Don was born on Feb. 10, 1956 in Crescent City and took his Journey on April 15 in Hoopa.

Don worked many years in the woods as a logger and he also loved to go mushrooming every year with family or friends and sometimes just by himself. Don loved the mountains! Don was just Don and anyone that knew him well understood this. He was a man with few words, but when he did say something you knew.

He also had a soft spot for animals and had many dogs over the years. If friends or family didn’t have dog food Don would go buy a bag of food for them. But, Don had his favorites of his dogs, Ventura, Little Man, Sambo, Calie, Lobo, Jimmy, Buttons and both Tia’s. He would feed cats that would come up to his trailer door and dogs that got lost he would bring them home and try to find there families to return them to the owner.

Don had many friends from all walks of life and would help them in time of needs and also for his family. Don could be hard at times but he always loved his family and friends.

Don had survived by Vi Long for a little over 20 years and his uncle and aunt Darrel D. and Connie Ridenour and all his nieces nephews, and Steve Lee. He had one daughter Crystal Lynn Ridenour-Withers and one step-daughter Sunshine.

Don will preceded in death by his four brothers: Stanley D. Ridenour, Johnny A. Ridenour, Douglas L. Ridenour, Gerald E. Ridenour, and his two sister’s: Linda L. Ridenour-Noble, and Mildred K. Criteser-Dildine.

Don is also preceded in death by his parents, mother side Mabel K. Doolittle and father Stanley L. Ridenour; grandparents on mother side George W. Doolittle and Alta M. Cooke-Doolittle-Leslie. Father side Austin Ridenour and Maude A. Nunemaker-Ridenour.

He had a very large family of nieces and nephews and Don loved each and everyone of them!

Don loved Christmas and his birthday don’t let him fool you, these were his special days. He loved the food and presents. His eyes would light up and a big smile on his face unwrapping the presents.

Don liked to cook and he made a good dinner. His favorites to cook were fried pork chops and chicken tenders with gravy, mash potatoes and a vegetable.

Don’s tribal blood lines were with Smith River, Nome Lackie, Tolowa, and Pitt River. We were just starting his enrollment with the SmithRiver Tribe at the time of his passing.

We would like to say thank you to Dr. Hong at Kimaw Medical Center, for everything. Thank you Boogie, Don’s nieces for helping, and Doug and Sharon Jackson, Jeff and Jenn Charvat, Steve Lee and to all the people that have reached out to me. It is very much appreciated!!

Thank you for everything, Trudi Emery — for your help over the years as a good friend, and helping Don too.

I’m very sorry if I have left out anything or anyone here in this obit.

Don’s health had been declining for a few months. Don’s passing was do to his lung disease and a ruptured gallbladder.

Don didn’t want any kind of services, he will be cremated and taken to; French Hill Cemetery in Gasquet, Del Norte County, California and ashes scattered in the Cooke’s Family Plot. When we get ready to go scatter Don’s ashes, I will make a post on Facebook of the date and time.

Though we mourn his passing, we take comfort in the love he gave so freely and the strong, beautiful family and friends Don leaves behind. He will be deeply missed and loved forever and live in our hearts forever ♥️

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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Don Ridenour’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.

Fortuna Police Department press release:

On April 22, 2025, officers from the Fortuna Police Department, with assistance from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, responded to the 1300 block of Rohnerville Road in an effort to locate Jesse Allen Hanson (Age, 44).

Over the past week, the Fortuna Police Department has been actively investigating a series of burglaries that occurred within city limits. Through the course of these investigations, Jesse Hanson was identified as a suspect in several of the incidents. Additionally, Hanson had an outstanding felony warrant for his arrest.

Officers located Hanson in the 1300 block of Rohnerville Road and took him into custody without incident. During the arrest, officers recovered items in Hanson’s possession that had been reported stolen in connection with the recent burglaries.

Hanson was transported and booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on his outstanding warrant, as well as the following charges:

• PC 459 – Burglary
• PC 460 – Burglary of an Inhabited Dwelling
• PC 666.1 – Theft with Two Prior Convictions
• H&S 11395 – Possession with Two Prior Drug Convictions
• PC 496(a) – Possession of Stolen Property
• PC 1203.2 – Violation of Probation
• PC 484g – Fraudulent Use of a Credit Card
• VC 10852 – Tampering with a Vehicle
• PC 594(a)(1) – Vandalism
• PC 487(a) – Grand Theft

The investigation is ongoing and if anyone has any information related to the recent thefts, please contact the Fortuna Police Department (707)725-7550.

The Long, Drawn-Out Fall of the Visitors Bureau

The Humboldt County Visitors Bureau has been undergoing a strange, protracted fall over the last several years. There was a time when it was the premier – and kind of the only – local organization that promoted Humboldt County’s tourism economy. What did they do? They bought ads in Sunset magazine and such. They’d wine and dine travel writers who came to town. They were, for a while, just absolutely laser-focused on the redwoods, and their bread-and-butter number one tourism target was retirees cruisin’ ’round the country in their RVs. Maybe they’d like to take a spin down through the big trees! Local governments couldn’t throw money at the Visitors Bureau fast enough.

But then, in 2019, the city of Eureka – which was actually coughing up a pretty large percentage of the bureau’s budget – decided that it was going to cut off the organization off, arguing that it didn’t do enough for Eureka proper. Simultaneously, the bureau’s longtime director, Tony Smithers, suddenly died. And then, a couple of years ago, county government started to think that maybe it should get off the Visitors Bureau train as well. Some complained that the HCVB wasn’t keeping up with its mandated reports to the county. Others thought that the bureau was siphoning off too much money that was eventually passed on to regional tourism bureaus and chambers of commerce. Others thought the county’s economic development division could do a better job itself.

But the county put off a final decision on the matter. And then it put it off again. Until, finally: Today.

Going into the meeting, Humboldt County government contributed only about $145,000 per year to the HCVB. The money comes from the transient occupancy tax – the so-called “bed tax” paid by hotel guests (and renters of Airbnbs, and camping spaces) – and from 2022’s Measure J. These days, a number of arts agencies and town-based organizations – chambers of commerce and the like – together receive much more of those funds, in aggregate. These agencies – from Garberville, Orick, Willow Creek, Loleta, Arcata and McKinleyville — all paraded through Supervisors’ chambers this afternoon with their annual report of activities, to much enthusiasm from members of the board.

Then it came time to make a decision about the HCVB. The staff report on the item recommended yanking their funding and instead awarding it to the county’s own economic development division, to be used as the board directs and to support Project Trellis. (Read that staff report here.) It would require a 4/5 vote.

Julie Benbow, the current executive director of the Visitors Bureau, stood up during public comment and gave it the ol’ college try.

“This is one last rallying cry,” Benbow said. “Maybe you think, instead of giving the $143,000 somewhere else, that you actually reinvest it in the bureau for another six months, and that way we can maintain all the things that we do outside the community and keep Humboldt’s reputation alive as a premier destination.”

But the conversation had clearly moved beyond. Employees of the county’s economic development department ran down a list of things that the board had already requested of them – an airport marketing plan, a business retention plan – that have no current source of funding behind them.

Also: Supervisor Mike Wilson sort of verbally subtweeted the agency, with an impassioned speech about how tourism marketing should perhaps not be so determinedly square. He spoke in praise of the work of the Ink People, another recipient of county bed tax funds.

“I’ve been a proponent for a long time — in terms of investment with relationship to tourism — just being a cool place to go visit,” Wilson said. “And it’s not just about redwood trees, which are awesome, and people do do that, but it’s also about your vibe. It’s about what’s happening when people visit. It’s about the spontaneous interactions that they have through the community, and if there’s an arts event here or a cultural event there, and even if they’re kind of in weird and sort of like remote spots within the community, and people run across that, those are the stories that basically generate sort of a broader understanding.”

Supervisor Rex Bohn hinted that, all things considered, he would prefer to see the Visitors Bureau continue to get some kind of funding. He reminisced about past reports from the bureau, and recalled how good it felt to see in them that the county had been written up in the New York Times, or things like that.

“I still like the Visitors and Convention Bureau,” he said. “Nothing against [the] economic development [division], but, I mean, you know, I don’t know. I’d rather keep them funded six months.”

But Bohn seemed more or less on the fence, and Supervisor Natalie Arroyo went ahead and made a motion to go with staff recommendations – to pull funding from the HCVB and reroute it to the county’s own economic development efforts.

That’s when Supervisor Steve Madrone stepped in with the most serious challenge to the proposal. He was all about yanking funding from the bureau, but as he did earlier in the meeting – see below – Madrone sought to use the proceedings to divert funding back to his home district. He proposed using some of the HCVB money to up contributions to the Arcata and McKinleyville chambers of commerce, and to give $20,000 to the Trinidad Chamber of Commerce, which is not currently funded through the bed tax. Trinidad deals with a lot of tourists in the summer, so that would be only fair. He asked Arroyo if she would be open to that amendment.

It turned out that she was not. She said that the ad hoc subcommittee that she and Supervisor Michelle Bushnell had served on had started work on the current list of recommendations many months ago, and hinted that it was a little bit late in the game to pull new proposals out of thin air.

“If we’re going to kind of open up the whole process again to analyze the return on investment and who’s doing what where, I think it would be a whole different conversation,” she said. “But I came to this conversation today with [the idea] that this is the staff recommendation and being able to, by and large, support it. So I’d like to stick to that.”

Madrone – again, as he did earlier in the meeting (again, see below) – said he would hold firm and vote no unless Trinidad gets some scratch. He noted his special leverage in this particular matter.

“I’m sure you’ll probably be able to get another second, but we do need four-fifths,” he said. “So we’ll see where we go with this.”

But if Bohn still held any qualms about defunding the Visitors Bureau, Madrone’s intervention had erased them. The motion passed 4-1, with Madrone dissenting.

That Measure Z Windfall

If you read yesterday’s preview, you may be wondering what the board decided to do with that $400,000 quasi-windfall of Measure Z funds that showed up all of a sudden. Money from Measure Z – a sales tax generally aimed at public safety — had previously been earmarked for brush-clearing along county roads. But now we have Measure O, another sales tax aimed at transportation, and everyone agrees that the brush-clearing should more appropriately be funded by that.

The regular distributions, as graded by the county’s Measure Z advisory committee, were probably not going to be that controversial. The city of Eureka was going to get about $32,000 to buy some safety gear; Fortuna would get nearly $200,000 to fund a program to place a police officer in local schools; Rio Dell would get about $100,000 for a community services officer; and the Humboldt County Fire Chiefs Association would get nearly $1 million for fire suppression efforts across the county.

But what do we do with that extra cash that we didn’t expect to have? There were three options:

Option 1: Give it all to county agencies, with a big bunch to the Sheriff’s Office and the rest to the District Attorney, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Probation Department.

Option 2: Give most of the money to those internal county agencies, but also give a little bit more than it would otherwise give to the Humboldt County Fire Chiefs Association.

Option 3: Give all the money to Measure Z applicants that were otherwise rejected for lack of funding. These applicants included Wild Souls Ranch, a horse therapy outfit in Loleta; the Bear River Band of Rohnerville Rancheria, which runs an Office of Emergency Services; and the City of Trinidad, which wants some cash to repair its water system.

During discussion, it was clear that the board was veering toward Option 2. But Madrone said that he would withhold his aye unless Trinidad got some money for its water system. There was some pushback against this, centering around the idea was that this was stretching the notion of “public safety” pretty far, but eventually Bushnell agreed to add some money — $40,000 – for the project.

This didn’t sit will with Bohn, who waited a few moments before deciding how he would vote.

“We’re paying for infrastructure for an incorporated city,” Bohn said. “I wouldn’t care who it was, but I’m just saying we went so far off the path and again, we’re going to have to do it again.”

“Valid criticism,” Wilson remarked.

But Bohn voted in favor anyway, because, he said, of “fire and the public safety and everything else.”

As the vote was announced (5-0) Bohn’s sotto voce could be heard grumbling into a hot mic, saying “It’s more political…” before Bushnell’s bright “Thank you!” to the staff drowned him out.

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Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District press release:

Eureka will welcome the Europa 2 from Hapag Lloyd Cruises with 460 passengers and 370 crew to Humboldt Bay on Sunday, April 27th, docking at 7:00 AM. The ship will enter Humboldt Bay at 5:30 AM and will be met with a private welcome party at Schneider Dock. The ship is expected to depart at 7:30 PM.

Ship guests will have the option to experience Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, Old Town Eureka, Blue Ox Millworks, Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate Factory, an oyster tour and tasting at Humboldt Bay Provisions, and kayaking in Trinidad Harbor with Kayak Trinidad.

The cruise visit and welcome party are a collaborative effort planned by the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District, the City of Eureka, Eureka Main Street, Humboldt County Office of Economic Development, Visit Humboldt, Humboldt Bar Pilots Association, and Zerlang and Zerlang Marine Services. Special thanks to Chet Albin, Dave Schneider, and Schneider Dock.

The Europa 2 is a German ship on a West Coast tour; it departed from Los Angeles on April 13th and travelled north to Vancouver with stops in San Francisco and Astoria before heading south and stopping in Seattle on its way to Eureka. The ship will also dock in Santa Barbara and San Diego before returning to Los Angeles on May 1st.

The ship is expected to be visible around 5:30 AM on Sunday; local citizens can watch the arrival from the Del Norte Street pier, the Park and Ride at Herrick Avenue and the Samoa boat ramp at the north jetty.

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Yesterday, an employee of Pretzelmaker at the Bayshore Mall emailed the Outpost with a news tip nearly as hot and delicious as those salted knots of freshly baked dough.

“Mall Robbery Harry Ritchies,” the subject line read. The body of the email offered details: “An individual ran up to a jewelry display case, smashed it, and ran off with a tray of about 5-10 rings. Not sure how much everything was worth … .”

About $20, turns out.

According to Laura Montagna, public information officer with the Eureka Police Department, the fake-jewel thief launched his brazen caper around 12:30 Monday afternoon, and it went down exactly as our pretzel-making friend reported.

Officers responded to the scene but were unable to locate the suspect. Nor has the department released a description.

Since the jewelry was fake and there were apparently no weapons involved, this might well have been a misdemeanor, “but the glass display was broken and that is going to be a vandalism charge,” Montagna said.

Anyone with information on this underachieving jewel bandit is asked to call the Eureka Police Department at 707-441-4044.

As we mentioned earlier today, Highway 36 having a little tantrum again. An active slide has resulted in the full closure of the roadway just west of Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park and, as of this writing, there is no estimated time of reopening. 

From Caltrans:

Route 36 remains fully closed east of Swimmer’s Delight in Humboldt County due to an active slide.

Early estimates indicate traffic may not resume for days, but we’ll keep you updated when there’s more information.

To give you some idea of what we’re dealing with, Caltrans sends along the video above of road crews quickly moving their bodies away from slide activity as trees come crashing down behind them. 

Yeah, it’s gonna be a while, travelers. 

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

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Any Californian can purchase naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal medication, directly from the state at a discounted price, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced Monday.

The medication is available online for $24 for a two-pack of the nasal spray, roughly half the market price of the drug. Previously, the discount was available only to government organizations and businesses.

“Life-saving medications shouldn’t come with a life-altering price tag. CalRx is about making essential drugs like naloxone affordable and accessible for all — not the privileged few,” Newsom said in a statement. CalRx is a Newsom initiative to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.

California has spent more than $1 billion fighting the opioid epidemic, which killed more than 8,900 people last year, according to preliminary data from the state health department. That represents a 13% increase in deaths from 2023.

The Naloxone Distribution Project and Access Initiative is part of the strategy to stop overdoses, which began spiking in 2019 as fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid, infused the market. The rate of fentanyl-related overdose deaths began declining last year, according to state data.

More than 6 million naloxone kits have been distributed to local governments and organizations since 2018, according to state data. About 355,000 overdoses have been reversed.

In 2024, Newsom’s office announced a new supplier for the state initiative, Amneal Pharmaceuticals, which agreed to sell the steeply discounted drug to California. Days prior, Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a $273-million multistate settlement with the New Jersey-based company over its alleged failure to report suspicious opioid orders that contributed to the country’s epidemic.

“By getting this lower price, we are making the financial savings and able to use our dollars to buy more product, which of course is ultimately very much about saving lives,” said Elizabeth Landsberg, director of the Department of Health Care Access and Information, last year.

Naloxone is one of two current efforts by the state to make generic drugs more affordable under Newsom’s effort to lower the costs of pharmaceuticals. California has a $50-million contract to manufacture generic insulins for CalRx. That project is more than a year behind schedule.

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Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.