attacks increase. The newly negotiated flow regimes for the Trinity River are based on a historical record that is likely different from future flow regimes, under current (and very uncertain) climate projections. The proportion of “below average” years based on 1906–96 flow records, will increase from 50 percent to somewhere between 58 to 74 percent. Less water may be coming down the upper Trinity River into Trinity Lake, and down the upper Shasta–McCloud–Pit River systems into Shasta Lake, and a higher proportion will come as rain rather than snow, because of the warmer environment. Snow-line elevation will rise, and the few glacierets in the region will vanish. The lakes will lose some of their buffering capacity to spread water releases over the summer period. Though construction of new dams is unlikely, one option under consideration is to raise the height of existing dams. Proposals to raise Shasta Dam to increase its storage capacity have already emerged. Early options included up to 200-foot raises in dam

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height, but these suggestions seem to have been designed to make the more attainable, and by comparison conservative, 6.4- to 18.5-foot options more reasonable. Critics say that raising the dam would threaten the considerable upstream values (tribal land issues, recreation sites, scenic values), as well as the downstream values (primarily by putting riparian and fish-spawning habitat at risk), and provide financial subsidies for users at the end of the pipeline. At this writing, no one has proposed raising Trinity Dam, but the idea will almost certainly be up for discussion in the future. If so, it will raise issues similar to those facing Shasta Dam: Trinity Center would have to be relocated a second time, and shoreline properties would be flooded. The “bathtub ring” of bare soil around the lake edge would likely become much deeper. The major unknown in all these proposals is how the local climate will change if a global climate change occurs. Precise estimates of flow are difficult to make, because none of the global-change models estimate the effects on precipitation as well as they predict the effects on temperature. But regardless of climate scenarios, the demands for water in California, and its allocation between nature and culture, will continue to prompt heated debates. We can approach these changes and our responses to them with optimism or pessimism, viewing the glass as half full or half empty. Why not adopt optimism, as long as we do not succumb to a Pollyanna approach to the world? We may choose disappointment as our theme, as Peter Schrag and Richard Rodriguez have done, or we can approach these challenges as we have in recent decades, pragmatically, without the dreamy promise of an isolated island paradise. The Klamath region is not an island any more than anywhere else on earth is. In the past century, its nature and culture have been affected by external trends: world war, recession, depression, national housing trends, agricultural and urban demands for water, regional concerns about wildlife protection, and many more. The region has adjusted and adapted to newer policies and management actions that have evolved from previously unsustainable practices. In the process of adjustment, we’ve created new sustainable pathways, but as we have done so, we have identified new barriers that we will need to address strategically over time. To the extent that we can foresee these barriers, we’ll be able to create management strategies to adapt to changing conditions. Riding the rivers of change reminds me of my days as a kid riding the Stuart Fork in an inner tube with my friends. We didn’t always take the best fork of the channel, and sometimes we got dunked or flipped over

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a rock. But we retrieved our tubes and hit the rapids once again. We chose our forks of the Stuart on our little tubes with limited knowledge of what was downstream, but we adjusted our course along the way by paddling or by stopping to seek a through channel. All of us now face much the same challenge in choosing a steward’s fork for the Klamath region. Let’s hope that history and humility guide us along the way.

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appendix

Biota Mentioned in the Text

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trees Alaska cedar Baker cypress bald cypress basswood bay bigcone spruce bigleaf maple black cottonwood blue oak Brewer (or weeping) spruce California black oak California buckeye California laurel canyon live oak cascara coast live oak dawn redwood Douglas-fir Engelmann spruce eucalyptus fig foxtail pine giant chinquapin giant sequoia gray pine (ghost pine) hazelnut

Cupressus nootkatensis Cupressus bakeri Taxodium spp. Tilia spp. Persea spp. Pseudotsuga macrocarpa Acer macrophyllum Populus balsamifera spp. trichocarpa Quercus douglasn Picea breweriana Quercus kelloggii Aesculus californica Umbellularia californica Quercus chrysolepis Rhamnus purshiana Quercus agrifolia Metasequoia spp. Pseudotsuga menziesii Picea engelmannii Eucalyptus spp. Ficus sp. Pinus balfouriana Chrysolepis chrysophylla Sequoiadendron giganteum Pinus sabiniana Corylus cornuta 255

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256 holly incense cedar Jeffrey pine knobcone pine lodgepole pine mountain hemlock noble fir Oregon ash Oregon myrtle Oregon white oak Pacific madrone Pacific silver fir Pacific yew ponderosa pine Port Orford cedar red alder redwood Shasta red fir Sitka spruce subalpine fir sugar pine tanoak tree of heaven tupelo twoneedle pinyon Utah juniper walnut western hemlock western juniper western red cedar western white pine white alder whitebark pine white fir

Biota Mentioned in Text Ilex spp. Calocedrus decurrens Pinus jeffreyi Pinus attenuata Pinus contorta Tsuga mertensiana Abies procera Fraxinus latifolia Umbellularia californica Quercus garryana Arbutus menziesii Abies amabilis Taxus brevifolia Pinus ponderosa Cupressus lawsoniana Alnus rubra Sequoia sempervirens Abies magnifica var. shastensis Picea sitchensis Abies lasiocarpa Pinus lambertiana Lithocarpus densiflorus Ailanthus altissima Nyssa sp. Pinus edulis Juniperus osteosperma Juglans spp. Tsuga heterophylla Juniperus occidentalis Thuja plicata Pinus monticola Alnus rhombifolia Pinus albicaulis Abies concolor

shrubs alpine laurel buckbrush buckwheat California coffeeberry California hazel California huckleberry California wild grape chamise creeping snowberry deerbrush deer oak

Kalmia polifolia Ceanothus cuneatus Eriogonum spp. Rhamnus californica Corylus cornuta Vaccinium ovatum Vitis californica Adenostoma fasciculatum Symphoricarpos mollis Ceanothus integerrimus Quercus sadleriana

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Biota Mentioned in Text dwarf mistletoe French broom gooseberry huckleberry oak mahala mat manzanitas mistletoe mock orange mountain heather ninebark Oregon grape poison oak rabbitbrush rhododendron salal salmonberry service-berry Shasta snow-wreath Sierra laurel snowbrush (or tobacco brush) thimbleberry toyon vine bark western Labrador tea white heather

257 Arceuthobium spp. Cytisus spp. Ribes spp. Quercus vaccinifolia Ceanothus prostratus Arctostaphylos spp. Phoradendron spp. Philadelphus lewisii Phyllodoce empetriformis Physocarpus capitatus Berberis nervosa Toxicodendron diversilobum Chrysothamnus spp. Rhododendron spp. Gaultheria shallon Rubus spectabilis Amelanchier alnifolia Neviusia cliftonii Leucothoe davisiae Ceanothus velutinus Rubus parviflorus Heteromeles arbutifolia Neillia opufolia Ledum glandulosum var. californicum Cassiope mertensiana

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herbs American vetch arnica aster bear-grass California pitcher plant cheatgrass columbine common horsetail corn silk Dalmatian toadflax elk clover five-finger fern Indian tobacco jewel flower leopard lily Lewis’ monkeyflower lupine Pacific trillium penstemon phacelia

Vicia americana Arnica spp. Aster spp. Xerophyllum tenax Darlingtonia californica Bromus tectorum Aquilegia formosa Equisetum arvense Veratrum californicum Linaria genistifolia ssp. dalmatica Aralia californica Adiantum aleuticum Nicotiana quadrivalvis Streptanthus spp. Lilium pardalinum Mimulus lewisii Lupinus spp. Trillium ovatum Penstemon spp. Phacelia spp.

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258 prince’s pine redwood sorrel scarlet monkeyflower sedge soap plant spring beauty timothy western hound’s tongue white-veined wintergreen wild-ginger wild oat wild onion yellow star-thistle

Biota Mentioned in Text Chimaphila umbellata Oxalis oregana Mimulus cardinalis Carex spp. Chlorogalum spp. Claytonia lanceolata Phleum pratense Cynoglossum grande Pyrola picta Asarum caudatum Avena fatua Allium spp. Centaurea solstitialis

mammals

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American fisher black bear blacktail deer Douglas squirrel dusky-footed wood rat gray wolf grizzly bear mink mountain lion mule deer myotis bats northern flying squirrel opossum pine marten raccoon wolverine

Martes pennati Ursus americanus Odocoileus hemionus columbianus Tamiasciurus douglasii Neotoma fuscipes Canis lupus Ursus arctos Mustela vison Felis concolor Odocoileus hemionus hemionus Myotis spp. Glaucomys sabrinus Didelphis marsupialis Martes americana Procyon lotor Gulo gulo

reptiles and amphibians Arizona coral snake black salamander bullfrog California mountain kingsnake clouded salamander Cope’s giant salamander Del Norte salamander ensatina foothill yellow-legged frog northwestern salamander Pacific giant salamander red-legged frog rough-skinned newt

Micruroides euryxanthus Aneides flavipunctatus Rana catesbeiana Lampropeltis zonata Aneides ferreus Dicamptodon copei Plethodon elongatus Ensatina eschscholtzii Rana boylii Ambystoma gracile Dicamptodon tenebrosus Rana aurora Taricha granulosa

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Biota Mentioned in Text rubber boa Scott Bar salamander Siskiyou Mountain salamander southern torrent salamander tailed frog western aquatic garter snake western fence lizard western pond turtle western rattlesnake

259 Charina bottae Plethodon asupak Plethodon stormi Rhyacotriton variegatus Ascaphus truei Thamnophis spp. Sceloporus occidentalis Clemmys marmorata Crotalus viridus

birds American crow American raven barred owl chestnut-backed chickadee dark-eyed junco golden eagle great blue heron marbled murrelet northern spotted owl osprey red-breasted nuthatch Steller’s jay

Corvus brachyrhynchos Corvus corax Strix varia Parus rufescens Junco hyemalis Aquila chrysaetos Ardea herodias Brachyramphus marmoratus Strix caurina occidentalis Pandion haliaetus Sitta canadensis Cyanocitta stelleri

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fish brown trout candlefish Chinook salmon coho salmon eastern brook trout kokanee salmon Lost River sucker Pacific lamprey rainbow trout shortnose sucker steelhead

Salmo trutta Thaleichthys pacificus Oncorhynchus tshawytscha Oncorhynchus kisutch Salvelinus fontinalis Oncorhynchus nerka Deltistes luxatus Lampetra tridentata Oncorhynchus mykiss Chasmistes brevirostris Oncorhynchus mykiss

insects and pathogens annosus root rot armillaria root rot black stain root rot Douglas-fir beetle fir engraver flatheaded borers laminated root rot mountain pine beetle

Heterobasidion annosum Armillaria ostoyae Leptographium wageneri Dendroctonus pseudotsugae Scolytus ventralis Melanophila spp. Phellinus weirii Dendroctonus ponderosae

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Ips pini Phytophthora lateralis Phellinus pini Dendroctonus valens Phaeolus schweinitzii Phytophthora ramorum Dendroctonus brevicomis Cronartium ribicola Paravespula vulgaris

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pine engraver Port Orford cedar root disease velvet top fungus red turpentine beetle red ring rot sudden oak death western pine beetle white pine blister rust yellow jacket

Biota Mentioned in Text

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References and Further Reading

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general sources Bennion, B., and J. Rohde, eds. 2000. Traveling the Trinity Highway. McKinleyville, CA: Mountain Home Books. Cox, I. 1940. The Annals of Trinity County. With annotations by J. W. Bartlett. Eugene, OR: Printed for Harold C. Holmes by John Henry Nash of the University of Oregon. Cross, S., ed. 2000. Intricate Homeland: Collected Writings from the KlamathSiskiyou. Ashland, OR: Headwaters Press. Jones, A. E., ed. 1981. Trinity County Historic Sites. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. Sawyer, J. O. 2006. Northwest California. Berkeley: University of California Press. The Siskiyou Pioneer. 1960–2005. Yearbooks. Yreka, CA: Siskiyou County Museum. Trinity. 1955–2005. Yearbooks. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. Weaverville, CA. Wallace, D. R. 1978. The Dark Range: A Naturalist’s Night Notebook. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. ———. 1983. The Klamath Knot. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. http://www.krisweb.com. Klamath and Trinity information system. A detailed and informative site on the natural resources of the region.

1. introduction Barbour, M., and J. Major. 1988. Terrestrial Vegetation of California. California Native Plant Society Publication 9. Sacramento: California Native Plant Society.

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References and Selected Reading

Bennion, B., and J. Rohde, eds. 2000. Traveling the Trinity Highway. McKinleyville, CA: Mountain Home Books. Parvin, R. 1997. The Loneliest Road in America. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ———. 2000. In the Snow Forest. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Pierce, C. 1999. For the Rest of Your Life: Trinity Alps Resort, the First 75 Years. Trinity Center, CA: Trinity Alps Resort. Pyle, R. M. 1995. Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Tisdale, S. 1991. Stepping Westward: The Long Search for Home in the Pacific Northwest. New York: Henry Holt. Trinity. 1955–2005. Yearbook. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. http://www.trinitycounty.org. Trinity County website.

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2. the physical world Alt, D., and D. W. Hyndman. 2000. Roadside Geology of Northern and Central California. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Company. Bailey, E. H., ed. 1966. Bulletin 190, Geology of Northern California. California Division of Mines and Geology Bulletin 190. San Francisco. California Department of Conservation, California Geological Survey. 2002. Generalized Geologic Map of California, note 17. Sacramento. Diller, J. S. 1914. Auriferous Gravels in the Weaverville Quadrangle, California. U.S. Department of the Interior (hereafter USDI) Geological Survey Bulletin 470. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. McPhee, J. 1993. Assembling California. New York: The Noonday Press. Trewartha, G. T. 1968. An Introduction to Climate. New York: McGraw-Hill. http://130.166.124.2/ca_panorama_atlas/page15.html. California landform maps by William Bower. http://www/siskiyous.edu/shasta/geo/his.htm. Geologic history of Mount Shasta. http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/pcpn/ca_north.gif. Climate data for Northern California from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Western Region Climate Center.

3. forest mélange Adam, D. P., and G. J. West. 1983. “Temperature and Precipitation Estimates through the Last Glacial Cycle from Clear Lake, California, Pollen Data.” Science 219: 168–70. Agee, J. K. 1993. Fire Ecology of Pacific Northwest Forests. Washington, DC: Island Press. Cooper, W. S. 1926. “The Nature of Vegetation Change.” Ecology 7: 391–413. Detling, L. E. 1961. “The Chaparral Formation of Southwestern Oregon.” Ecology 42: 348–57. Griffin, J. R., and W. B. Critchfield. 1972. “The Distribution of Forest Trees in California.” U.S. Department of Agriculture (hereafter USDA) Forest Service Research Paper PSW-82.

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References and Selected Reading

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MacGinitie, H. D. 1937. “The Flora of the Weaverville Beds of Trinity County, California.” Contribution 465. In Eocene Flora of Western America, edited by E. I. Sanborn, S. S. Potbury, and H. D. MacGinitie, 83–151. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington. Merriam, C. H. 1899. Results of a Biological Survey of Mount Shasta, California. USDA Division of Biological Survey, North American Fauna Report no. 16. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Merriam, C. H., and L. Steineger. 1890. Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and the Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona. USDA Division of Ornithology and Mammalia, North American Fauna Report No. 3. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Mohr, J. A., C. Whitlock, and C. N. Skinner. 2000. “Postglacial Vegetation and Fire History, Eastern Klamath Mountains, California.” The Holocene 10, no. 4: 587–601. Noss, R. F. 2000. The Redwood Forest: History, Ecology, and Conservation of the Coast Redwoods. Washington, DC: Island Press. Sawyer, J. O., Jr. 1996. “Northern California.” In The Enduring Forests: Northern California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Southeast Alaska, edited by R. Kirk, R. M. Pyle, and C. Mauzy, 20–41. Seattle: Mountaineers Books. Sawyer, J. O., and D. A. Thornburgh. 1977. “Montane and Subalpine Vegetation of the Klamath Mountains.” In The Vegetation of California, edited by M. Barbour and J. Major, 699–732. New York: John Wiley and Sons. West, G. J. 1993. “The Late Pleistocene-Holocene Pollen Record and Prehistory of California’s North Coast Ranges.” In There Grows a Green Tree: Papers in Honor of David A. Fredrickson (Publication 11), edited by G. White, P. Mikkelsen, W. R. Hildebrandt, and M. E. Basgall, 219–36. Davis, CA: Center for Archaeological Research at Davis. Whittaker, R. H. 1960. “Vegetation of the Siskiyou Mountains, Oregon and California.” Ecological Monographs 30: 279–338. ———. 1961. “Vegetation History of the Pacific Coast States and the ‘Central’ Significance of the Klamath Region.” Madrono 16, no. 1: 5–23. http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/projects/ecoregions.htm. Descriptions of California ecoregions, Klamath Mountain section and subsections. Derived from C. B. Goudey and D. W. Smith. 1994. “Ecological Units of California: Subsections (map, scale 1:1,000,000, color). San Francisco: USDA Forest Service.

4. a rose by any name Graube, M. 2002. “What’s in a Name? Perhaps Something Fishy.” Northwest Science and Technology, Spring 2002, 50–51. Hickman, J. C., ed. 1993. The Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hitchcock, C. L., and A. Cronquist. 1973. Flora of the Pacific Northwest. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Jones, A. E. 2000. Flowers and Trees of the Trinity Alps. Rev. ed. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society.

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References and Selected Reading

Kruckeberg, A. R. 1954. “The Ecology of Serpentine Soils. III. Plant Species in Relation to Serpentine Soils.” Ecology 35: 267–74. Pollan, M. 2001. The Botany of Desire. New York: Random House. Sawyer, J. O. 2006. Northwest California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schemske, D. W., and H. D. Bradshaw. 1999. “Pollinator Preference and the Evolution of Floral Traits in Monkeyflowers (Mimulus).” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96, no. 21: 11910–15. Stuart, J. D., and J. O. Sawyer. 2001. Trees and Shrubs of California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

5. my contest with miss alice eastwood Dakin, S. B. 1954. The Perennial Adventure, a Tribute to Alice Eastwood 1859–1953. San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences. Eastwood, A. 1902. “From Redding to the Snow-Clad Peaks of Trinity County.” Sierra Club Bulletin IV, no. 1: 39–52. Jones, M. E. 1933–35. Contributions to Western Botany. No. 18. Claremont, CA. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. 2003. North Fork Trinity River, East Fork North Fork Trinity River, and Canyon Creek Watershed Analysis. Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Redding, CA: USDA Forest Service. Wilderness Act. 1964. Public Law 88–577, 88th Congress, 4th sess. (September 3, 1964). Woods, M. C. 1976. “Pleistocene Glaciation in Canyon Creek Area, Trinity Alps, California.” California Geology, May 1976, 109–13.

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6. wild creatures of the klamaths California Department of Water Resources. 1957. The California Water Plan. Division of Resources Policy Bulletin 3. Sacramento. Corkran, C. C., and C. Thoms. 1996. Amphibians of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Vancouver: Lone Pine Publishing. Cox, I. 1940. The Annals of Trinity County. With annotations by J. W. Bartlett. Eugene, OR: Printed for Harold C. Holmes by John Henry Nash of the University of Oregon. Mead, L. S., D. R. Clayton, R. S. Nauman, D. H. Olsen, and M. E. Pfrender. 2005. “Newly Discovered Populations of Salamanders from Siskiyou County California Represent a Species Distinct from Plethodon stormi.” Herpetelogica 61, no. 2: 158–77. Montgomery, D. R. 2003. King of Fish: The Thousand-year Run of Salmon. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press. Peterson, R. T. 1961. A Field Guide to Western Birds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Quinn, T. P. 2005. The Behavior and Ecology of Pacific Salmon and Trout. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Stebbins, R. C. 1966. A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Updike, D., and T. Burton. 2002. “Managing Black Bears in California.” Outdoor California, July–August 2002, 14–21.

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http://www.dfg.ca.gov/ocal/index.html. Articles from the California Department of Fish and Games publication Outdoor California. http://www.psmfc.org/habitat/. Life-history information on fish.

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7. change is the only constant Agee, J. K. 1991. “Fire History along an Elevational Gradient in the Siskiyou Mountains, Oregon.” Northwest Science 65: 188–99. ———. 1993. Fire Ecology of Pacific Northwest Forests. Washington, DC: Island Press. Atwater, B. F., S. Musumi-Rokkaku, S. Satake, Y. Tsuji, K. Ueda, and D. K. Yamaguchi. 2005. The Orphan Tsunami of 1700. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey / Seattle: University of Washington Press. Fry, D. L., and S. L. Stephens. 2006. “Influence of Humans and Climate on the Fire History of a Ponderosa Pine–Mixed Conifer Forest in the Southeastern Klamath Mountains, California.” Forest Ecology and Management 223: 428–38. Goheen, E. M., E. Hansen, A. Kanaskie, N. Osterbauer, J. Parke, J. Pscheidt, and G. Chastagne. 2006. Sudden Oak Death and Phytophthora ramorum. Oregon State University Extension Service Publication EM 8877. Corvallis, OR. Harden, D. R. 1995. A Comparison of Flood-Producing Storms and Their Impacts in Northwestern California. USDI Geological Survey Professional Paper 1454-D. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Helley, E. J., and V. C. LaMarche Jr. 1973. Historic Flood Information for Northern California Streams from Geological and Botanical Evidence. USDI Geological Survey Professional Paper 485-E. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Jimerson, T. M., and D. W. Jones. 2003. “Megram: Blowdown, Wildfire, and the Effects of Forest Treatment.” In Proceedings of Fire Conference 2000: The First National Congress in Fire Ecology, Prevention, and Management (Miscellaneous Publication 13), edited by K. E. M. Galley, R. C. Klinger, and N. Sugihara, 55–59. Tallahassee, FL: Tall Timbers Research Station. Kroeber, A. L. 1976. Yurok Myths. Berkeley: University of California Press. Linsley, E. G. 1943. “Attraction of Melanophila Beetles by Fire and Smoke.” Journal of Economic Entomology 36: 341–42. Morford, L. 1984. 100 Years of Wildland Fire in Siskiyou County (selfpublished, Yreka, CA). Moritz, M. A., and D. C. Odion. 2005. “Examining the Strength and Possible Causes of the Relationship between Fire History and Sudden Oak Death.” Oecologia 144: 106–14. Odion, D. C., E. J. Frost, J. R. Strittholt, H. Jiang, D. A. Dellasalla, and M. A. Moritz. 2004. “Patterns of Fire Severity and Forest Conditions in the Western Klamath Mountains, California.” Conservation Biology 18: 927–36. Oswald, D. D. 1968. “The Timber Resources of Humboldt County, California.” USDA Forest Service Resource Bulletin PNW-26. Portland, OR: Pacific Northwest Research Station. Pickett, S. T. A., and P. S. White. 1985. The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics. New York: Academic Press.

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Rizzo, D. M., and M. Garbelotto. 2003. “Sudden Oak Death: Endangering California and Oregon Forest Ecosystems.” Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 1, no. 5: 197–204. Skinner, C. N. 1995. “Change in Spatial Characteristics of Forest Openings in the Klamath Mountains of Northwestern California, USA.” Landscape Ecology 10: 219–28. ———. 2003. “Fire Regimes of Upper Montane and Subalpine Glacial Basins in the Klamath Mountains of Northern California.” Proceedings of Fire Conference 2000: The First National Congress in Fire Ecology, Prevention, and Management (Miscellaneous Publication 13), edited by K. E. M. Galley, R. C. Klinger, and N. Sugihara, 145–51. Tallahassee, FL: Tall Timbers Research Station. Skinner, C. N., A. H. Taylor, and J. K. Agee. 2006. “Klamath Mountains.” In Fire Ecology in California’s Ecosystems, edited by N. Sugihara, J. W. Wagtendonk, K. E. Shaffer, J. A. Fites-Kaufman, and A. E. Thode, 170–94. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stewart, J. H., and V. C. LaMarche. 1967. Erosion and Deposition in the Flood of December 1964 on Coffee Creek, Trinity County, California. USDI Geological Survey Professional Paper 422-K. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Stuart, J. D., and L. A. Salazar. 2000. “Fire History of White Fir Forests in the Coastal Mountains of Northwestern California.” Northwest Science 74: 280–85. Taylor, A. H., and C. N. Skinner. 1998. “Fire History and Landscape Dynamics in a Late Successional Reserve, Klamath Mountains, California.” Forest Ecology and Management 111: 285–301. ———. 2003. “Spatial Patterns and Controls on Historical Fire Regimes and Forest Structure in the Klamath Mountains.” Ecological Applications 13: 704–19. Thornburgh, D. A. 1995. “The Natural Role of Fire in the Marble Mountain Wilderness.” In Proceedings: Symposium on Fire in Wilderness and Park Management (USDA Forest Service General Technical Report INT-GNR320), edited by J. K. Brown, R. W. Mutch, C. W. Spoon, and R. H. Wakimoto, 273–74. Ogden, UT: Intermountain Research Station. Whitlock, C., C. N. Skinner, P. J. Bartlein, T. Minckley, and J. A. Mohr. 2004. “Comparison of Charcoal and Tree-Ring Records of Recent Fires in the Eastern Klamath Mountains, California, USA.” Canadian Journal of Forest Research 34: 2110–21. http://nature.berkeley.edu/comtf. History and ecology of sudden oak death. http://www.consrv.ca.gov/CGS/rghm/ap/Map_index. Earthquake fault zones in Northern California. http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/~geodept/earthquakes. A large earthquake scenario for the North Coast.

8. first peoples of the rivers Anderson, K. 2005. Tending the Wild. Berkeley: University of California Press. Arnold, M. E., and M. Reed. 1957. In the Land of the Grasshopper Song. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Bancroft, H. H. 1890. History of California. Vol. 7. In vol. 24 of Collected Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft. San Francisco: The History Company. Curtis, E. S. 1924. The North American Indian. Vol. 13. Norwood, MA: Edward S. Curtis and Plimpton Press. Davis, B. J. N.d. Karuk Ethnobotany. Unpublished manuscript, available on file at Office of Archeology, Six Rivers National Forest, 1330 Bayshore Way, Eureka, CA 95501. Dixon, R. B. 1905. “The Shasta-Achomawi: A New Linguistic Stock, with Four New Dialects.” American Anthropologist 7, no. 2: 213–17. ———. 1931. “Dr. Merriam’s ‘Tlo-Hom-Tah’-Hoi.’” American Anthropologist 33, no. 2: 264–67. Dundee, A. 1976. “Folkloristic Commentary.” In Yurok Myths, edited by A. L. Kroeber, xxxi–xxxviii. Berkeley: University of California Press. Golla, V., and S. O’Neill, eds. 2001. Northwest California Linguistics. Vol. 14 of The Collected Works of Edward Sapir. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Harrington, J. P. 1932a. Tobacco among the Karuk Indians of California. Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 94. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. ———. 1932b. Karuk Indian Myths. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 107. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Heizer, R. F., ed. 1974. The Destruction of the California Indians. Santa Barbara, CA: Peregrine Smith. Heizer, R. F., and A. B. Elsasser. 1980. The Natural World of the California Indians. California Natural History Guide, 46. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hurtado, A. L. 1988. Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Keter, T. S. 1993. “Territorial and Social Relationships of the Inland Southern Athabascans: Some New Perspectives.” In There Grows a Green Tree: Papers in Honor of David A. Fredrickson, edited by G. White, P. Mikkelsen, W. R. Hildebrandt, and M. E. Basgall, 37–51. Center for Archaeological Research at Davis Publication 11. Davis: University of California. ———. 1999. “Effects of Euro-American Settlement on Native Americans in the North Fork–Eel River Basin of Trinity County 1854–1864.” In Trinity 1999, 34–52. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. Knudtson, P. 1992. The Wintun Indians of California and Their Neighbors. Happy Camp, CA: Naturegraph Publishers. Kroeber, A. L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 78. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. ———. 1976. Yurok Myths. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kroeber, T. 1959. The Inland Whale. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lake, Frank. Personal communication, 22 November 2006. Lewis, H. T. 1973. Patterns of Indian Burning in California: Ecology and Ethnohistory. Ballena Press Anthropological Papers No. 1. Ramona, CA: Ballena Press. Merriam, C. H. 1930. “The New River Indians: Tlo-Hom-Tah’-Hoi.” American Anthropologist 32, no. 2: 280–93. ———. 1979. Indian Names for Plants and Animals among Californian and Other Western North American Tribes. Assembled and annotated by R. F. Heizer. Socorro, NM: Ballena Press.

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Moratto, M. J. 1984. California Archaeology. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Rohde, J., and G. Rohde. 1992. Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Eureka, CA: Miles and Miles. Silver, S. 2004a. “Shastan Peoples.” In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 8, edited by W. C. Sturtevant, 211–24. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. ———. 2004b. “Chimariko.” In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 8, edited by W. C. Sturtevant, 205–10. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Spott, R., and A. L. Kroeber. 1942. Yurok Narratives. University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology 35, no. 9: 143–256. Strobridge, W. F. 1994. Regulars in the Redwoods: The U.S. Army in Northern California 1852–1861. Spokane, WA: Arthur N. Clark Co. Vale, T. R., ed. 2002. Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape. Washington, DC: Island Press. Wallace, W. J. 1948. “Hupa Narrative Tales.” Journal of American Folklore 61: 345–55. ———. 2004. “Hupa, Chilula, and Whilkut.” In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 8, edited by W. C. Sturtevant, 164–79. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. White, R. 1991. It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. http://www.trinidad-rancheria.org. Trinidad Rancheria history. http://content.wsulibs.wsu.edu/cgi-bin/advsearch.exe. Washington State University digital-map collection showing Oregon Indian tribes. http://www.covelo.net/tribes/pages/tribes_rvcongress.shtml. Round Valley Indian Reservation congressional history. http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~ammon/tsnungwe/narrative.html. Narrative of Tsnungwe Council. http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/cilc_images/bibs/maps/tribemap.gif. University of California digital-map collection showing California Indian tribes.

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9. gold is where you find it Alpers, C. N., and M. P. Humerlach. 2000. Mercury Contamination from Historic Gold Mining in California. USDI Geological Survey Fact Sheet FS-061–00. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Ashley, R. P., J. J. Rytuba, R. Rogers, B. B. Kotlyar, and D. Lawler. 2002. Preliminary Report on Mercury Geochemistry of Placer Gold Dredge Tailings, Sediments, Bedrock, and Waters in the Clear Creek Restoration Area, Shasta County, California. USDI Geological Survey Open File Report 02–401. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Aubury, L. E., ed. 1910. Gold Dredging in California. California State Mining Bureau Bulletin 57. Sacramento. Beauchamp, M. 2005. “King Copper.” Redding Record Searchlight, August 8, 2005. Cox, I. 1940. The Annals of Trinity County. With annotations by J. W. Bartlett. Eugene, OR: Printed for Harold C. Holmes by John Henry Nash of the University of Oregon.

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de La Grange, Clementine. 2000. From the Known to the Unknown: The Memoirs of Baroness de La Grange 1892–1894. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. Diller, J. S. 1911. Auriferous Gravels in the Trinity River Basin, California. USDI Geological Survey Bulletin 540. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. ———. 1914. Auriferous Gravels in the Weaverville Quadrangle, California. USDI Geological Survey Bulletin 470. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Doolittle, E. M. 1905. Gold Dredging in California. California State Mining Bureau Bulletin 36. Sacramento. Eastwood, A. 1902. “From Redding to the Snow-Clad Peaks of Trinity County.” Sierra Club Bulletin IV, no. 1:39–52. Elder, D., and S. M. Cashman. 1992. “Tectonic Control and Fluid Evolution in the Quartz Hill, California, Lode Gold Deposits.” Economic Geology 87: 1795–1812. Haifley, K. 2001. “The Obscure East Fork.” In Trinity 2001, 58–61. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. Hightower, J. M., and D. Moore. 2003. “Mercury Levels in High-End Consumers of Fish.” Environmental Health Perspectives 111, no. 4: 604–8. Lydon, P. A. 1962. “History and Mining in the Southeast Quarter of the Minersville Quadrangle, Trinity, California.” In Trinity 1962, 4–19. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. May, H. 2001. “Re-floating the Fairview Placers Dredge.” In Trinity 2001, 37–47. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. May, J. T., R. L. Hothem, W. G. Duffy, C. N. Alpers, and J. J. Rytuba. 2002. “Mercury Bioaccumulation from Historical Mining in the Trinity River Watershed, California.” Abstract, Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry National Meeting, November 16–20, Salt Lake City, UT. Nordstrom, D. K., and C. N. Alpers. 1999. “Negative pH, Efflorescent Mineralogy, and Consequences for Environmental Restoration at the Iron Mountain Superfund Site, California.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96: 3455–62. Ryan, R. A., and J. Shuford. 1974. “Bucket Line Dredges.” In Trinity 1974, 8–27. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. Schuldberg, J. B. 2005. Kennett: The Short, Colorful Life of a California Copper Town and Its Founding Family. Chico, CA: Stansbury Publishing. Somer, W. L., and T. J. Hassler. 1992. “Effects of Suction-Dredge Gold Mining on Benthic Invertebrates in a Northern California Stream.” North American Journal of Fisheries Management 12: 224–52. Stellman, L. J. 1934. Mother Lode: The Story of California’s Gold Rush. San Francisco: Harr Wagner Publishing. Town of Shasta Interpretive Association. 2005. Image of America: Old Shasta. San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing. Warne, W. E. 1973. The Bureau of Reclamation. New York: Praeger. http://www.csuchico.edu/~rcooke/rastra.html. Types of ore-crushing arrastras. http://alaskaoutdoorjournal.com/Activities/Goldpanning/kpgold.html. Goldpanning guidelines in Alaska.

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http://www.icmjz.com/BegCorner/US65HowToMineForGold.htm. J. M. West, “How to mine for placer gold.” www.keeneengineering.com/pamphlets/howdredge.html. The gold dredge. www.oehha.ca.gov/fish.html. Advisories on consumption of California sport fish. http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/prospect1/goldgip.html. Basic information from the U.S. Geological Survey about gold. www.tcbwest.com/htm/perceys.htm. Account of the discovery of Percy’s body in the Trinity River.

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10. green grass and green gold Anonymous. 1881. History of Humboldt County, California, with Illustrations. San Francisco: W. W. Elliott & Co. ———. 1965. Etna—From Mule Train to ‘Copter.’ Eschscholtzia Parlor 112. Etna, CA: Native Daughters of the Golden West. ———. 1978. “South of the South Fork.” 1978 Trinity. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. ———. 1999. “Trinity Center”—Now and Then. Menlo Park, CA: Prodigy Press (first published in 1950 by the Trinity Center Elementary School Board of Trustees). Armstrong, M. H. n.d. History, Law, Legislation, Events, Water, Agriculture, Ranching, Mining, Property. Yreka, CA: Siskiyou County Farm Bureau. Belden, G. E. 1998. The Annals of a Forester. Self-published. Weaverville, CA. Best, D. W. 1995. History of Timber Harvest in the Redwood Creek Basin, Northwestern California. USDI Geological Survey Professional Paper 1454-C. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Burke, A. 2005. “The Public Lands’ Big Cash Crop.” High Country News 37, no. 20: 8–13, 19. Burton, F. 1965. “The Forest House Story.” 1965 Siskiyou Pioneer. Etna, CA: Siskiyou County Historical Society. Carranco, L., and E. Beard. 1981. Genocide and Vendetta: The Round Valley Wars of Northern California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Doak, S, and J. Kusel. 1997. Well-Being of Communities in the Klamath Region. Taylorsville, CA: Forest Community Research. Available at http://inforain. org/indicators/klamath/ index.htm. Ficken, R. 1987. The Forested Land: A History of Lumbering in Western Washington. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Gordon, D. E. 1907. “In Golden Trinity.” Sunset, December 1907, 157–63. Hagans, D. K., W. E. Weaver, and M. A. Madej. 1986. “Long Term On-Site and Off-Site Effects of Logging and Erosion in the Redwood Creek Basin, Northern California.” In American Geophysical Union Meeting on Cumulative Effects, National Council for Air and Stream Improvement Technical Bulletin 490, 38–66. Research Triangle Park, NC. Jones, A. E. 1981. Trinity County Historic Sites. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society. ———. 2001. “The Trinity Alps Story.” In Trinity 2001, 28–32. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Historical Society.

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Mueller, T., and S. Duggan. 2005. Guide to the California Forest Practices Act and Related Laws. Point Arena, CA: Solano Press. Poli, A., and H. L. Baker. 1954. Ownership and Use of Land in the Redwood–Douglas-Fir Subregion of California. Technical Paper 7. Berkeley: USDA Forest Service California Forest and Range Experiment Station. Poli, A., and E. V. Roberts. 1958. Economics of the Utilization of Commercial Timberland of Livestock Ranches in Northwestern California. Miscellaneous Paper 25. Berkeley: USDA Forest Service California Forest and Range Experiment Station. State Board of Equalization. State Board of Equalization 1997–2002 Annual Report. Sacramento. Steen, H. K. 1976. The U.S. Forest Service: A History. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Stone, W. 1963. “Half a Century of Cattle Raising—Half a Century Ago.” Siskiyou Pioneer, 1963, 20–21. Tomascheski, J. B. 1991. Sierra Pacific: A Family History. Arcata, CA: Creative Type. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. 1905. The Use of the National Forest Reserves: Regulations and Instructions. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Waddle, K. L., and P. M. Bassett. 1996. Timber Resource Statistics for the North Coast Resource Area of California, 1994. USDA Forest Service Resource Bulletin PNW-RB-214. Portland OR: Pacific Northwest Research Station. ———. 1997. Timber Resource Statistics for the North Interior Resource Area of California. USDA Forest Service Resource Bulletin PNW-RB-222. Portland, OR: Pacific Northwest Research Station. Ward, F. R. 1995. California’s Forest Industry: 1992. USDA Forest Service Resource Bulletin PNW-RB-206. Portland, OR: Pacific Northwest Research Station. Wells, H. L. 1881. History of Siskiyou County, California. Oakland, CA: D. J. Stewart and Co. http://www.blm.gov/or/rac/ctypayhistory.php. Bureau of Land Management history of the Oregon and California railroad grants. http://www.wilderness.net. List and description of U.S. wilderness areas.

11. dam the world California Department of Water Resources. 1957. The California Water Plan. Division of Resources Policy Bulletin 3. Sacramento. ———, The Resources Agency. 1965. Flood! December 1964–January 1965. Department of Water Resources Bulletin 161. Sacramento. ———, Northern District. 1967. Alternative Plans for the Development of the Lower Trinity and Klamath Rivers. Sacramento. ———. 1970. Water for California—The California Water Plan Outlook in 1970. Division of Resources Bulletin 160–70. Sacramento.

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———. 1987. California Water: Looking to the Future. Department of Water Resources Bulletin 160–87. Sacramento. Carle, D. 2000. Water and the California Dream. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. McCasland, S. P. 1951. United Western Investigation: Interim Report on Reconnaissance. Salt Lake City, UT: USDI Bureau of Reclamation. Reisner, M. 1986. Cadillac Desert. New York: Viking Penguin. Sharp, R. P. 1960. “Pleistocene Glaciation in the Trinity Alps of Northern California.” American Journal of Science 258: 305–40. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation. 1981. The Central Valley Project: Its Historical Background and Economic Impacts. Sacramento: Mid-Pacific Regional Office. Warne, W. E. 1973. The Bureau of Reclamation. New York: Praeger.

12. modern myths and monsters

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Coleman, L., and P. Huyghe. 1999. The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide. New York: Avon Books. Daegling, D. J. 2004. Bigfoot Exposed. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Farrell, H. 1997. Shallow Grave in Trinity County. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Munz, P. A., and D. D. Keck. 1959. A California Flora. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pyle, R. M. 1995. Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Walker, K. 1995. A Trail of Corn. Santa Rosa, CA: Golden Door Press. Wallace, D. R. 1985. The Turquoise Dragon. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/sightings.htm. California Bigfoot encounters. http://www.oregonbigfoot.com. Stories of Bigfoot and links to audio and video. http://www.outwestnewspaper.com/rjs4.html. Lemurians of Mount Shasta. http://www.siskiyous.edu/shasta/bib/B17.htm. Annotated bibliography of Ascended Masters. http://www.strangemag.com/landischambers.html. Information linking the Patterson-Gimlin film to a Hollywood costume designer.

13. principles of future sustainability Aplet, G. H., N. Johnson, J. T. Olson, and V. A. Sample. 1993. Defining Sustainable Forestry. Washington, DC: Island Press. Berry, Wendell. 1992. Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1999. “1998 Speech to Organic Growers.” In Our Land, Ourselves, edited by P. Forbes, A. A. Forbes, and H. Whybrow, 200–202. San Francisco: Trust for Public Land. Constanza, R., B. G. Norton, and B. D. Haskell. 1992. Ecosystem Health: New Goals for Environmental Management. Washington, DC: Island Press. Dale, V. H., J. K. Agee, J. Long, and B. Noon. 1999. “Ecological Sustainability Is Fundamental to Managing the National Forests and Grasslands.” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 80: 207–9.

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Forbes, P., A. Armbrecht Forbes, and H. Whybrow. 1999. Our Land, Ourselves. San Francisco: The Trust for Public Land. Franklin, J. F. 1993. “The Fundamentals of Ecosystem Management with Applications in the Pacific Northwest.” In Defining Sustainable Forestry, edited by G. H. Aplet, N. Johnson, J. T. Olson, and V. A. Sample, 127–44. Washington, DC: Island Press. Hobbs, R. J., M. A. Davis, L. B. Slobodkin, R. T. Lackey, W. Halvorson, and W. Throop. 2004. “Restoration Ecology: The Challenge of Social Values and Expectations.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1, no. 2: 43–48. Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1993. Round River. New York: Oxford University Press. National Academy of Sciences. 2003. Endangered and Threatened Fishes in the Klamath River Basin: Causes of Decline and Strategies for Recovery. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Oglethorpe, J., ed. 2002. Adaptive Management: From Theory to Practice. Gland, Switzerland, and Cambridge, England: World Conservation Union. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Committee of Scientists. 1999. Sustaining the People’s Lands. Recommendations for Stewardship of the National Forests and Grasslands into the Next Century. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. http://www.arwc.org/news/. Applegate Partnership website.

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14. hard times for hardrock Nordstrom, D. K., and C. N. Alpers. 1999. “Negative pH, Efflorescent Mineralogy, and Consequences for Environmental Restoration at the Iron Mountain Superfund Site, California.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96: 3455–62. Thompson, H. M. 1957. “King Solomon Mine.” In The Siskiyou Pioneer in Folklore, Fact, and Fiction, edited by B. J. Fairchild, vol. 2, no. 10, 14–17. Yreka, CA: Siskiyou County Historical Society. Wilkinson, C. F. 1992. Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water and the Future of the West. Washington, DC: Island Press. http://www.akmining.com/mine/1999epa.htm. Impact of suction dredging on water quality and benthic habitat. http://ca.water.usgs.gov/mercury/trinity/. U.S. Geological Survey report on an interagency project focusing on Trinity River watersheds with abandoned mine lands. http://www.consrv.ca.gov/omr/smara/financial_assurance_guideline.htm. Surface mining reclamation assurances for California. http://www.perc.org/publications/policyseries/mininglaw_full.php. Pros and cons of the Mining Law of 1872.

15. forests for the future Agee, J. K., and R. L. Edmonds. 1992. “Forest Protection Guidelines for the Northern Spotted Owl.” In Recovery Plan for the Northern Spotted Owl.

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USDI Fish and Wildlife Service, Appendix F. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Best, C., and L. A. Wayburn. 2001. America’s Private Forests: Status and Stewardship. Washington, DC: Island Press. Courtney, S. P., J. A. Blakesley, R. E. Bigley, M. L. Cody, J. P. Dumbacher, R. C. Fleisher, A. B. Franklin, J. F. Franklin, R. J. Gutierrez, J. M. Marzluff, and L. Sztukowski. 2004. Scientific Evaluation of the Status of the Northern Spotted Owl. Portland, OR: Sustainable Ecosystems Institute. Dombeck, M. P., C. A. Wood, and J. E. Williams. 2003. From Conquest to Conservation: Our Public Lands Legacy. Washington, DC: Island Press. Dunne, T., J. Agee, S. Beissinger, W. Dietrich, D. Gray, M. Power, V. Resh, and K. Rodrigues. 2001. A Scientific Basis for the Prediction of Cumulative Watershed Effects. University of California Wildland Resources Center Report, 46. Berkeley. Franklin, A. B., D. R. Anderson, R. J. Gutierrez, and K. P. Burnham. 2000. “Climate, Habitat Quality, and Fitness in Northern Spotted Owl Populations in Northwestern California.” Ecological Monographs 70: 539–90. Graham Mathews and Associates. 2001. Sediment Source Analysis for the Mainstem Trinity River, Trinity County, California. Fairfax, VA: Tetra Tech, Inc. Stokstad, E. 2005. “Learning to Adapt.” Science 309: 688–90.

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16. restoring the rivers Barinaga, M. 1996. “A Recipe for River Recovery?” Science 273: 1648–50. California Department of Fish and Game. 2003. Recovery Strategy for California Coho Salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch). Report to California Fish and Game Commission. Sacramento. Lind, A. J., H. H. Welch Jr., and R. A. Wilson. 1996. “The Effects of a Dam on Breeding Habitat and Egg Survival of the Foothill Yellow-Legged Frog (Rana boylii) in Northwestern California.” Herpetological Review 27, no. 2: 62–67. National Academy of Sciences. 2004. Endangered and Threatened Fishes in the Klamath River Basin: Causes of Decline and Strategies for Recovery. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Poff, N. L., J. D. Allan, M. B. Bain, J. R. Karr, K. L. Prestegaard, B. D. Richter, R. E. Sparks, and J. C. Stromberg. 1997. “The Natural Flow Regime.” Bioscience 47, no.11: 769–84. Reese, D. A., and H. H. Welch Jr. 1998. “Habitat Use by Western Pond Turtles in the Trinity River, California.” Journal of Wildlife Management 62, no. 3: 842–53. Trinity County Resources Conservation District. 1999. Grass Valley Creek Watershed Restoration Project: Restoration in Decomposed Granite Soils. Weaverville, CA: Trinity County Resources Conservation District and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service in cooperation with Trinity River Restoration Project. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation. 2001. Trinity River Restoration Program. TRRP. Weaverville, CA.

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References and Selected Reading

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U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. 1999. Executive Summary, Draft Environmental Impact Statement / Environmental Impact Report, Trinity River Mainstem Fishery Restoration. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Hoopa Valley Tribe, and Trinity County. Washington, DC. http://www.srrc.org. Home page of the Salmon River Restoration Council.

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17. steward’s fork Breshears, D. D., N. S. Cobb, P. M. Rich, K. P. Price, C. D. Allen, R. G. Balice, W. H. Romme, et al. 2005. “Regional Vegetation Die-Off in Response to Global-Change-Type Drought.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102, no. 42: 15144–48. Field, C. B., G. C. Daily, F. W. Davis, S. Gaines, P. A. Matson, J. Melack, and N. L. Miller. 1999. Confronting Climate Change in California. Union of Concerned Scientists and Ecological Society of America. Cambridge, MA: UCS Publications. Hayhoe, K., D. Cayan, C. B. Field, P. C. Frumhoff, E. P. Maurer, N. L. Miller, S. C. Moser, et al. 2004. “Emissions Pathways, Climate Change, and Impacts on California.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 34: 12422–27. Lenihan, J. M., R. Drapek, D. Bachelet, and R. P. Neilson. 2003. “Climate Change Effects on Vegetation Distribution, Carbon, and Fire in California.” Ecological Applications 13, no. 6: 1667–81. Louv, R. 2005. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From NatureDeficit Disorder. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. McKenzie, D., Z. Gedalof, D. L. Peterson, and P. Mote. 2004. “Climatic Change, Wildfire, and Conservation.” Conservation Biology 18: 890–902. Montgomery, D. R. 2003. King of Fish: The Thousand-year Run of Salmon. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press. Quinn, T. P. 2005. The Behavior and Ecology of Pacific Salmon and Trout. Bethesda, MD: American Fisheries Society / Seattle: University of Washington Press. Rodriguez, R. 2006. “Disappointment.” California, January–February 2006, 14–19. Schrag, P. 2004. Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, R. 1996. “Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?” In Uncommon Ground, edited by W. Cronon, 171–85. New York: Norton. http://www.findingbigfoot.com. Bigfoot remote search via webcam. At the time of publication, the website was inactive.

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Index

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Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abbott, Burton, 191–94, 196 Abies, 27 Abies amabilis (Pacific silver fir), 31 Abies concolor. See white fir Abies lasiocarpa (subalpine fir), 28, 31 Abies magnifica var. shastensis (Shasta red fir), 21, 22, 29, 44, 52, 84 Abies procera (noble fir), 31 Acer macrophyllum (bigleaf maple), 99 acorns, 100, 110, 112 active management, 220–24, 247 adaptive management, 203, 238, 241, 243 adaptive management areas (AMAs), 218 Adenostoma fasciculatum (chamise), 82 Adiantum aleuticum (five-finger fern), 113, 114 Aesculus californica (California buckeye), 99, 112 agriculture, 145–52, 179; mining impacts and Sawyer decision, 124, 128–29, 137; Native American, 113, 115, 145 Ah Pah dam, 169, 175 Ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven), 39 Alaska cedar, 27, 31 alders, 29, 72; red alder, 89; white alder, 26, 113 Aliciella, 54 alien species, 38–39, 53, 251 Allium (wild onion), 114

Allotment Act of 1887, 121 alluvial deposits. See gravels, gold-bearing; sediment movement/deposition Alnus rhombifolia (white alder), 26, 113 Alnus rubra (red alder), 89 Alpen Cellars, 151 alpine laurel, 45, 52 Alt, David, 17–18 Altoona Mine, 130–31, 140 AMAs (adaptive management areas), 218 Ambystoma gracile (northwestern salamander), 64 Amelanchier alnifolia (service-berry), 114 American crow, 110 American fisher, 60 American raven, 71 American vetch, 24 America’s Private Forests (Best and Wayburn), 230 amphibians, 63–66. See also frogs; salamanders anadromous fish. See fish and fisheries; salmonids; individual species Anderson, John, 118 Andrus, Cecil, 178 Aneides ferreus (clouded salamander), 65 Aneides flavipunctatus (black salamander), 65 annosus root rot, 97 Anti-Débris Association, 129 Applegate Partnership, 204–5

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Applegate River, 10 Aquila chrysaetos (golden eagle), 56–57 Aquilegia formosa (columbine), 45 Aralia californica (elk clover), 49 Arbutus menziesii (Pacific madrone), 25, 77, 99 Arceuthobium (dwarf mistletoe), 98 Arctostaphylos (manzanita), 99 Ardea herodias (great blue heron), 58 “Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?” (White), 247 Arizona coral snake, 62 Arkansas Dam, 128, 165 armillaria root rot (Armillaria ostoyae), 97 arnica (Arnica), 45 Arnold, Mary, 121 arrastras, 131 Arrowhead, Lake, 102, 251 Asarum caudatum (wild-ginger), 114 Ascaphus truei (tailed frog), 64 Ascended Masters, 181, 182 Astara, 181 aster (Aster), 45 Australian grasslands, 38 avalanches, 103–4 Avena fatua (wild oat), 38 Baker cypress, 31 bald cypress, 13, 26 Ballard, Edna, 181 Ballard, Guy Warren, 181–82 balloon bomb attack, 195–97 Bancroft, H. H., 117 Bannion, Ben, 6 bark beetles, 96–97, 103 bark characteristics, fire and, 72–73, 77, 79, 84 barred owl, 58, 219–20 Bartlett, James, 147 basalt, 15 basketry, Native American, 113, 114 bass, 141 basswood, 26 bats, 58–60; myotis bats, 59; spotted bat, 59 bay, 26 bear-grass, 113, 114 bears, 69; black bear, 45, 50–51, 60, 112; grizzly bear, 56, 60, 112 beaver, 146 Beaver Reservoir, 176–77 bees, 35, 36 Berberis nervosa (Oregon grape), 24, 34 Berry, S. L., 50 Berry, Wendell, 214 Berry Summit, 18 Best, Connie, 230

Index Big Backbone Creek, 143 Big Bar, 90 bigcone spruce, 32 Big Flat, 7, 170 Bigfoot, 185–90, 249 Bigfoot Scenic Byway, 188 bigleaf maple, 99 biodiversity, 13, 14, 18, 105, 216; change and, 31, 247 birds, 56–58, 97, 100; in Yurok myth, 110. See also individual genera and species Black Basin, 146 black bear, 45, 50–51, 60, 112 black oak, 28, 32, 77, 80, 99 black salamander, 65 black stain root rot, 97 BLM (Bureau of Land Management), 154, 207, 215 Blommer Slide, 166–67 Blue Mountains, 17 blue oak, 82, 99 Bluff Creek Bigfoot sightings, 186–87 Boas, Franz, 122 bobcat, 98 Bodega, Juan Francisco de la, 113 The Botany of Desire (Pollan), 37 Bowerman, John, 146 Bowerman Meadows, 146 Brachyramphus marmoratus (marbled murrelet), 216 Bradshaw, Toby, 36 Brewer (weeping) spruce, 31, 44, 52 Bridge Creek, 89 Bridge Gulch massacre, 118–19 Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass), 38 Brotherhood of Mount Shasta, 181 Brown, Edmund G., 173 brown trout, 66 Bryan (Stephanie) murder case, 191–97 buckbrush, 34, 82 Buckeye Ridge gold mining, 129 Buckhorn Summit, 14, 241 buckwheat, 50, 53 bullfrog, 62, 64 bull pine. See gray (ghost) pine Bureau of Land Management (BLM), 154, 207, 215 Bureau of Reclamation, 168, 173, 178, 241. See also California Water Plan Burns-Porter Act, 173 Butter’s Dam, 143 Cabinet Mountains, Rock Creek Mine proposal, 213–14 cable yarding, 161, 229 Cadillac Desert (Reisner), 169 California Academy of Sciences, Eastwood at, 41, 42, 54

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Index California and Oregon Railroad Company, 154 California bay. See California laurel California black oak, 28, 32, 77, 80, 99 California buckeye, 99, 112 California coffeeberry, 99 California Department of Fish and Game, 139 California Department of Water Resources (DWR), 167, 173, 176. See also California Water Plan California Environmental Protection Agency, 141 California Forest Improvement Program, 231 California hazel, 99, 113, 114 California huckleberry, 55, 99 California laurel, 34, 78, 80, 99, 114 California law: Burns-Porter Act, 173; 1924 Klamath dam prohibition initiative, 175; State Water Resources Act, 168; Surface Mining and Reclamation Act, 139, 207; timber harvest regulation, 161–62, 226, 227, 230–31; Wilderness Bill, 157 California mountain kingsnake, 62 California pitcher plant, 36–37 California Water Plan, 70, 169–70, 173–78; maps, 174, 177 California wild grape, 114 Callahan, 137–38 Calocedrus decurrens (incense cedar), 27, 28, 33, 73, 82, 98 Canadian zone, 21, 22 candlefish, 33 Canis lupus (gray wolf), 60 Canoe fire, 79 Canyon Creek: author’s plant survey, 46–53; Eastwood plant survey, 21–22, 41, 42–46, 48–49, 53; farms along, 146; frogs in, 64; glaciation, 13, 44–45; gold mining, 47, 131–32, 139, 144 Canyon Creek Falls, 43, 44 Canyon Creek Lakes (Twin Lakes), 43, 44, 47, 52 Canyon Creek pluton, 17, 44 Canyon Creek Wilderness/trailhead, 47, 48 canyon live oak, 77, 80, 99 Carex (sedge), 170 Carrville, 137, 164 Carrville Pond, 141 Carson, Rachel, 141 Cascade Mountains, 18, 25, 76 cascara, 114 Cassiope mertensiana (white heather), 45, 52

279 Castanopsis chrysophylla. See Chrysolepis chrysophylla Castle Crags Wilderness, 157 catfish, 141 cattle, 147–48. See also ranching Ceanothus cuneatus (buckbrush), 34, 82 Ceanothus integerriumus (deerbrush), 34 Ceanothus prostratus (mahala mat), 24 Ceanothus velutinus (snowbrush or tobacco brush), 34, 43 Cecil Lake, 183, 184–85 cedars: Alaska cedar, 27, 31; incense cedar, 27, 28, 33, 73, 82, 98; Port Orford cedar, 31, 32–33, 73, 97; western red cedar, 104 Centaurea solstitialis (yellow star-thistle), 38 Central Metamorphic Belt, 15, 16, 17, 124–25 Central Pacific Railroad Company, 154 Central Valley Project, 167–68, 236 Chabot, “Frenchy,” 128 chain fern, 113 Chamaecyparis lawsoniana. See Cupressus lawsoniana Chambers, John, 187 chamise, 82 Champion International, 242 Chanchelulla Gulch, 195 Chanchelulla Wilderness, 157 Chaney, Earlyne, 181 change, 53, 71–73, 247; diversity and, 31, 247; ecosystem management and, 4–5, 198, 252; forest succession/ potential vegetation, 22–24, 71. See also climate change; ecosystem dynamics; natural disturbances chaparral, 80, 82 Charina bottae (rubber boa), 63 Chasmistes brevirostris (shortnose sucker), 240 Chaumont Quitry ditch, 172 cheatgrass, 38 Cherry Flat, 7, 48 chestnut-backed chickadee, 97 Chilcutt, Jimmy, 189 children, experience with nature, 248–49 Chilula people, 108, 121 Chimaphila umbellata (prince’s pine), 24 Chimariko people, 108, 115, 120, 121 China Slide, 166 Chinese immigrants, 126 Chinook people, 121 Chinook salmon, 5, 67, 68, 211, 241 chinquapin, giant, 25, 80 Chlorogalum (soap plant), 114 Chrysolepis chrysophylla (giant chinquapin), 25, 80

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280 Chrysothamnus (rabbitbrush), 114 Church Universal and Triumphant, 181 cinnabar (mercury) mining, 130–31, 140–41, 206 Cinnabar Sam, 131 Civil War, 117, 120 Clair Engle Lake, 164. See also Trinity Lake Clark Fork river, 213 Clayton, Dave, 65 Claytonia lanceolate (spring beauty), 114 Clear Creek, 10, 125, 129 Clear Creek tunnel, 175, 178–79 clear-cutting, 149, 155, 158, 161, 227–28; current regulation, 228, 229, 230–31; impacts, 200, 204, 221, 223; tax policy and, 231 Clemmys marmorata (western pond turtle), 63 Clifton, Glen, 32 climate, 10–14; fire and, 13, 73; vegetation patterns and, 20, 24–25, 87 climate change, 13–14, 26–29, 103, 250–52; forest management and, 29, 224 Clinton Forest Summit, 217 clouded salamander, 65 coarse-filter management approaches, 201–3 coast live oak, 99 cobra lily. See California pitcher plant Cody, “Buffalo” Bill, 119 Coffee Creek, 93, 94–95, 141; gold dredging, 134; stream pirating, 170, 171 Coffee Creek Ranch, 146 coho salmon, 67, 68, 69, 70, 211 collaborative planning, 204–5, 226 Collins Pine, 227 Colorado River, 169 Columbia River diversion proposals, 169 columbine, 45 common horsetail, 114 conifer forest: climate change and, 250; copper-mining impacts, 142, 143, 144 conifers, 31–32; fire adaptations, 72–73, 77–78; insects and pathogens, 96–100, 102. See also individual genera and species conservation easements, 231–32 conservation planning. See ecosystem management; ecosystem restoration; forest management continental drift. See plate tectonics Conway, Fred, 146 Conway Lake, 146 Cooper, William, 25 Cope’s giant salamander, 66 Copper Creek, 211

Index copper mining, 132, 141–44; Iron Mountain Mine, 142, 144, 210–11 corn silk, 170 Corvus brachyrhynchos (American crow), 110 Corvus corax (American raven), 71 Corylus cornuta (hazelnut, California hazel), 114 Costa, John, 146 cottonwoods, 72, 73 cougar. See mountain lion Covelo, 178 cover types, 22 Cox, Isaac, 3, 62 creeping snowberry, 34 crime: Bryan murder case, 191–97; marijuana growing, 151; at wilderness trailheads, 48. See also violence Cronartium ribicola (white pine blister rust), 98–99 Crotalus viridus (western rattlesnake), 61–62 Crowell, John, Jr., 158 Crystal Creek, 10 Cuenca, Sam, 65 cumulative effects, 201, 203–4, 221, 224; logging, 227, 229 Cupressaceae, 27 Cupressus bakeri (Baker cypress), 31 Cupressus lawsoniana (Port Orford cedar), 31, 32–33, 73, 97 Cupressus nootkatensis (Alaska cedar), 27, 31 currant, 98 Curtis, Edward, 112, 116 CVP (Central Valley Project), 167–68, 236 CWP. See California Water Plan Cyanocitta stelleri (Steller’s jay), 71 Cynoglossum grande (western hound’s tongue), 194 cypresses, 27; Baker cypress, 31; bald cypress, 26 Cytisus (French broom), 39 Dalmatian toadflax, 38 dams, 5, 10, 164–79, 202; Central Valley Project, 167–68; Feather River Project, 173; fisheries impacts, 67, 96, 201; flood-control justifications, 167, 176, 178; gold mining and, 128, 134, 165, 211; landslide-caused, 165–67; proposals to raise, 251–52; for restoration purposes, 243–44. See also California Water Plan; water diversions; specific dams dark-eyed junco, 34, 71

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Index Darlingtonia californica (California pitcher plant), 36–37 dawn redwood, 26 Deadwood, 131, 159 decomposed granite, 14, 241–42, 244 Dedrick, 13, 43, 47–48, 132 deer, 34, 60, 98, 100, 112 deerbrush, 34 Deer Creek, 159, 248 deer fern, 55 deer oak, 99 Del Norte salamander, 65 Deltistes luxatus (Lost River sucker), 240 dendrochronology, 90, 102–3, 104 Dendroctonus, 96–97 Dendroctonus brevicomis (western pine beetle), 96 Dendroctonus ponderosae (mountain pine beetle), 96 Dendroctonus pseudotsugae (Douglas-fir beetle), 80, 97 Dendroctonus valens (red turpentine beetle), 97 Department of Water Resources (DWR), 167, 173, 176. See also California Water Plan Dicamptodon copei (Cope’s giant salamander), 66 Dicamptodon tenebrosus (Pacific giant salamander), 66 Didelphis marsupialis (opossum), 56–57 digger pine. See gray (ghost) pine Diller, J.S., 15, 45, 128 Diller Canyon, 45 Dillon Creek, 211 disease. See pathogens Dixon, Roland, 122–23 Dodge, Wilber, 62 dominant vegetation, 22–24; gradient analysis, 30. See also forest structure doodlebugs, 134 Dos Rios Dam, 178 Douglas City, 117, 126 Douglas-fir, 6, 22–23, 26, 28, 32, 44; fire and, 6, 72, 77, 78–79, 80, 81–82, 222–23; flood intolerance, 90; insects and pathogens, 97, 98; for lumber, 159, 160; names, 32, 34; as SOD host, 99; wind and, 102 Douglas-fir beetle, 80, 97 Douglas-fir/hardwood forests, 25 Douglas squirrel, 49 dragline dredges, 134 Drake, Sir Francis, 113 dredging, for gold, 132–35, 136, 137–40 drought, 102–3, 251 Dundes, Alan, 187

281 dunite, 37 dusky-footed wood rat, 57, 219 Dutton, C. E., 55 dwarf mistletoe, 98 DWR. See California Water Plan; Department of Water Resources Eagle Creek, 91, 92, 93 eagles, 69, 141; golden eagle, 56–57 earthquake faults, 17, 18, 105 earthquakes, 18, 87, 104–5 eastern brook trout, 67 Eastern Klamath Belt, 15, 16 East Fork Coffee Creek, 134 East Fork Scott River, 147 East Fork Stuart Fork, 129 East Fork Trinity River, 130–31, 141, 151 Eastwood, Alice, 41–42, 53–54, 55, 132; author’s contest with, 41, 46–53; Canyon Creek plant survey, 21–22, 41, 42–46, 48–49, 53; Prairie Creek Redwoods memorial grove, 54–55 Eastwoodia, 54 ecology, 6 economic sustainability, 200, 204, 205, 225–26 ecosystem dynamics, 4–5, 8, 202–3; cumulative effects, 203–4; ecosystem management and, 198, 201–2, 220. See also change; natural disturbances; specific disturbance types ecosystem health/integrity, 198–200 ecosystem management: active management, 220–24, 247; adaptive management, 203, 218, 238, 241, 243; challenges, 4–5, 203, 232, 243, 249; change and, 4–5, 198, 252; coarse-filter vs. fine-filter approaches, 201–3; collaborative planning, 204–5; cumulative effects in, 201, 203–4, 221, 224, 227; island biogeography theory and, 216; micromanagement, 201; natural processes and, 198, 201–2, 220; social/economic sustainability goals, 200, 204, 205, 225–26; sustainability principles, 198–201; views of, 247. See also ecosystem restoration; forest management; resource management ecosystem restoration, 205, 231, 233, 243, 247; mining reclamation, 139–40, 209–13; NWP forest-restoration component, 226. See also watershed restoration ecotypes, 37–38 Eddy, Mount, 9, 146 Eddy, Nelson, 146 Eel River, 88, 105, 177–78

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Egler, Frank, 203 1872 Mining Law, 139, 144, 206–7, 208–9 Eleanor Lake, 146 elevation, vegetation and, 29 elk clover, 49 El Niño, 13–14 Emerald Lake, 172 Emmerson, “Red,” 155 endangered species. See threatened/ endangered species endemics, 21, 37, 38, 65 Engelmann spruce, 31 ensatina (Ensatina eschscholtzii), 65 environmental ethics, 3–4, 199, 200, 248–49; Native American, 111, 112–13. See also stewardship EPA Superfund regulation. See Superfund regulation/sites Equisetum arvense (common horsetail), 114 Eriogonum (buckwheat), 50, 53 erosion, 162–63, 228–29, 241–45. See also sediment movement/deposition eucalyptus (Eucalyptus), 38 exotic species. See alien species extinctions, 200 Fairview Reservoir, 164. See also Trinity Lake farming and ranching, 146–50, 152 faults, 17, 18, 105 Fawn fire, 101 Feather River Project, 173 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, 207 Felis concolor (mountain lion), 56, 60–61 Felter Ranch, 146 fig (Ficus), 26 fine-filter management approaches, 201, 202–3 fire, 6, 73–87, 104, 228; climate and, 13, 73, 102, 250–51; firefighting costs, 225; forest impacts, 76–77, 78–85, 101, 104, 202, 220, 222–23; ignition sources, 13, 74, 75; in-town fires, 126–27; Native Americans and, 74, 82, 83, 112, 113, 224–25, 247; Northwest Forest Plan and, 218, 219; season/timing, 72, 73; SOD distribution and, 100; wildlife impacts, 57–58 fire adaptations: chaparral shrubs, 82; trees, 55, 72–73, 77–78 fire beetles. See flatheaded borers fire frequency, 76, 78, 80, 81–82, 251 fire intensity, 76, 80, 82

Index fire management, 220–25; fire suppression, 5, 82, 87, 105, 224–25; prescribed fire, 87, 202, 219, 223, 224; under Northwest Forest Plan, 219 fir engraver, 97 fire regimes/patterns, 76, 78–87; meadows and openings, 85–87; mixedevergreen forest, 80–82; redwood forest, 78–79; Shasta red fir forest, 84; subalpine forest, 84–85; white fir forest, 83; woodland and chaparral, 82–83 fire severity, 76, 80–81, 221, 251; fire suppression and, 105; wind damage and, 83, 101 fire suppression. See fire management firs, 26, 27, 28–29, 97; grand fir, 28; noble fir, 31; Pacific silver fir, 31; Shasta red fir, 21, 22, 29, 44, 52, 84; subalpine fir, 29, 31. See also Douglasfir; white fir fish and fisheries, 5, 66–70; dam impacts, 67, 70, 96, 179, 201, 233–34, 240–41, 242; mining impacts, 141, 144; Native American fishing, 111, 112. See also watershed restoration; specific fish and streams fisher, 60 five-finger fern, 113, 114 flatheaded borers, 97 flood control, 167, 176, 178 floodplain management, 238, 239 floods, 5, 6, 64, 73, 87–96, 147; forest impacts, 72; historic analysis, 88, 90–95; landslide-caused dams, 165–67; Native American legend, 104; 1955 flood, 64, 66, 88–89, 90, 91, 93, 177, 192–93, 242; 1964 flood, 66, 88, 90–91, 93–95, 166–67, 177, 197; power of, 88–89, 93 Flora of the Pacific Northwest (Hitchcock and Cronquist), 33 Flowers and Trees of the Trinity Alps (Jones), 49 fog, fog drip, 11, 25 foothill pine. See gray (ghost) pine foothill yellow-legged frog, 63–64 forest disturbance: drought, 102–3, 251; insects and pathogens, 72, 96–100, 102, 103, 199, 251; wind, 100–102. See also fire entries; floods forest health, 199 Forest House, 147 forest land ownership, 153–55, 157, 215

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Index forest management, 29, 154, 200–201, 215–32; Northwest Forest Plan, 57, 154, 158, 161, 216–19, 225–26; private lands, 215, 216, 221, 226–32; public lands, 154, 156, 157–58, 215, 216–26. See also logging; resource management; sustainability forest openings, fire in, 85–87 Forest Practices Act (California), 161–62, 226, 227 forest regeneration: after fires, 79, 82, 83, 91 (see also fire adaptations); after floods, 90, 91; mined areas, 137, 138 Forest Reserve Act, 155–56 forest restoration, 226, 244 Forest Service, 154, 156, 157–58, 207. See also national forest lands Forest Stewardship Council certification, 227 forest structure, 19–30; active stand management, 221–24; avalanches and, 103; climate and, 24–25, 26–29, 250; dominant/potential vegetation, 22–24, 71; gradient analysis, 29–30; historic change, 25–29; insect/disease susceptibility and, 96; zonal classification systems, 19–22. See also forest disturbance Forest Summit, 217 fossil flora, 25–26 Foster, William, 146 Foster Lake, 146 foxtail pine, 29, 31 Franciscan mélange, 17–18 Franklin, Jerry, 200 Fraxinus latifolia (Oregon ash), 34 French broom, 39 French Gulch fire, 127 frogs, 63–64; bullfrog, 62, 64; foothill yellow-legged frog, 63–64; redlegged frog, 64; tailed frog, 64 fungal pathogens, 96, 97, 98–99 Gannett, Henry, 42 Garry oak. See Oregon white oak garter snake, western aquatic, 62–63 Gaultheria shallon (salal), 55, 114 General Mining Law of 1872, 139, 144, 206–7; calls for reform, 208–9, 214 genetic potential, 200 geology, 14–18; Canyon Creek basin, 43–44, 44–45, 51, 52; dam sites, 175; fossil flora, 25–26; gold deposits, 17, 25, 124–25, 127; life-zone classifications and, 21; map, 16; stream pirating and, 170 ghost (gray) pine, 22, 31, 33

283 giant chinquapin, 25, 80 giant sequoia, 39–40 Gila Wilderness, 156 Gimlin, Bob, 186 glaciers, glaciation, 9, 13, 26, 94, 170, 171, 251; Canyon Creek, 13, 44–45, 52 Glaucomys sabrinus (northern flying squirrel), 57 global warming, 13–14, 29, 103, 224, 250. See also climate change Globe Mine, 131–32 gneiss, 17 gold, gold mining, 43, 90, 117, 124–44; agricultural development and, 145–46; Canyon Creek, 47, 131–32, 139, 144; Chinese miners, 126; dredging, 132–35, 136, 137–40; early mining methods, 125, 127; environmental impacts, 125, 128–29, 131, 136–41; gold deposits, 17, 25, 124–25, 127–28; hydraulic mining, 10, 127, 128–30, 134, 137, 172; La Grange mine, 17, 43, 130, 134, 135, 172; lode mining, 131–32, 134, 140, 159; mercury use, 130–31; mining towns, 126–27, 129; Native Americans and, 14, 116–18, 119, 125; reclamation, 139–40; regulation, 139; Sawyer decision, 124, 129, 137; Siskon Mine, 211–13; timber needs, 159; Weaverville-Redding stage robbery, 142; yields and prices, 125, 134–35, 139. See also mining entries Golden City, 129 golden eagle, 56–57 Gold Is Where You Find It (film), 124 Goodall, Jane, 189 gooseberry, 98, 114 gradient analysis, 29–30 grand fir, 28 granite, granitic soils, 14, 17, 44, 45, 241–42, 244 grapes, 151–52. See also California wild grape; Oregon grape grasses, 38, 87 Grass Valley Creek restoration project, 241–45 gravels, gold-bearing, 17, 25, 125, 127–28. See also sediment movement/deposition Gray, Asa, 41 Gray Eagle Mine, 132 gray (ghost) pine, 22, 31, 33 gray wolf, 60 grazing, 85, 87, 149. See also ranching great blue heron, 58

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grizzly bear, 56, 60, 112 Gulo gulo (wolverine), 60 Hall City Cave, 14 Hamilton Ponds, 242, 245 Handbook of North American Indians, 106 Hardrock Act (1872 Mining Law), 139, 144, 206–7, 208–9 hardrock mining. See gold, gold mining; mining entries hardwoods, 78, 79, 80, 90; fire and, 73, 77–78; SOD hosts, 99. See also individual genera and species Harrington, John, 113 Harrison, Benjamin, 155–56 Hayfork, Hayfork Valley, 9, 116, 149, 150; balloon bomb attack, 195–97; Bryan murder case, 191–97; mill closure, 155, 205 Hayfork Adaptive Management Area, 218 Hayfork Creek, 118, 195, 197 Hayfork fires, 75 Hayfork Watershed Research and Training Center, 205, 225 hazelnut. See California hazel Healthy Forests Restoration Act, 224 heart rots, 97 Heizer, Robert, 107, 108, 118, 122 Helley, Ed, 88, 90–91 Hetch Hetchy Dam, 156 Heterobasidion annosum (annosus root rot), 97 Heteromeles arbutifolia (toyon), 99 Hightower, Jane, 141 Hilton, James, 180 holly, 26 Homestead Act, 153 Honeydew, 11 Hoopa Valley, 9, 120, 175, 176 Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, 121, 175, 176 Horse Mountain, 144 Hound’s-Head Fall, 43, 44, 50 huckleberry oak, 28, 29 Hudsonian zone, 21 hummingbirds, 35, 36 hunting, 60–61, 112 Hupa people, 108, 115, 121, 187 Hyampom Valley, 151, 175 hydraulic mining, 10, 127, 128–30, 134, 137, 172 I AM movement, 181 ice ages, 26. See also glaciers, glaciation Idaho, Rock Creek Mine proposal, 213–14

Index Ilex (holly), 26 incense cedar, 27, 28, 33, 73, 82, 98 Indian Names for Plants and Animals (Merriam), 122 Indian Recognition Act (IRA), 121 Indians. See Native Americans; specific tribes Indian tobacco, 113, 114, 115 industrial forestlands, 226–30 insects, 72, 96–100, 102, 103, 251; bat feeding, 58–59 Integral Mine, 130–31, 140 Interagency Scientific Committee (ISC), 216–17 International Bigfoot Symposium, 188–90 Ips pini (pine engraver), 97 IRA (Indian Recognition Act), 121 Iron Gate Dam, 67, 70, 240 Iron Mountain Mine, 142, 144, 210–11 ISC (Interagency Scientific Committee), 216–17 island biogeography, 216 Island Mountain, 144 Jackson, Harold, 192 Jackson, Henry “Scoop,” 169 Jeffrey pine, 28, 30, 37, 80, 84, 113; fire and, 72 Jepson, Willis Linn, 41 Jepson Manual, 33, 41, 194 jewel flower, 37–38 Johnson, Lyndon, 157 Jones, Alice, 49, 157 Jones, Marcus, 54 Josephine ophiolite, 17 Juglans (walnut), 26 Junco hyemalis (dark-eyed junco), 34, 71 Junction City, 137 Junction fire, 127 Jungwirth, Lynn, 205 junipers, 27, 83; Utah juniper, 20; western juniper, 28 Juniperus occidentalis (western juniper), 28 Juniperus osteosperma (Utah juniper), 20 juniper woodland, 30, 82–83 Kalmia polifolia (alpine laurel), 45, 52 Karuk people, 108, 113, 116, 118, 121; legends, 110; plants used by, 114 Keswick Reservoir, 211 King, Godfré Ray, 181, 182 king salmon. See Chinook salmon kingsnake, 62 King Solomon Mine, 132 Kise Brothers, 133

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Klamath Mountains, 3; books about, 6–7, 182–83; climate, 10–14; geology, 14–18; map, 4; population density, 106; topography, 9–10 Klamath River, 10, 109, 178, 211; dam and diversion proposals, 168–70, 174, 175, 176–77 (see also California Water Plan); dam impacts, 67, 70, 179, 240; fisheries, 67–70, 240–41; gold mining, 129, 133, 137, 139; restoration efforts, 233, 240–41; salmon die-off, 179, 241. See also Iron Gate Dam Klamath River Fish and Game District initiative, 175 Klamath River Reserve, 121 Knight, Goodwin, 173 knobcone pine, 31, 33, 81, 84; fire adaptations, 73, 77 kokanee salmon, 7 Kroeber, Alfred, 104, 107, 116, 120, 122 La Grange, Baron de, 61, 130, 172 La Grange, Baroness de, 130, 172 La Grange ditch, 130, 172 La Grange Mine, 17, 43, 130, 134, 135, 172 Lake, Frank, 112 LaMarche, Val, Jr., 88, 90–91, 93, 94–95 laminated root rot, 97 Lamoine Lumber and Trading Company, 159–60 lamprey, Pacific (Lampetra tridentata), 67 Lampropeltis zonata (California mountain kingsnake), 62 land ethic. See environmental ethics; stewardship land management. See ecosystem management; forest management; resource management land ownership: forest lands, 215, 221; Native American land allotments, 121, 176; by railroads, 153–55, 157 landslides, dams formed by, 165–67 land trusts, 232 land use, 8, 124; national forest lands, 156–58; Native American, 108, 110–11. See also specific uses Lassen, Mount, 18 Lassik people, 121 late-successional reserves (LSRs), 158, 217, 218 Ledum glandulosum var. californicum (western Labrador tea), 52, 114 legends. See lore and legend; Native American legends Lemurians, 182 leopard lily, 114 Leopold, Aldo, 3, 156, 199–200

285 Leptographium wageneri (black stain root rot), 97 Leucothoe davisiae (Sierra laurel), 146 Lewis and Clark expedition, 34, 112, 121 Lewis’ monkeyflower, 34, 35, 36 Lewiston, 127, 151 Lewiston Dam, 138, 164, 233–34 Libocedrus decurrens. See Calocedrus decurrens lichens, 55 life zones, 20–22, 42; evolution and change, 27–29 lightning, 13, 74, 75, 84, 85 Lilium pardalinum (leopard lily), 114 limestone, 14 Linaria genistifolia ssp. dalmatica (Dalmatian toadflax), 38 Linsley, E.G., 97 Lithocarpus densiflorus. See tanoak litigation: Idaho Rock Creek Mine proposal, 214; Trinity River Restoration Plan, 234, 236 live oaks, 32; canyon live oak, 77, 80, 99; coast live oak, 99 livestock. See ranching lodgepole pine, 27, 84 logging, 155, 157–63, 228, 242; as active management component, 220–21, 223; Bigfoot sightings and, 188; environmental impacts, 161–63, 226, 228–29, 242, 243–44; Forest Stewardship Council certification, 227; methods, 159–60, 161, 229; under Northwest Forest Plan, 217, 218, 225–26; private forestland management, 226–30; regulation, 158, 161–62, 209, 226, 227, 230–31; regulatory reform proposals, 228–30; sustained yield plans (SYPs), 227; THPs, 162, 226, 227, 229; timberland conversions, 149–50 logjams, 94, 167 Long, Floyd, 166–67 Long Ridge, 148 lore and legend, 180; Bigfoot, 185–90, 249; giant salamander stories, 183–84; Mount Shasta, 181–82 Lost Horizon (Hilton), 180 Lost River sucker, 240 Louisiana-Pacific Corporation, 158 Louv, Richard, 248–49 Lowden Ranch fire, 127 low-elevation forests, 25, 28 Lower Canyon Creek Falls (Hound’sHead Fall), 43, 44, 50 LSRs (late-successional reserves), 217, 218 lungwort, 55 lupine (Lupinus), 114

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286 Mad River, 174, 175 magnolias, 13 mahala mat, 24 Maidu people, 121 Manual of the Flowering Plants of California. See Jepson Manual manzanitas, 99, 196 maple, bigleaf, 99 maps, 4, 12, 16, 23; California Water Plan proposals, 174, 177; Native American groups, 107 marble, 17 marbled murrelet, 216 Marble Mountains, 14 Marble Mountain Wilderness, 157 marijuana, 151 marine rocks, 15, 17 Marshall, John, 116 Martes americana (pine marten), 60 Martes pennati (American fisher), 60 Master Petroleum, Inc., 144 matrix lands, 218, 222–23 McDonald, Tom, 60 McKay, Thomas, 146–47 meadows, 85–87, 137 Megram fire, 74, 83, 101 Melanophila (flatheaded borers), 97 Meldrum, Jeff, 189–90 mercury, mercury mining, 130–31, 140–41, 206 Merriam, C. Hart, 19–22, 42, 73–74, 122–23 Merriam, Frank Finley, 55 Metasequoia (dawn redwood), 26 methylmercury, 141 mice, 69 Micruroides euryxanthus (Arizona coral snake), 62 Milestone, Jim, 10 Mimulus, 34, 37, 45 Mimulus cardinalis (scarlet monkeyflower), 34, 35, 36 Mimulus lewisii (Lewis’ monkeyflower), 34, 35, 36 Mineral King, 103–4 miner’s inches, 127 Minersville, 164 mining, 10; calls for reform, 208–10, 213, 214; cinnabar/mercury, 130–31, 140–41, 206; copper, 132, 141–44, 210–11; environmental impacts, 125, 128–29, 131, 136–44, 208–13, 228; Forest Service and BLM regulations, 207; reclamation, 208, 209–13; regulatory law, 139, 144, 206–8, 213; water diversions for, 127, 128, 129, 130, 137, 172. See also gold, gold mining

Index mining claims, 206–7, 207–8; legal reform proposals, 208–9 Mining Law of 1872, 139, 144, 206–7, 208–9 mining technologies: dredging, 132–35, 137–40; hydraulic mining, 10, 127, 128–30, 134, 137, 172; lode mining, 131–32, 134, 140, 159; panning, 125, 127, 137, 138; sluice boxes and rockers, 127, 137, 140; small-stream methods, 134 mining towns, 126–27, 129; logging near, 159. See also specific towns mink, 60 mistletoes, 98 mixed-evergreen forest, 80–82 mock orange, 114 Modern Gold Mine, 136, 139–40 moisture, vegetation patterns and, 24 monkeyflowers, 34, 37, 45; Lewis’ monkeyflower, 34, 35, 36; scarlet monkeyflower, 34, 35, 36 montane forests, 25 Montgomery, David, 249–50 moraines, 44 Morris, Florence, 157 Morris, James, 146 Morris, Leonard, 157 Morris Meadows, 61, 85–87, 146 mountain heather, 52 mountain hemlock, 29, 44, 52, 84 mountain lion, 56, 60–61 mountain pine. See western white pine mountain pine beetle, 96 Muir, John, 156 Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, 157 Mustela vison (mink), 60 myotis bats (Myotis), 59 mythology. See lore and legend; Native American legends names: Latin names, 255–60; place names, 7–8, 10, 146; plant names, 32–34 national forest lands, 155–56, 215; grazing permits, 149; land use/management, 154, 156, 157–58; logging on, 158, 160–61; marijuana on, 151; wilderness designations, 156–57 National Forest Management Act, 158, 221 national parks, mining claims in, 207 National Park Service, 156 Native American legends, 104, 108–10, 187–88 Native Americans, 8, 106–23; Bigfoot and, 187; CWP dam proposals and, 175–76, 178; fire use/ignition, 74,

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Index 82, 83, 112, 113, 224–25, 247; fishing and hunting, 111–12; land allotments/sales, 121, 176; land use/ resource management, 74, 108, 110–11, 145, 247; language/tribal groups, 106–8, 122–23; map, 107; plant/timber use, 112–13, 114, 152; population and cultural declines, 120–22; relations with whites, 14, 116–20, 125, 146; reservations, 120, 121; strife and war, 115–16; tobacco cultivation, 113, 115, 145; village/ community structure, 108, 115, 121–22 native plants, place sense and, 38–40 Natural Bridge, 118 natural disturbances, 5–6, 71–105; avalanches, 103–4; climate change and, 250–51; drought, 102–3, 251; earthquakes and tsunamis, 18, 87, 104–5; fire, 73–87; floods, 87–96; forest succession and, 24; insects and pathogens, 96–100, 102, 103, 199, 251; management and, 198, 201–2, 220–21, 223, 236–37; Native American pacification ceremony, 111; synergistic effects, 72, 101, 102, 103; types and effects, 72–73; wind, 100– 102. See also ecosystem dynamics; specific disturbance types naturalized plant species, 38 natural selection, 37. See also speciation nature, culture and, 247–49 nature-deficit disorder, 248–49 Neillia opufolia (vine bark), 50, 53 neoteny, 66 Neotoma fuscipes (dusky-footed wood rat), 57, 219 Neviusia cliftonii (Shasta snow-wreath), 32 New River, 131 New River Indians, 122–23 newt, rough-skinned, 64 Nicotiana quadrivalvis (Indian tobacco), 113, 114, 115 ninebark, 32, 34, 50, 53, 114 noble fir, 31 nomenclature. See names nonindustrial private forestlands, 230–32 nonindustrial timber management plans (NTMPs), 230–31 northern flying squirrel, 57 northern spotted owl, 57–58, 158, 202, 203, 216, 219–20. See also Northwest Forest Plan North Fork Trinity River, 234 North Fork Wilderness, 157

287 Northwest California (Sawyer), 33 northwestern salamander, 64 Northwest Forest Plan (NWP), 57, 154, 158, 216–19, 233; logging under, 161, 217, 218, 225–26; social/economic sustainability goals, 225–26 Norwegian Ranch, 146 Nowlin, Bill, 148–49 NTMPs (nonindustrial timber management plans), 230–31 nuthatches, 71; red-breasted nuthatch, 97 Nyssa (tupelo), 26 oaks, 28, 32, 80, 98; acorns, 100, 110, 112; blue oak, 82, 99; California black oak, 28, 32, 77, 80, 99; canyon live oak, 77, 80, 99; coast live oak, 99; deer oak, 99; huckleberry oak, 28, 29; Oregon white oak, 28, 82, 99, 114; sudden oak death, 99–100 oak woodland, 30, 82 Olympic Mountains, Olympic Peninsula, 6, 81–82, 85, 98–99, 104 Olympic National Park, 58, 219–20 Oncorhynchus kisutch (coho salmon), 67, 68, 69, 70, 211 Oncorhynchus mykiss (steelhead), 7, 67, 111, 112, 211, 245 Oncorhynchus mykiss (rainbow trout), 66–67 Oncorhynchus nerka (kokanee salmon), 7 Oncorhynchus tshawytscha (Chinook salmon), 5, 67, 68, 211, 241 open lands, fire in, 85–87 ophiolites, 15, 17 opossum, 56–57 Oregon, names with, 33–34 Oregon and California Railroad land grant, 153–55 Oregon ash, 34 Oregon grape, 24, 34 Oregon Gulch, 130 Oregon junco. See dark-eyed junco Oregon Mountain, 17, 47, 105, 130, 172 Oregon Mountain fire, 74, 127 Oregon myrtle. See California laurel Oregon white oak, 28, 82, 99, 114 Oroville Dam, 173 osprey, 58, 141 owls: barred owl, 58, 219–20; northern spotted owl, 57–58, 158, 202, 203, 216, 219–20 (see also Northwest Forest Plan) Oxalis oregana (redwood sorrel), 54, 55

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288 Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), 14 Pacific giant salamander, 66 Pacific lamprey, 67 Pacific madrone, 25, 77, 99 Pacific silver fir, 31 Pacific trillium, 24, 54, 114 Pacific yew, 114 palynology, 27 Pandion haliaetus (osprey), 58, 141 panther. See mountain lion Papoose Lake, 45 Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future (Schrag), 246 Paravespula vulgaris (yellow jacket), 2, 36 Parus rufescens (chestnut-backed chickadee), 97 pathogens, 96, 97–100, 199 Patterson, Roger, 186–87 Payments to States funding, Northwest Forest Plan, 225–26 PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation), 14 Pend Oreille, Lake, 213 penstemon (Penstemon), 45 pepperwood. See California laurel peridotite, 15, 37 Persea (bay), 26 phacelia (Phacelia), 37–38 Phellinus weirii (laminated root rot), 97 Philadelphus lewisii (mock orange), 114 Phleum pratense (timothy), 87 Phoradendron (mistletoe), 98 Phyllodoce empetriformis (mountain heather), 52 Physocarpus capitatus (ninebark), 32, 34, 50, 53, 114 Phytophthora lateralis (Port Orford cedar root disease), 97, 99 Phytophthora ramorum (sudden oak death), 99–100 Picea breweriana (Brewer or weeping spruce), 31, 44, 52 Picea engelmannii (Engelmann spruce), 31 Picea sitchensis (Sitka spruce), 24–25, 78 Pickett, Stewart, 72 Pierce, Cliff, 167 pillow lavas, 15 Pinchot, Gifford, 156, 157 pine bark beetles, 96–97 pine engraver, 96–97 pine marten, 60 pines, 27, 28, 33, 251; foxtail pine, 29, 31; gray or ghost pine, 22, 31, 33; insects and pathogens, 96–97, 98, 102; knobcone pine, 31, 33, 73, 77, 81, 84; lodgepole pine, 27, 84; sugar pine, 22, 73, 80, 82, 98, 114; western white pine, 22, 29, 44, 84, 98;

Index whitebark pine, 21, 29, 33, 98. See also Jeffrey pine; ponderosa pine; prince’s pine Pinus albicaulis (whitebark pine), 21, 29, 33, 98 Pinus attenuata (knobcone pine), 31, 33, 73, 77, 81, 84 Pinus balfouriana (foxtail pine), 29, 31 Pinus contorta (lodgepole pine), 27, 84 Pinus edulis (twoneedle pinyon), 20, 251 Pinus jeffreyi. See Jeffrey pine Pinus lambertiana (sugar pine), 22, 73, 80, 82, 98, 114 Pinus monticola (western white pine), 22, 29, 44, 84, 98 Pinus ponderosa. See ponderosa pine Pinus sabiniana (gray or ghost pine), 22, 31, 33 pinyon pine, 20, 251 pitcher plant, 36–37 Pit River, 112 Pitt, William, 148 place names, 7–8, 10, 146 place sense/appreciation, 6–8, 38–40 plant communities, alien species impacts, 38–39, 53. See also forest structure; vegetation types/patterns; specific plants and community types plant diversity, 14, 31–32, 96. See also biodiversity plant evolution/speciation, 34–38 plant names, 32–34 plant surveys: author’s Canyon Creek survey, 46–53; Eastwood Canyon Creek survey, 21–22, 41–46, 48–49, 53; Merriam Mount Shasta survey, 20–21, 42 plant use, Native American, 112–13, 114; tobacco cultivation, 113, 115 plate tectonics, 14–15, 18 Plethodon asupak (Scott Bar salamander), 65, 182 Plethodon elongatus (Del Norte salamander), 65 Plethodon stormi (Siskiyou Mountain salamander), 65 plethodontids, 65 Poison Canyon, 146 poison oak, 32, 99, 114 Poli, Adon, 149–50 Pollan, Michael, 37 pollen records, 27–29 pollinators, 35, 36 Pomo people, 121 ponderosa pine, 21, 22, 27, 28, 37, 80; fire and, 72, 77, 82; Karuk uses, 114; Lake Arrowhead die-off, 102; logging, 159–60; pathogens, 97, 98

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population density, 106 Port Orford cedar, 31, 32–33, 73, 97 Port Orford cedar root disease, 97, 99 Portuguese Meadows, 146 potential vegetation, 22–24, 71–72 power generation, Feather River Project, 173 Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, 54–55 precipitation, 11, 14, 24, 74, 87; drought, 102–3, 251; fog drip, 11; map, 12; potential changes, 250, 251 Preemption Act, 153 prescribed fire, 87, 202, 219, 223, 224 prince’s pine, 24 private forestlands management, 215, 216, 221, 226–32. See also logging Procyon lotor (raccoon), 69 productivity, sustainability and, 200 Prophet, Elizabeth Clare, 181 Proposition 117, 60–61 Pseudotsuga, 32 Pseudotsuga menziesii. See Douglas-fir Pseudotsuga macrocarpa (bigcone spruce), 32 public lands: forest management, 154, 156, 157–58, 215, 216–26; government divestment, 153–54. See also national forest lands Pyle, Robert Michael, 188 Pyrola picta (white-veined wintergreen), 114 quail, 112 Quercus agrifolia (coast live oak), 99 Quercus chrysolepis (canyon live oak), 77, 80, 99 Quercus douglasii (blue oak), 82, 99 Quercus garryana (Oregon white oak), 28, 82, 99, 114 Quercus kelloggii (California black oak), 28, 32, 77, 80, 99 Quercus sadleriana (deer oak), 99 Quercus vaccinifolia (huckleberry oak), 28, 29 quicksilver. See mercury, mercury mining rabbitbrush, 114 rabbits, 112 raccoon, 69 RACs (resource advisory committees), 226 Radiant School, 181–82 radiolarian cherts, 15 Railroad Land Grant Act, 153 railroad land grants, 153–55, 157 railroad logging, 159–60 rail transportation, 148, 160

289 rainbow trout, 66, 67 rainfall, 11–12, 87, 165; El Niño and, 14; potential changes, 250, 251 Ramshorn Creek, 91, 92 Rana aurora (red-legged frog), 64 Rana boylii (foothill yellow-legged frog), 63–64 Rana catesbeiana (bullfrog), 62, 64 ranching, 146–50 rattlesnake, western, 61–62 Reading, Pierson B., 117, 125 Reagan, Ronald, 60, 157, 158, 161, 176, 178 reclamation, after mining, 139–40, 209–13 reclamation bonds, 139, 207, 208 recreational uses, national forest lands, 156 red alder, 89 red-breasted nuthatch, 97 Red Buttes Wilderness, 157 red fir, 28–29, 84. See also Shasta red fir red-legged frog, 64 red oaks, 32 red ring rot (Phaeolus schweinitzii), 97 red turpentine beetle, 97 redwood, 25, 26, 30, 54–55, 114; fire and, 55, 72, 78; flooding and, 72, 73, 90; logging, 160; as SOD host, 99. See also dawn redwood Redwood Creek, 89, 95, 104, 105, 243; logging impacts, 162–63, 203 redwood forest, 78–79, 99 Redwood National Park, 89, 162, 178 redwood sorrel, 54, 55 Reed, Mabel, 121 regeneration harvesting, 220–21, 223, 227–28 Reisner, Marc, 169 reproductive isolation, 36 resource advisory committees (RACs), 226 resource management: fish/wildlife and, 60, 70; Native American, 74, 108. See also ecosystem management; ecosystem restoration; forest management restoration. See ecosystem restoration; watershed restoration Revett Silver Company, 213–14 Rhamnus californica (California coffeeberry), 99 Rhamnus purshiana (cascara), 114 rhododendron (Rhododendron), 99 Rhyacotriton variegatus (southern torrent salamander), 65 Ribes (gooseberry or currant), 98, 114 Ridgeville, 129

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riparian vegetation, riparian reserves, 5, 64, 79, 138, 158, 217–18 rivers. See fish and fisheries; watershed restoration; specific rivers and streams roads and transportation, 145–46, 148, 150, 152, 153, 159; logging roads, 226, 229, 242, 243 Roberts, E. V., 149–50 Rock Creek Mine proposal, 213–14 Rodoni, Roger, 151 Rodriguez, Richard, 246, 252 Rohde, Jerry, 6 Roosevelt, Franklin, 168 root rots, 97 rots, 97 rough-skinned newt, 64 Round Valley Indian Reservation, 121, 178 rubber boa, 63 Rubus parviflorus (thimbleberry), 114 Rubus spectabilis (salmonberry), 99 Ruggles, Charles, 142 Ruggles, John, 142 Rundell, Lieutenant, 120 Rush Creek, 240 Rush Creek Lakes trail, 102 Russian Peak Wilderness, 157 Russian River, 105 Russian Wilderness, 31, 32 rust. See white pine blister rust Sacramento River: fish kills, 144; North Coast river diversions into, 17, 70, 168, 169, 175, 178–79, 233. See also California Water Plan; Shasta Dam; Shasta Lake Sacramento River system, mining debris in, 128–29 Saint Germain sects, 181–82 salal, 55, 114 salamanders, 64–66, 182; black salamander, 65; clouded salamander, 65, 182; Cope’s giant salamander, 66; Del Norte salamander, 65; giant salamander stories, 183–84; northwestern salamander, 64; Pacific giant salamander, 66; Scott Bar salamander, 65, 182; Siskiyou Mountain salamander, 65; southern torrent salamander, 65; The Turquoise Dragon, 65, 182–83 Salmo trutta (brown trout), 66 salmon: Chinook salmon, 5, 67, 68, 211, 241; coho salmon, 67, 68, 69, 70, 211; Klamath die-off, 179, 241. See also salmonids salmonberry, 99

Index salmonids, 66–70, 111, 112; dam impacts, 7, 70, 96, 179, 233–34, 242; declines, 5, 67; mining impacts, 211 Salmon River, 132, 136, 139, 166–67 Salmon River drainage, fires in, 74, 75 Salmon River Restoration Council, 205, 241 Salvelinus fontinalis (eastern brook trout), 67 Sammet, Edna, 54 San Andreas Fault, 105 A Sand County Almanac (Leopold), 199 sandstone, 14, 18 San Francisco Bay, 129, 137 San Joaquin Valley water diversions, 167, 168. See also Central Valley Project Santa Fe Pacific Timber Company, 155 Santa Fe Railroad, 155 Sasquatch, 190 Save-the-Redwoods League, 54 Sawtooth Ridge, 44 Sawyer, John, 24, 32, 33 Sawyer decision, 124, 129, 137 scarlet monkeyflower, 34, 35, 36 Sceloporus occidentalis (western fence lizard), 71 Schemske, Doug, 36 schist, 14, 17, 18 Schrag, Peter, 246, 252 Scolytus ventralis (fir engraver), 96–97 Scott Bar salamander, 65, 182 Scott River, 90–91, 133, 134–35, 137–38 Scott Valley, 9, 138, 140, 146–47 sedge, 170 sediment management: Grass Valley Creek restoration, 241–45; Trinity River Restoration Program, 238 sediment movement/deposition, 88, 90, 91, 94; Redwood Creek sediment slug, 162–63, 203; Trinity River, 234, 235, 236, 238, 240, 242. See also erosion sequoia, giant (Sequoiadendron giganteum), 39–40 Sequoia sempervirens. See redwood serotiny, 77 serpentine, serpentine soils, 14, 15, 17, 21, 37 serpentinite plant communities, 15, 17, 21, 37–38 service-berry, 114 shade-tolerant tree species, 22, 24 Sharp, Robert F., 170 Shasta, Mount, 18, 26; Eastwood’s climb, 42; legends/spiritual sects, 181–82; Merriam’s survey and life zones, 20–21, 42

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Index Shasta Bally, 17, 241 Shasta Dam, 167–68, 251–52 Shasta Lake, 251; copper mining, 141, 144 Shasta red fir, 21, 22, 29, 44, 52, 84 Shasta red fir forest, fire in, 84 Shasta snow-wreath, 32 Shastina, 18, 26 sheep, 146, 148. See also ranching shooter dams, 134 shortnose sucker, 240 shrubs: fire and, 82, 84; sudden oak death infection, 99. See also individual genera and species Sierra laurel, 146 Sierra Nevada, 17, 25, 76; gold and gold mining, 117, 127, 128–29, 133, 137; grazing, 85, 87 Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI), 155, 157, 205, 226, 227 Silent Spring (Carson), 141 Siligo, Louis, 146 Siligo Meadows, 146 Silver, Shirley, 106 silver salmon. See coho salmon Simpson Timber Company, 155 Siskiyou Mountain salamander, 65 Siskiyou Wilderness, 157 Siskon Mine, 211–13 Sitka spruce, 24–25, 78 Sitta canadensis (red-breasted nuthatch), 97 Skinner, Carl, 80–81, 84, 85 smelt, 33 Smith, Dottie, 210 Smith, Jedediah, 116 Smith River, 174; wild and scenic status, 178 snakes, 61–63; Arizona coral snake, 62; California mountain kingsnake, 62; western aquatic garter snake, 62–63; western rattlesnake, 61–62 snow avalanches, 103–4 snowberry, creeping, 34 snowbrush (tobacco brush), 34, 43 snow load: fire and, 83; wind and, 101 snowmelt, flooding and, 87, 95 soap plant, 114 social sustainability, 200, 204, 205, 225–26 SOD (sudden oak death), 99–100 Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 154–55 southern torrent salamander, 65 South Fork Mountain, 17, 178 South Fork Salmon River, 94, 170, 171

291 South Fork Trinity River, 63, 64, 116, 121, 175, 238 speciation: plants, 34–38; salamanders, 65 species-centered management, 201, 202 species distribution: zonal classification systems, 19–22. See also forest structure; vegetation types/patterns species diversity. See biodiversity; plant diversity SPI (Sierra Pacific Industries), 155, 157, 205, 226, 227 spotted bat, 59 spotted owl, 57–58, 158, 202, 203, 216, 219–20 spring beauty, 114 spruces, 30; bigcone spruce, 32; Brewer or weeping spruce, 31, 44, 52; Engelmann spruce, 31; Sitka spruce, 24–25, 78 squirrels, 100; Douglas squirrel, 49; northern flying squirrel, 57 stamp mills, 131, 140, 159 steelhead, 7, 67, 111, 112, 211, 245. See also salmonids Steinmann Trinity, 15 Steller’s jay, 71 Stepping Westward (Tisdale), 183 Steward’s Fork, 3. See Stuart Fork stewardship, 3–4, 8, 231, 246, 249–50. See also environmental ethics; sustainability Stewart, John, 93, 94–95 Stewart’s Fork, 3. See Stuart Fork Stoddard, John, 146 Stoddard Lake, Stoddard Meadows, 146 Stone Act, 153 Stonehouse, 51–52 Stonewall Pass, 146 storms. See floods; rainfall; weather stream pirating, natural, 170, 171. See also water diversions streams. See fish and fisheries; watershed restoration; specific rivers and streams Streptanthus (jewel flower), 37–38 Strix caurina occidentalis (northern spotted owl), 57–58, 158, 202, 203, 216, 219–20. See also Northwest Forest Plan Strix varia (barred owl), 219–20 Stuart, John, 33 Stuart Fork, 3, 13, 64, 66, 159; floods, 89, 93; gold mining/water diversions, 129, 130, 172 Stuart’s Fork trailhead, 48 subalpine fir, 28, 31

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subalpine forest, 25, 84–85 succession (forests), 22–24, 71 suction dredging, 135, 136, 138–39 sudden oak death (SOD), 99–100 sugar pine, 22, 73, 80, 82, 98, 114 Sunset Peak, 45 Superfund regulation/sites, 213; Iron Mountain Mine, 142, 144, 210–11; Siskon Mine, 211–13 Survey and Manage protocols, 218–19 sustainability, 8, 198–205; defining ecosystem health, 198–200; encouraging signs, 246; social/economic, 200, 204, 205, 225–26; timber harvest sustainability, 227 sustained yield plans (SYPs), 227 Sutter, John, 116, 147 Swift Creek, 13, 95 sword fern, 55 Symphoricarpos mollis (creeping snowberry), 34 SYPs (sustained yield plans), 227 tailed frog, 64 Tamiasciurus douglasii (Douglas squirrel), 49 tanoak, 7, 25, 26, 32, 78, 80; fire and, 77, 82; Native American uses, 112, 114; sudden oak death, 99–100 Taricha granulosa (rough-skinned newt), 64 Taxodium (bald cypress), 26 tax policy, 231 Taxus brevifolia (Pacific yew), 114 Taylor, Alan, 80–81 Taylor, Dean, 32 temperatures, 13. See also climate change terranes, 14–18 TFCC (Trinity Farm and Cattle Company), 146 Thaleichthys pacificus (candlefish), 33 Thamnophis couchi (western aquatic garter snake), 62–63 thimbleberry, 114 Thompson Peak, 9, 44, 45 Thornburgh, Dale, 24 THPs (timber-harvest plans), 162, 226, 227, 229 threatened/endangered species, 70, 201, 216, 218–19; coho salmon, 67, 68, 69, 70, 211; mammals, 60; northern spotted owl, 57–58, 158, 202, 203, 216 (see also Northwest Forest Plan); shortnose and Lost River suckers, 240 Thuja plicata (western red cedar), 104 Tiffany and Company, 214

Index Tilia (basswood), 26 Timber and Stone Act, 153 timber company land purchases, 121, 153 timber-harvest plans (THPs), 162, 226, 227, 229 Timberland Production Zones, 231 timberlands. See forest management; logging timothy, 87 Tisdale, Sallie, 183 Tlo-Hom-Tah’-Hoi, 122–23 tobacco brush (snowbrush), 34, 43 tobacco cultivation, Native American, 113, 115, 145 Tolowa people, 116 tonalite, 44, 51, 52 topography, 9–10; fire and, 74, 80–81; zonal classifications and, 20 toxic mining waste, 141, 144, 211–13 Toxicodendron diversilobum (poison oak), 32, 99, 114 toyon, 99 tractor yarding, 161, 229 Transition zone, 21, 22 transportation, 145–46, 148, 150, 152, 153, 159 Traveling the Trinity Highway (Bannion and Rohde), 6 tree of heaven, 39 tree-ring dating, 90, 102–3, 104 trees: alien species, 38–40; drought effects, 102–3, 251; fire adaptations, 55, 72–73, 77–78; flood adaptations, 73; meadow encroachment, 85, 87; relict species, 31–32; species migrations, 26–27. See also forest entries; individual genera and species Trees and Shrubs of California (Stuart and Sawyer), 33 Trillium ovatum (Pacific trillium), 24, 54, 114 Trinity Alps, 17, 44, 66–67 Trinity Alps Primitive Area, 156, 157 Trinity Alps Recreation Area, 156 Trinity Alps Resort, 1–2, 89, 93, 164 Trinity Alps Wilderness, 157 Trinity Center, 164 Trinity Dam, 138, 139, 164, 165, 242, 252; channel morphology impacts, 234, 235, 236; construction, 39; fisheries impacts, 63, 64, 67, 70, 233–34, 235; summer releases, 64, 88 Trinity Dredging Company, 138 Trinity Farm and Cattle Company (TFCC), 146

Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

Index

Copyright © 2007. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Trinity Lake, 9, 141, 164, 175, 251 Trinity Lakes viticultural area, 152 Trinity Land and Cattle Company, 149 Trinity River, 10, 125, 178; dam impacts, 63, 64, 179, 233–34, 235, 236; dam proposals, 174, 233–34 (see also California Water Plan); diversion into the Sacramento, 178–79, 233; fisheries, 7, 67, 69–70, 179, 233–34; flooding, 88, 90, 91–94, 165–66, 242; gold mining in, 128, 133, 134, 135, 139, 165; Grass Valley Creek sediments in, 242; historic flows, 201, 234, 251; landslide-caused dams, 165–66; mercury in, 141. See also Trinity River Restoration Program Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP), 70, 179, 203, 234–39, 240, 246 Trinity River Task Force, 242–43 trout, 66–67; brown trout, 66; eastern brook trout, 67; rainbow trout, 66, 67 TRRP. See Trinity River Restoration Program Trust for Public Land, 243 Tsnungwe people, 108, 121 Tsuga heterophylla (western hemlock), 54–55, 78, 79, 90 Tsuga mertensiana (mountain hemlock), 29, 44, 52, 84 tsunamis, 87–88, 104, 105, 166 tupelo, 26 The Turquoise Dragon (Wallace), 65, 182–83 turtle, western pond, 63 Twain, Mark, 11 Twin Lakes. See Canyon Creek Lakes twoneedle pinyon, 20, 251 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 176 U.S. policy/legislation: forest restoration funding, 225–26, 231, 242; land grants, 153–54; mining law, 139, 144, 206–8; Native American policy/relations, 117, 119, 120, 121; public lands management legislation, 155–56, 157–58, 221, 224; Wild and Scenic Rivers legislation, 178; wilderness legislation, 47, 157. See also specific legislation by name ultramafic soils, 21 Umbellularia californica (California laurel, Oregon myrtle), 34, 78, 80, 99, 114 Umpqua National Forest, 221 understory species: communities, 24–25; potential vegetation, 22–24, 71 Upper Sonoran zone, 21, 22

293 Ursus americanus (black bear), 45, 50–51, 60, 112 Ursus arctos (grizzly bear), 56, 60, 112 Utah juniper, 20 Vaccinium ovatum (California huckleberry), 55, 99 Van Duzen River, 174, 175 Van Matre, Mart, 146 Van Matre Creek, Van Matre Meadows, 146 Van Valer, Nola, 181–82 vegetation types/patterns, 19; community classifications, 24; dominant vegetation, 22–24; serpentine areas, 37; zonal classifications, 19–22. See also forest structure velvet top fungus (Phellinus pini), 97 Veratrum californicum (corn silk), 170 Vicia americana (American vetch), 24 vine bark, 50, 53 vineyards, 151–52 violence: among early ranchers, 148–49; Bryan murder case, 191–97; marijuana-related, 151; white-Indian violence, 118–20 virtual nature, 249 Vitis californica (California wild grape), 114 volcanoes, 18 Wailaki people, 119, 121 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 42 Wallace, David Rains, 65, 182–83 Wallace, Ray L., 186, 189 walnut, 26 Ward, Whit, 146 Ward Lake, 146 Warne, William, 178 Warren, Earl, 173 water diversions, 167; California Water Plan, 70, 169–70, 173–78; Central Valley Project, 167–68, 236; Klamath diversion proposals, 168–69; by miners, 127, 128, 129, 130, 137, 172; natural stream pirating, 170, 171; upper Trinity River, 178–79, 233 water rights, 127 Watershed Research and Training Center, 205, 225 watershed restoration, 179, 201, 233–45; fish/wildlife benefits, 236; flow restoration, 236–38, 251; Grass Valley Creek, 241–45; Klamath River, 233, 240–41; sediment management, 238; Trinity River, 70, 179, 203, 233–39, 240, 246; uplands/tributaries, 241

Steward's Fork : A Sustainable Future for the Klamath Mountains, University of California Press, 2007.

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294 water supply, climate change and, 251–52. See also water diversions water table, 85 Watt, James, 157 Wayburn, Laurie, 230 weather: drought, 102–3, 251; fire weather, 74–76; floods and, 87; wind, 83, 100–102. See also climate; climate change; floods; precipitation Weaver Bally Mountain, 188 Weaverville, 74, 124, 126–27, 131, 149 Weaverville formation, 25 Weaverville-Redding stage robbery, 142 weeds. See alien species weeping (Brewer) spruce, 31, 44, 52 western aquatic garter snake, 62–63 western fence lizard, 71 western hemlock, 54–55, 78, 79, 90 western hound’s tongue, 194 western juniper, 28 Western Jurassic Belt, 16, 17 western Labrador tea, 52, 114 Western Paleozoic and Triassic Belt, 16, 17, 124–25 western pine beetle, 96 western pond turtle, 63 western rattlesnake, 61–62 western red cedar, 104 western white pine, 22, 29, 44, 84, 98 Westfall, Norman, 182 Westlands Water District, 234 Weston, Bill, 46, 85 West Weaver Creek, 172 Where Bigfoot Walks (Pyle), 188 Whilkut people, 108, 115, 121 Whiskey Creek distillery, 147 White, George, 148 White, Peter, 72 White, Richard, 119, 247 white alder, 26, 113 whitebark pine, 21, 29, 33, 98 white fir, 28–29, 97, 102, 114; distribution, 22, 23, 24, 29, 44, 84; fire and, 82, 83 white heather, 45, 52 white oak (Oregon white oak), 28, 82, 99, 114 white oaks, 32, 99 white pine blister rust, 98–99 white pines, 98. See also individual species white-veined wintergreen, 114 wild and scenic status, 178 wilderness, views of, 247 Wilderness Act, 47, 157 wilderness area mining claims, 207

Index wilderness designations, national forest lands, 156–57 wilderness trailheads, crime at, 48 wildfire. See fire entries wild-ginger, 114 wildlife, 56–70; amphibians, 63–66; birds, 56–58, 97, 100; mammals, 58–61; mistletoe and, 98; snakes, 61–63; SOD and, 99–100. See also fish and fisheries; threatened/endangered species; individual genera and species wildlife management, 60, 70 wild oat, 38 wild onion, 114 Wildwood, 191, 194, 195, 196 Wilkinson, Charles, 208 Willow Creek, 188 willows, 73 Wilson, Richard, 178 wind: wind damage, 100–102; wind snap, 83, 100; windthrow, 83, 97, 100–102 wine, wine grapes, 147, 151–52 Wintu people, 108, 110, 118–19, 121 Wirzen, G. A., 62 witches’-brooms, 98 Wiyot people, 108, 119 wolf, gray, 60 Wolford, John, II, 138 Wolford, Margaret, 138 Wolford Ranch, 138 wolverine, 60 wood rats, 202; dusky-footed wood rat, 57, 219 World War II, 132, 134, 195–97 Xerophyllum tenax (bear-grass), 113, 114 Yana people, 121 yellow jacket, 2, 36 yellow star-thistle, 38 Yokuts people, 187 Yolla Bolly—Middle Eel Wilderness, 157 Yosemite National Park, 156 Yuba Dredging Company, 137 Yuki people, 107, 119, 121 Yurok Myths (Kroeber), 104 Yurok people, 108, 111, 113, 115, 116, 121; legends, 104, 109, 110, 187 Z’berg-Nejedly Forest Practices Act. See Forest Practices Act (California) Zebo, Dave, 188 Zoë (journal), 42 zonal classification systems, 19–22, 42

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