On Northern California’s Klamath River, habitat restoration is finally underway within the Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary. With the completion of a bridge over Blue Creek, Western Rivers Conservancy and the Yurok Tribe are building on a decade-plus partnership that delivered one of California’s most important conservation successes in recent history: the 47,000-acre Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and Yurok Tribal Community Forest.
When WRC and the Yurok created the salmon sanctuary in 2018, we conserved every acre of unprotected land along Blue Creek, the most important source of cold water for the lower Klamath River and the lifeline for some of the largest runs of salmon and steelhead remaining on the West Coast.
Since that historic success, we’ve made major strides with the Yurok to ensure that what we’ve established together lasts forever. Those steps include everything from developing a long-term management plan for the property, to building a coalition of private and public partners that will support the restoration work the property requires. With the lands under joint Yurok-WRC management and with restoration funding secured, one obstacle remained before WRC and the Yurok Tribe could begin work in earnest: rebuilding the primary bridge over Blue Creek. Without this critical link in the main travel artery across the project area, restoration efforts were severely hampered.
This spring and summer, WRC and the Yurok successfully planned, permitted and rebuilt an interim bridge over Blue Creek, in the heart of the sanctuary. It was a crucial step in the effort to revitalize 47,000 acres of temperate rainforest for the sake of the Klamath’s salmon and steelhead, and the diverse wildlife the river sustains. In the fullness of time, the Yurok will build a permanent bridge that will withstand extreme flows and the harshest conditions, but this temporary bridge was critical to continuing restoration efforts.
Now, the Yurok Tribe can forge ahead with the hard and important work of improving the health of over 73 square miles of second-growth and third-growth forest, and moving the sanctuary toward a complex, old growth forest landscape. These are the efforts that will ultimately keep Blue Creek alive and healthy forever—the crystal-clear, ice-blue, life-giving stream that has sustained the Klamath’s salmon for millennia.
