On this week’s EcoNews Report, historian Jerry Rohde joins the show to discuss his new book, Northern Humboldt Indians, which you can download as an e-version here.

In his book, Jerry details the history of the seven tribes of Northern Humboldt County, with many newly colorized photographs and transcripts of interviews that help to bring to light the indigenous people of the area. The book is the companion to Jerry’s 2022 book, Southern Humboldt Indians.

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Ed. note: The following is an excerpt from Northern Humboldt Indians, the latest in local historian Jerry Rohde’s book series on the people and places of Humboldt County. It was published earlier this year by the Cal Poly Humboldt Press.

Like all of Rohde’s recent work, the book is published under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded as a PDF for free. This is amazingly generous. If you’re looking for a beautiful hardcover copy for your shelves or to give to a loved one, you can pick up a copy at various places around town, including from our friends at the Humboldt County Historical Society.

Northern Humboldt Indians tells the stories of the Hoopa, the Yurok, the Wiyot, the Whilkut, the Tsungwe and the Mawenok — the latter of whom, we’d be willing to wager, you’ve never heard of until now — and their encounters with each other, and with the wave of White settlement that overran Native Americans in the mid-19th century.

There’ll be an interview with Rohde posted on the Outpost a couple of hours from now. In the meantime, check out this excerpt, which Rohde gave us explicit permission to reprint.

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Mawenok Territory

There was a place, on the Mad River, that must have seemed like a world unto itself. To the west the Iaqua Buttes stood like a dark, unscalable wall, rising abruptly from the canyon bottom and extending so high that they blocked the late afternoon sun. On the south was another mountain barrier that also enshadowed the river, while to the north rose a rolling ridgeline punctuated by Chaparral Mountain, Bug Creek Butte, and Board Camp Mountain, all more than 5,000 feet high. Here, however, the mountains descended more gradually to the river, with grassy, south-facing prairies often warmed by the unobstructed sun. On the canyon floor, near the location that became known as Big Bend, it is easy to believe that the river ran through its gorge like a long, sonorous chord, sending its sound to anyone who paused to listen to it, and telling the listeners that here they were welcome to abide, that here, like the river canyon, the spirit ran deep.

It became the home of the Mawenoks.

Almost no one has heard of the tribe. Between 1906 and 1913 three ethnographers interviewed Mawenoks, but they either failed to confirm their tribal identity or did not broadcast their information. In 1918 Llewellyn Loud, in his monograph on the Wiyot tribe, used statements from John Stevens, whom he indicated was born “one and a half to two miles below Maple Creek.” The location was in the heart of Mawenok country, but Loud didn’t know this and he accordingly labeled Stevens a member of the neighboring tribe, the Whilkuts.

Eight years earlier, Stevens had been interviewed by another ethnographer, C. Hart Merriam, who concluded that the Mad River area previously assigned to the Whilkuts had actually been the homeland of a closely connected but separate tribe called the Mawenoks. Merriam obtained a list and descriptions of numerous Mawenok villages without realizing that his informant was himself a member of the tribe, believing, like Loud, that Stevens was a Whilkut. Merriam’s minimal account of this heretofore unknown tribe was not published until 1974 and then only as a paper from the Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley. An even earlier ethnographical inquiry, conducted by Pliny Goddard in 1906 and 1908, included a brief but detailed report about the tribe that still languishes in the deepest obscurity.

In his 1906 interview with Johnnie Maple, he obtained the tribe’s name, spelling it “Me-wi-yi-nuk,” but he apparently never used it in print. A 1908 Goddard interview with Minnie Pete, a Mawenok who was born at Big Bend in about 1850, never mentions her tribal identity, It was first seen by California Athabaskan language expert Victor Golla in 2015, some 107 years after it was recorded. After studying it, Golla concluded that it “is clear that it was recited in a variety of Hupa closely resembling Goddard’s ‘Whilkut.’”

Over time, according to Goddard’s and Merriam’s information, the Mawenoks came to occupy a long stretch of the river, from above Bug Creek on the south all the way downstream to the North Fork Mad. In about 1849 the Mawenoks and their Whilkut neighbors probably joined together in expanding their boundaries by attacking a Wiyot village in the vicinity of later-day Blue Lake. Some Wiyot men were killed, some were driven off, and some of the younger women, whether willingly or not, became wives or partners of the attackers, so that the village subsequently became a combination of Wiyots, Whilkuts, and Mawenoks, along with their mixed offspring.

Upstream from the main Mad River’s confluence with the North Fork, in the area south of Blue Lake, the Mad flows through a heavily wooded canyon that offers little access to the surrounding forest. In the mountains to the east there were two upland Mawenok villages: Ma-kawch-ting at the future site of the Angel Ranch and Yi-kil-le-yah’ng-ahl-ting, on or near Cañon Creek in the prairie area that later became the John Anderson Ranch. Below them, several Mawenok villages occupied small riverside flats at creek mouths. Upstream from Cañon Creek, according to Loud, “there were six villages or camping places, but none of them could boast of having more than two plank houses, or two or three bark houses.” Then came Tse-didis-ten, which “was situated one and a half to two miles below Maple creek.” It “had 10 or 12 houses” and was the birthplace of the Loud and Merriam informant John Stevens.

Above Tse-didis-ten the river twists in a convolution of curves and passes by three large villages located at the mouths of Maple Creek and Boulder Creek and at Blue Slide. Loud reported that

… there were five houses, mostly bark, but some of plank, at the mouth of Maple creek, while on Boulder creek, one and a half miles above Maple creek, there were a considerable number scattered about on both sides of the creek and also up the creek. Hence the Maple creek district was a comparatively populous center.

About a mile above the mouth of Boulder Creek, the Mad makes a C-shaped bend to the west, bumping into a wall of colorful clay called Blue Slide. The flat on the inside of the bend contained what was described as “one of the largest rancherias in the whole Mad river valley.” The Mawenok name for the village was probably Me-meh, but this is not certain. 

Above Blue Slide the canyon is again constricted. Some four miles upriver was a village called Sel-ku-mik-kin-ne-din. It was south of what later became the Mountain View Ranch and was situated about a mile west of the river, near the base of the Iaqua Buttes. Another four miles upriver, near the confluence with Wilson Creek, was the village of Lit-tcite-tcin-nouru-din, “sand blows place,” at the location the Whites called Big Bend. The canyon of the Mad opens here, briefly, so that for about two miles south-facing prairielands slope scenically down to the westward-bound river. About a mile farther upstream, near the mouth of Humbug Creek, was the village of Un-tcin-ta-tci-ki. It was a place where Van Duzen Pete, a member of the nearby Nongatl tribe, stayed as a boy.

The Mawenok village farthest up the Mad River was Tseng-nah-neng-ahl-teng, which Merriam reported was “on or near Bug Creek.” At this point the river turns southeast and the already steep-sided canyon narrows into another gorge. At one time there was a landslide in the vicinity of Bug Creek that in dry years formed a barrier to fish migration. The sudden arrival of this obstacle may have caused the Mawenoks to lose interest in the territory upriver from it. In any case, about three miles above Bug Creek, in the vicinity of Deer Creek, was the first village of the Nongatl tribe, which was the Mawenoks’ neighbor to the south.

When Pliny Goddard Met Johnnie Maple

In September 1906, Pliny Goddard, one of two professors in the University of California Berkeley’s Anthropology Department, found his way to a remote section of the Mad River, ten miles or so upstream from the town of Blue Lake. He arrived at the flat opposite a wall of clay called Blue Slide, and rode his white horse southward until he reached the homestead of the man he had come to see, Johnnie Maple.

Maple’s cabin and barn were nestled in a gentle curve of hillslope curve that rose eastward from the riverside towards the ranchlands of the Maple Creek area. The structures were built White man’s style, with mill-cut lumber for the sidings and redwood shingles for the roofs. Maple, who was part Mawenok and part Whilkut, lived there with his Mawenok-Wiyot wife Ida, two children, a boarder named Leon, and Johnnie’s half-sister, Betsey.

Goddard took out a brand-new “Stenographer’s Note Book,” wrote “Maple Creek” on the cover, turned the page, and went to work.

For several years during the 1900s this was how he spent his summers. When spring classes were over at the university, Goddard would gather up some supplies and head north, picking up the university’s white horse and pack mule at Laytonville, and then riding into the Humboldt County back country, searching for elderly Athabascan-speaking Indians to interview. He had received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Berkeley in 1904, the first such degree ever conferred in the United States. By then Goddard was already an instructor in the university’s anthropology department, and in 1906 he was promoted to assistant professor. He had come to California in 1897 to serve as a lay missionary on the Hoopa Valley Reservation, where he soon bonded with reservation’s Indians. In 1900 he left Hoopa to pursue his academic career at Berkeley, where during his first year Goddard wrote Life and Culture of the Hupa, which became the initial monograph in the university’s American Archaeology and Ethnology series.

Now, a few hundred feet from the Mad River, in the territory of a tribe whose name had never been recorded, Goddard was in his element. He was trained as a linguist, but his heart was not with the language, it was with the people who spoke it. He would dutifully collect a vocabulary from an aging Indian, and perhaps record a series of mythlike stories, but time and again his fingers would seek a different objective, and his pencil would stray from its required task and form words that told of the Indians’ people and places and what had happened to them.

With Johnnie Maple, it happened faster than usual. Goddard skipped the usual preliminaries and went straight to geography.

Goddard learned that Maple’s early-day home had been at Dil-tcwa-yo-o-kut, a village near the mouth of Maple Creek on a hillside above the Mad River. His half-sister, Betsey Maple, was born on Yi-nal-lin-ni-kot, Boulder Creek, a short distance upriver. Her Mawenok name was Kon-na-din-nun, which meant “eye sharp” in the tribe’s language.

Johnnie told Goddard that the “Maple Creek and Rock Ranch” area was his father’s country, and that his father’s people “didn’t go up Mad River beyond Blue Slide.” He also indicated that there was a village called Mista-dun “way down” the river, and that “the people on Mad River from Al Graham’s [Algren’s] to Mista-dun” were called the Me-wi-yi-nuk. As the crow flies, the Mawenoks’ northern boundary at Mista-dun and their southern boundary at the Al Graham Ranch were about 18 miles apart. Along the twisting course of the Mad River, where most of their villages lay, the distance may have been twice that.

When Maple provided his tribe’s name, “Me-wi-yi-nuk,” it had never before been recorded. Four years later, Merriam rendered it as “Mawenok,” a form that is easier to pronounce. The Hupa tribe, which spoke an Athabascan language similar to the Mawenoks, gave the name as Mewinakhwe. Maple’s information indicated that the Mawenoks were not a single, monolithic tribal unit. His own, unnamed group did not go upriver beyond his home area at Blue Slide, while the tribe’s southern boundary was about a dozen river miles to the southeast at Bug Creek, near the Al Graham Ranch. Downstream from Blue Slide, the territory of his father’s tribal group only extended to Maple Creek, many miles from the Mawenoks’ northern boundary near Blue Lake, which meant that at least one unnamed Mawenok tribal group occupied the intervening area. Johnnie also stated that the area across the Mad River from the flat at Blue Slide “belonged to another people not Johnnie’s folks.” Thus there were probably at least three or four Mawenok tribal groups and perhaps more. Johnnie Maple is the sole source of this information. Without his interview with Goddard we would know of no divisions, or their boundaries, within the tribe’s territory.

Goddard also learned a few details about Mawenok life. Maple said that his people “used to dance out of doors, around fire counterclock[wise]. Men and women together.” A person Goddard identifies only as “old woman,” (who was probably Johnnie’s wife Ida) then said “they used to build house of bark and sticks with hides in side. They stay when it is wet and cold [she] pointed to her house.” Johnnie indicated that “they never dug a pit for the houses but put it on top of the ground that is why can’t find the exact places.” Regarding one village area, Betsey Maple added that there was “no sweat house [at] this place.”

The rest of Goddard’s interview with the Maples mostly concerned the names and locations of Mawenok villages or other significant spots. The interview was one of the briefest Goddard recorded; it ends on page 19 of his “Stenographer’s Note Book” and three of the intervening pages are entirely or nearly blank.

John Maple died in 1953. Ida Maple died five years later at age 97. By then their son, Harvey, had returned from living on the coast in the lumber mill town of Samoa and was back on the family’s allotment. At some point his parents’ house was abandoned and Harvey dwelt in a small clapboard house that he probably built himself. In 1973 he was still living on the property at age 74. That year, a project to build a dam at nearby Butler Valley was under consideration. If built, the dam would flood a large section of the Mad River canyon, ultimately covering Harvey Maple’s allotment property. He was interviewed as part of an assessment of the dam’s potential impacts, which noted that he was “the last Whilkut [Mawenok] speaking Indian in existence.”

The dam was never constructed.

Besides being the keeper of the Mawenok language, Harvey also maintained another part of local Indian culture. He made finely crafted dip nets that were used at ocean locations such as Moonstone Beach to gather surf fish.

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You like Humboldt history? In addition to buying Jerry Rohde’s new book to read the rest of his stories about the Mawenoks and other local peoples, consider becoming a member of the Humboldt County Historical society. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.

Nancy Yvonne Detrick was born on November 19, 1951 in Garberville and died on October 10, 2025 at her home in Wool Mountain surrounded by family. Nancy heroically lost her battle to cancer after a long fight of six years.

 Nancy was born to her parents Nancy Sanderson Detrick and Harold Lee Detrick. At an early age, Nancy was nicknamed Voncie, and Voncie is the name that she would grow up with and that most people would know and love her as. Voncie and her family moved around Humboldt County all throughout her childhood, but Alderpoint was the home base for her family, and is the town where she put most of her roots. As a young child she attended Zenia, Hoopa and Casterlin Elementary schools and later moved to Eureka for high school. Her first job was cracking crab for the local fish company.

Voncie came back to Alderpoint because she wanted to move back to the countryside with her little boy, Sonny. Voncie reconnected with her old friend who then became her life long partner, Darrell Wyatt in 1972, where they spent 50 years together growing a family and raising hell in the best way possible. They welcomed their first daughter Misty into their family, and a couple years later they welcomed Echo.

As a family they lived in Alderpoint until they later built their home in Harris. In these early years while the children attended school, Voncie was a home maker and Mother, while also always working alongside Darrell. Voncie enjoyed abalone diving, eeling, commercial salmon fishing and tending to the garden, and animals they had on the farm. In the early 2000s, they built and moved into their home in Wool Mountain. Voncie and Darrell were both lucky to be able to have their final moments in this home. This home became the pinnacle for grandchildren and animals. Voncie enjoyed animals and she was known to have a lot of dogs, chickens, cows and she tamed many wild piglets over the years. She also had two cats that were very important to her. Her garden was a place of peace for her, she always grew a huge garden every year. Voncie hand watered this garden every morning, right up until her final weeks. She enjoyed eating from her garden, and also canning the vegetables and fruit for the winter months. She passed on these traditions to her family

Voncie had 10 grandchildren and 8 great-grandchildren and she was a very proud grandmother who enjoyed doing things for her grandchildren. She was the type of grandma who would have cookies made for you when you got to her house, food on her wood cook stove, and freshly mopped floors. When her grandchildren were younger, one big event every year was getting the Family picture taken at Sears, you could count on matching outfits and maybe a few tears, but that picture was a staple in their lives. The grandchildren always did it, just for their grandma to send her holiday cards out with that picture inside. Holidays were always spent at Grandma Voncie’s house. Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter, were some of the major holidays that you could count on her whole family gathering together at her house for a meal and celebration. Voncie was not only the designated turkey cooker and pie baker but also the heart of the family. 

Voncie was always ready to go on an adventure, whether that meant going and cutting firewood, swimming at the river or creek, Shelter Cove to fish, Ruth Lake to camp, or just simply going on a drive to see what was going on. She was a great passenger and always made sure there was an ice chest in the back with cold Miller and a bag of snacks.

Voncie was competitive by nature. She loved to sit down at the table and play a game of rummy, or see who’s dish was better at the bbq. Speaking of BBQs, Voncie and Darrell hosted a heck of a lot of BBQs all through their years. Friends and family gathered at their houses for various events. When you came to their house, you could count on Voncie having plenty of food cooked up and a joint, or two, or three rolled for you. Voncie was fortunate to have a lot of friends in the hills where she built her life. Friends that became family. 

Voncie was the matriarch of her family. Her children, Grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins all looked up to her in so many ways. She will be forever missed. The legacy that she left will be carried on in the hearts and minds of those that she loved. 

Voncie is predeceased by: Mother Nancy Sanderson Detrick, Father Harold Leland Detrick, Spouse Darrell Wyatt, siblings: Antone Detrick, Phyllis Wantt, Larry Coleman, Eugene Coleman. 

Voncie is survived by her three children Sonny, Misty, and Echo; ten grandchildren Breanna (Zach), Natalee, Kaitlynn, Shasta (Colt), Austin (Makayla), Brennan (Joslin), Jasmine, Kasey, Lily and Tanner; great-grandchildren Brayden, Azalea, Sage, Maverick, Scarlett, Hayes, Waylon and Addison. Siblings: Judy Scott and September Detrick. And lots of nieces, nephews and cousins.

The family would like to extend a thank you to Deena Johnson and the Heart of the Redwoods Hospice for your support and help during the final weeks of Voncie’s life. 

There will be a celebration of life on November 22, 2025 at 1 p.m. at the Alderpoint Volunteer Fire Hall. This will be a potluck event, please bring a dish and a memory of Voncie. 

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Christine Ann Patton, born on March 14, 1950, in Fresno and earned her angel wings on September 25, 2025.  She was the beloved wife of Tim Patton for 52 years. 

Chris was one of five siblings.  Daughter of the late Robert and Ora Neal.  Her early years were spent growing up in the Catholic Church and hanging out with her 2 sisters.  She enjoyed spending time at her grandparents’ cabin in North Fork and as a teen, driving her jeep around the property. 

She met the love of her life, Tim Patton, at a concert for his band in Fresno, where they both grew up.  He played guitar and sang.  They fell deeply in love and their story began.  They were married in Fresno and then moved to Humboldt County in 1973.  They started with humble beginnings in Trinidad, living near the beach with their two dogs.   

Chris attended College of the Redwoods and Humboldt State University.  She taught preschool, which became her life passion, working mostly for the Head Start program.  She had a gift for teaching young children and was young at heart herself.  She often received letters from children’s parents saying how much the children adored her.  She even started a children’s puppet show business with her friend Doloris, called “The Puppet Ladies.”

Chris and Tim purchased a home near Sequoia Park in Eureka in the late 70’s, where they would walk dogs and raise their children, Nicolette and Casey.  Chris found joy in beautifying her garden and home, as well as taking walks among the redwoods, making jewelry, crafts, dancing, listening to music, baking, decorating for the holidays, camping, reading and going to the river with her best friend Jill.  She also found great joy in traveling to her favorite place, the Cook Islands. 

Chris was a devoted mother and was involved with the kid’s school, Cheerleading, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun Club” (a club she invented for her daughter and friends).  She was so excited to have a new son-in-law, David, and her 2 grandchildren, Sebastian and Diego.  Being a grandmother brought her tremendous happiness. Each morning the boys would run into her playroom to see what activities she had prepared for them.  She was an exceptional mother and grandmother. 

She was kind, generous, supportive, caring, loving, wise, and was a bright light, who loved to laugh.  And she had a great laugh!  Chris inspired us to never give up hope and exemplified grace, positivity and gratitude at every turn.   

She will be greatly missed by all who knew and loved her.  She is survived by her husband Tim Patton, daughter Nicolette Jarquin, son Casey Patton, son-in-law David Jarquin, grandsons Sebastian and Diego Jarquin, sister Marlaine Pollock, brother’s and sister’s-in-law and her many nieces and nephews, Temple cousins and dear friends, neighbors and dog Sachi.  

We have full hearts from all the love she gave us over the years.  Chris would not want us to be sad, but to love each other today, tomorrow, and always put on a smile, some sparkly earrings and go outside and enjoy the sunshine. 

A Celebration of Life will be held on Sunday, Nov. 9 at 2 p.m. at the Wharfinger Building’s Bay Room in Eureka.   

In lieu of flowers, we ask that you consider donating blood in her honor. 

Camoapa, Nicaragua is a town of about 18,000. Its main industry is cows; it is surrounded by verdant fields and hills. Its similarities to Arcata made it a prime target to become its sister city in the ‘80s — their need for regular clean drinking water and healthcare supplies, which were affordable enough to pay for by mass fundraising, also helped. 

In the years since, the main form of cultural exchange between Camoapa and Arcata has been the annual I Street Block party, which raises money for projects in Camoapa. Camoapans sometimes visit Arcata; a mayor, high school students, and nurses have all made the trip. The relationship is at a content equilibrium. 

But there might be another sibling to add into the mix someday. Arcata’s City Council meetings have been inundated for over a year with people asking the council to consider becoming a sister city with Gaza in Palestine as a way to support those afflicted by the recently-paused war with Israel. Although the councilmembers have shown no interest in that idea, it got a few people thinking that it’d be worth it to have a framework for evaluating which cities might make another good sister city for Arcata if one’s proposed. 

Some guidelines are currently in the works. They’re being developed by Wesley Christensen, a Cal Poly Humboldt political science student and intern for the city, along with city manager Merritt Perry. They might be presented to the city council next month, but there’s no firm plan on when that might happen. 

Perry said in an interview with the Outpost that activists from the Redwood Peace and Justice Coalition had told him about Boulder, Colorado’s sister city partnership with Nablus, a city of 156,000 in Palestine. They’d asked him why Arcata hadn’t done something similar with Gaza, but what interested Perry was the robust organization created to make the relationship functional and worthwhile for both communities. 

Perry said that the framework wasn’t set in stone, but a few of the things Arcata might want to consider when evaluating if they should take one on are things like electing a board that oversees the relationship or facilitating some face-to-face meetups. It also might be best if the city is similar in size to Arcata. 

Arcata is still laying the foundations of policy for a sister city and isn’t looking for any specific counterpart abroad right now, but Perry mentioned somewhere in Oaxaca, Mexico might make a good candidate because of the many Oaxacan immigrants in Humboldt.

Perry said making sure both sides benefit from the exchange — whether it’s culturally or educationally — is also important, as is keeping Arcata from expending too much time and money into the project. Camoapa’s partnership with Arcata is built on fundraising and requires no monetary input from the city. 

“Otherwise, we could say ‘Oh, we’re a sister city with Gaza City. Cool. We’re done. Let’s all congratulate each other,’ and then there’s nothing happening,” Perry said. “…We have plenty of problems to deal with at home, and our resources are scarce, like a lot of cities. So how do we balance out our needs at home, but then still keep our perspective on the world and other communities and create those connections?”

Christensen did not respond to requests for comment. 

Press release from the Eureka Police Department:

On October 21, 2025, the Eureka Police Department’s School Resource Officer (SRO) was made aware of a potential stalking and online baiting incident involving female students at Eureka High School (EHS) through the Snapchat social media platform.

Preliminary information indicates a male subject has been attempting to befriend young female students online, with the apparent intent of meeting in person to engage in inappropriate and potentially criminal behavior.

The Eureka Police Department, in partnership with Eureka City Schools, is actively investigating this incident.

Parents and guardians are urged to remain vigilant and to monitor their children’s use of social media and online communications. Unmonitored use of these platforms can expose youth to individuals who may seek to exploit or harm them.

Anyone with information related to this investigation is encouraged to contact the Eureka Police Department’s School Resource Officer or the Criminal Investigations Unit at (707) 441-4300.

PREVIOUSLY

• Lawsuit Could Force Humboldt County to Regulate Groundwater Pumping in the Eel River Valley
• Friends of the Eel River Sues County for Failure to Protect Public Trust by Regulating Groundwater Extractions in Lower Eel
• County Staff Present Groundwater Sustainability Plan for Eel River Valley

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We somehow missed this decision when it was handed down late last month, but Humboldt County Superior Court Presiding Judge Kelly Neel ruled against local nonprofit Friends of the Eel River (FOER) in its lawsuit concerning the county’s management of groundwater extraction in the Eel River Valley.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, argued that Humboldt County was falling short of its responsibility to protect public trust resources in the Eel by failing to consider the adverse effects of groundwater pumping, particularly during the late summer and early fall.

FOER’s suit pointed to instances of extremely low flows and the resulting inhospitable environmental conditions for migrating salmon, conditions such as anemic flow, warm temperatures, algal accretion and low dissolved oxygen. Citing the public trust doctrine, a common law principle that dates to ancient Rome, the suit asked the court to require Humboldt County to create a program to regulate groundwater pumping.

But Judge Neel instead found that the county is already considering public trust resources on the Eel through both its Groundwater Sustainability Plan and its well permitting process. FOER may not like way the county is exercising its discretion, Neel’s decision says, but “Petitioners cannot seek declaratory relief to use the Court to tell Respondents how to do their job.”

The county has to consider many factors when weighing public trust resources on the Eel, factors such as navigation, commerce, fishing, the right to hunt, bathe, or swim, scientific study, open space availability, animal habitat, natural beauty, agricultural need, and human consumption. “Balancing these factors and selecting a course of action is the essence of discretion,” Neel’s ruling says.

Because the county is exercising that discretion, she found, FOER is not entitled to a writ of mandamus, a type of court order that’s typically considered a last resort when no other remedy is available.

In a prepared statement sent to the Outpost, FOER said Neel’s decision “appears to misinterpret the nature of the public trust doctrine and FOER’s argument.” 

The nonprofit’s lawsuit pointed out that the county has only analyzed the impacts of groundwater use on Chinook when flows in the Eel are above 130 cubic feet per second (cfs) and argued that the public trust doctrine requires the county to analyze such impacts throughout each season.

“The fact remains that groundwater pumping in the Lower Eel depletes surface flows by as much as 15 cubic feet per second (cfs), and that during dry summers, flows in the Lower Eel often dip as low as 50cfs,” the statement reads. “Unfortunately, irrigators in the Lower Eel will remain some of the only water users in the entire County who are not required to do their part and reduce water use during dry times.”

The statement adds, “We are disappointed by the ruling and considering our options.”

Hank Seemann, the county’s deputy director of environmental services, also didn’t learn about Neel’s decision until last week. County staff had declined to comment on the case while it was still in court, but on Thursday Seemann described the suit as “misdirected and also wasteful.” He said the case was based on “a pretty extraordinary claim,” and it diverted “enormous amounts of money and staff time” away from other important projects. 

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With help from a $2 million state grant, the county spent years developing its Eel River Valley Groundwater Sustainability Plan, as required by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014. 

“We did a lot of technical work and data collection and stakeholder engagement and computer modeling to try to understand the dynamics of how groundwater is used and how it affects different things like seawater intrusion, but also the interconnected flows and streams,” Seemann said in a phone interview yesterday.

The county conducts ongoing monitoring per the terms of that plan, an updated version of which will be coming in about a year and a half, according to Seemann.

Meanwhile, the county is also required to weigh potential impacts to public trust resources whenever it considers issuing a new permit for groundwater extraction.

The claim Seemann found extraordinary was that under the public trust doctrine, a judge needed to order the county to develop a program to regulate all existing wells, or at least wells that would were negatively impacting public trust resources on the Eel.

“The judge concluded that the county has discretion to implement the public trust doctrine, and she saw that the administrative record indicated that, yes, the county had done that … ,” Seemann said. “The judge determined that their legal basis didn’t hold water.”

He lamented that FOER chose an “adversarial approach” because the courtroom setting didn’t allow other stakeholders to weigh in and because such legal proceedings aren’t conducive to thoughtful consideration of complicated scientific information like hydrologic computer modeling results.

Seemann estimated that the suit cost the county a couple hundred thousand dollars and postponed work on projects including restoration work on Ryan Creek, a sand-bearing stream that flows through the McKay Community forest and empties into Humboldt Bay. 

“It might be a very beneficial project, and it’s ready to move the next phase, but we had to put it on hold,” Seemann said. “We just had to divert time to this case. So I think that was really unfortunate.”

FOER is disappointed, too, albeit for different reasons.

“While cannabis cultivators, domestic users, and appropriative water rights holders are subject to curtailments when flows are low (and much stronger regulations in the case of cannabis cultivators), those taking surface flows via groundwater can pump as they like regardless of the impact … ,” the group’s statement says. “The question remains why the County did not analyze impacts of groundwater extraction continuously throughout each season, as is required by the public trust doctrine.”

Seemann said the county did the county’s computer modeling was based on the best available data and scientific information and that staff “applied it the best we could” given the limitations and uncertainties of such models.

He also noted that there are “some exciting innovations going on” in irrigation management, citing Vevoda Dairy’s use of soil moisture sensors and saying such technology will help reduce groundwater extraction.

Seemann maintained that FOER’s attorney didn’t provide compelling and overwhelming evidence that existing wells are causing harm to public trust resources at such a magnitude that the county must intervene.

Judge Neel agreed. You can read her full decision below.

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DOCUMENT: Judge Neel’s Ruling and Order