Dennis Lee Lyon, age 76, of Fortuna, passed away on February 15, 2025, at his home, surrounded by his wife, children and grandchildren. Dennis was born on February 13, 1949, in Arcata to Betty Lucille Vogel and George Echols Lyon. Dennis graduated from Arcata High School and spent almost 30 years working at Louisiana Pacific at both the Samoa and Big Lagoon sawmills. He is survived by his wife of 49 years, Donna Lyon; his son Jamie Lyon (Rachel); his daughter Stacey Costa (Roland); grandchildren Matthew Ware, Ashley Lyon and Katelyn Costa; as well as his great-grandchildren, Ian, Colton, Oliver and Grace.

Dennis was proceeded in death by his parents Betty and George; his brothers Daniel Lyon, Marvin Lyon, Eddie Lyon and Chris Colebank. Eddie, Chris and Dennis all passed away within one year of each other.

Dennis was a loving and honorable man, whose world revolved around his wife and family. He enjoyed helping people and was an extremely hard worker. He loved to play practical jokes and laugh, he enjoyed wood-working, gardening, fishing, going to the lake, taking drives into the mountains, spending time outdoors and learning about history. Dennis was a wonderful storyteller and has written many children’s stories and books for his family.

Dennis and Donna had a wonderful marriage. They enjoyed dancing and gardening together, and when their kids were young they hosted many school dances for them and their classmates, cleaning up the sawmill cookhouse, hanging lights and playing music, just like the movie “Footloose.”

When Dennis was 46 years old he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The tumor could not be completely removed, and he continued to have surgeries and procedures as a result of the tumor for the rest of his life. Dennis then faced many health challenges. Most of his health issues and the treatments that Dennis faced in his life were life-threatening, but you never would have known it from his cheerful and positive disposition. If you didn’t know he was sick, and didn’t see the scars, you probably wouldn’t have known there was anything wrong with him. Whenever he was recovering from a surgery, he would look for his wife Donna, who was always right there. The first thing to return was always his ability to say, “I love you,” followed closely by his manners, saying “please” and “thank you” to his family, the nurses and doctors. He was known for allowing medical students to practice procedures on him and always exceeding everyone’s expectations for how quickly he recovered. His family would often tease a new nurse the first time they would take him for a walk after surgery, expecting he would move slowly, they would say, “Get ready, he doesn’t walk, he runs to recover.” His wife Donna, was his hero, always a champion for his medical issues and always right beside him. Watching them love and care for one another was a beautiful honor. Dennis fought his last battle in the form of a brain cancer and a stroke. Complications and setbacks arose which he could not overcome this time. He died in his home, surrounded by loved ones, at the age of 76, which was a miracle in and of itself, and he knew it. He never took a single day for granted, always saying what needed to be said, he showed his love openly. He faced his passing with acceptance and love, which is all any of us could ever hope for.

The family would like to thank all of the doctors, nurses and medical professionals that cared for him over the years, many of them quite literally performing miracles to save him. This includes a very special thanks to his neurosurgeon Dr. Mitchel Berger and his team at UCSF. Many of the people who cared for Dennis became like family and checked in on him regularly. If it wasn’t for them, we would have lost him many years ago, and for that his family is forever grateful.

A gathering of friends and family is being planned for July 12 at Sue-Meg State Park in Patrick’s Point, among the trees that he loved, to honor his memory. If you would like to honor Dennis’s memory, please do a random act of kindness. We would love to hear how you all chose to honor him.

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

Dana K. Bott, age 75, of Bayside, and a Humboldt County native, passed away peacefully on March 30, 2025, surrounded by loved ones.

Dana was a devoted daughter, wife, sister, aunt, mother, and grandmother. She is survived by her husband, William Bott, sister, Myrta Johnson, niece, Tara Powers, son, Jesse Arias, daughter-in-law, Stefanie Arias, daughter, Julia Nottingham, and grandchildren, Anniea and Joe Nottingham.

Dana had a true passion for life. You could always find her enjoying the outdoors, rain or shine, tending to plants, and appreciating what nature had to offer. She also enjoyed having family poker nights at home, which often went on until the early hours of the morning. She held the record for William’s Glasspar sport boat by catching a 33-pound salmon just 1 mile out of Humboldt Bay at the whistler.

She loved all critters and adored her livestock and many other wild animals surrounding her home, including her bear, Harry. She appreciated the arts, enjoyed painting, and was published twice for her poetry. She enjoyed live shows and exciting restaurants with her husband in Las Vegas and Reno year-round. She had a close relationship with the Lord and led those around her with optimism and an unmatched work ethic.

A memorial service will be held in her honor at Sanders Funeral Home on Monday, April 7, 2025.

Viewing at 10 a.m., service to follow.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to the Hospice of Humboldt or the American Cancer Society.

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

It’s safe to say that the Anti-Donald Trump/Elon Musk protest that stretched for blocks around the county courthouse on Saturday was among the largest political demonstrations Humboldt has ever seen. In recent memory, only the Headwaters Rallies of the ‘90s, the Iraq War protests of the ‘00s and the Women’s March that marked the dawn of the first Trump presidency rival the day’s turnout locally. 

The day certainly felt historic. The first weekend of truly glorious Humboldt weather of 2025 enhanced the hopeful spirit of Saturday’s proceedings. Signs were waved. Horns were honked. Connections were made. ‘Twas a vibe.

Officially, the event was one of hundreds of “Hands Øff!” protests taking place across the country in opposition of the Trump administration’s attempts to quickly and aggressively reshape American life. But in practice, those who gathered in Eureka each brought their own motivations. 

See for yourself! The Outpost attended the festivities and took too many photos of the colorful signs waved by our neighbors. We invite you to peruse them below.

[Click photos to enlarge]

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Aerial photos, below, courtesy Donovan Stevahn

Do you like to go to the beach? Do you appreciate having a beach to go to? Are you happier when that beach has clean ocean water, thriving ocean life and isn’t covered by rocks, seawalls or houses intruding on the public sand?

If the answer to any/all of those questions is, “Yes!,” that means you’re a fan of the California Coastal Act, a law passed in 1976 following a 1972 public uprising to defend the coast from development threats. The Coastal Act, as it’s commonly known, protects two key rights — public beach access and coastal preservation – but now those rights are under attack as the Trump administration and California’s own Governor Gavin Newsom seek to weaken or eliminate the agency charged with upholding them, the California Coastal Commission.

Guest Jennifer Savage of Surfrider Foundation joins the show to discuss the movement to protect the Coastal Commission from attacks from the left and right.

Want to help? Surfrider Foundation has the resources for you here.

Just a quick heads-up: From the chatter we gather on the Internet and elsewhere, we’re getting the impression that today’s demonstration against the Trump Administration in downtown Eureka is going to be pretty large. So maybe you either want to avoid the area or get there yourself.

We’ll have a report later. More information at the link below:

Hands Off! Humboldt Fights Back: The LoCO Lowdown

Humboldt County’s homepage.

LOST COAST OUTPOST

I have been asked to tell you what I remember about Loleta, or “Swauger” as it was originally called, but was renamed Loleta about the turn of the century, upon the suggestion of Mrs. Rufus (Martha) Herrick.

I came to this country from Denmark sixty-eight years ago, when I was seventeen. A group of us, numbering eighteen in all, left Denmark on May 8th, and arrived at Port Kenyon by boat, the Argo, on May 30, 1894.

Many of the persons in our group were relations of Peter Frey, so most of them stayed at his home. Mr. Frey had the Crown Creamery and a ranch rented from Mr. Nix Nisson. The rest of us were lodged in other Danish homes. “Happy” John Christensen, who is Orlan Christensen’s father, and I spent our first night in Humboldt County with the parents of Jimmy Jensen of Loleta, Mr. and Mrs. Svend Jensen. At that time, they lived across the Eel River from Singley’s Crossing, close to what is now Fernbridge.

The next day, they took me over to Swauger, where I started my first job in America working for Mr. Nis Petersen on his 370-acre ranch. This is the same ranch now owned by Orlan Christensen in Loleta and whose home is built exactly across the road from where the old Sunset Creamery was once located. The roads that now cross at that corner are called the Copenhagen Road and the Hawk Hill Road. At that time, it was called the Table Bluff road to Eureka, the only one at that time.

This ranch of Mr. Nis Petersen’s was rented from a Mr. Bagley of Springville, now Fortuna. The barn on this ranch, built in 1893, cost $1,000, and was built by a Swede named Holmberg. Lumber at that time was priced at $2.00 per thousand board feet. There was room for 100 cows and 10 horses in the barn. At that time, there were no dikes on the marsh lands west of Swauger, so when there was an unusually high tide, the salt water would come as far up the gulch as behind the hill, on which stood the one-room schoolhouse. This was on the northwest side of Loleta, where the West Wind Trailer Court is now.

As Mr. Petersen’s ranch had 200 acres of marsh land, he had the tide waters to fight. So, in many of his fields on the marsh, he had plowed his land up into ridges twelve feet wide the length of the field. In this way, the land became high enough to be above the ordinary tides, so it would give the marsh grass a chance to grow and provide feed for his cows and at the same time give the cattle a place to keep dry.

At the end of one of these fields was a big slough where, on a windy day, the water would be blown into waves two feet high. It looked so rough it was almost enough to make me seasick to watch it.

The land on the other side of this slough belonged to Cornelius Rasmussen, who had the Quill place rented. All the land west of us belonged to Rufus Herrick. I worked for Nis Petersen for two years. But it was four years before I had a chance to see Eureka. In 1905 or 1906, Mr. Petersen bought the ranch from Bagley for $35,000 or $36,000. The ranch was diked by this time.

In the late 1890s, Mr. Rufus Herrick owned 1,800 to 2,000 acres of marsh land. He was the only man with enough foresight to see the future value of that land. Mr. Herrick’s neighbors, Patrick Quinn and Hank Knight, only wanted a small amount of that type of land. They each homesteaded only eighty acres, but Mr. Herrick homesteaded close to 2,000 acres. Now, the government would pay a certain amount per rod [16.5 feet] for land reclaimed from the marsh. So, Mr. Herrick, Mr. Quinn, and Mr. Knight hired a Norwegian named Felton Dahle to supervise the building of dikes for them. Dahle hired a crew of Scandinavians who did the job by hand with shovels, spades and wheelbarrows. These dikes were only six to twelve inches, and all tides would go over them.

But as they actually were dikes, the government paid the landowners for reclaiming the land. This made it possible for Mr. Herrick to have his dikes built higher so that only the highest tides would flood his land. Marsh grass then started growing, and soon there was feed enough so cattle could be pastured at 50¢ per head per month for all that came back alive. Sometimes remains of cattle and horses would be found in the blind sloughs that ran in every direction on the marsh. The animals had died of starvation or had drowned as the tides came in.

An Italian named Serafini rented a few acres of marshland from Mr. Herrick. Both these men kept a few milk cows, and I remember seeing them come to the road with two small cans of milk in the back of their buggy on their way to the Diamond Spring Creamery at Swauger. At times, they hauled it back home again as the creamery had rejected it as being unfit for their use. The milk was bitter because the cows had been eating a yellow weed that grew on the marsh. As a result, Mr. Herrick found it difficult to meet his expenses, so occasionally he would sell some of his land to help pay taxes and the cost of diking. I’m not absolutely certain, but I believe it was at this time that Teichgraber brothers bought sixty acres, Mr. Waldner forty acres. Mr. Petersen paid $25 per acre.

There were many Danes who wanted to rent marshland from Mr. Herrick. Mr. Andrew Petersen rented 300 acres for $3.00 per acre per year for fifteen years; Cornelius Lorense and John Christensen 160 acres for $2.00 per acre per year for 10 years; Niels Schmith and John Holst 160 acres for $2.00 per acre per year for 10 years; and Erik Ericksen 160 acres for $1.50 per acre per year for 10 years. There were so many Danes who settled in this particular area that it was soon named “Copenhagen,” and the road that served it was called “Copenhagen Road.”

All the Danes went into the dairying business, resulting in a great increase in milk deliveries to the Diamond Spring Creamery at Swauger. At the time, it was a co-operative creamery owned by several dairymen, who were: Mr. Foss; Mr. Charlie Dickson; Mr. Elliot, father of Wilsey Elliot; Mr. Perrott, grandfather of Henry Perrott; and perhaps a few others. They finally sold their shares in the creamery to the Gold Brook Creamery, which later sold to Smith & Co. They in turn sold to Libby, McNiel & Libby, who sold out to Golden State Creamery, which is now one of the last two remaining creameries in Humboldt County [as of 1964, when this was written].

As the population in Loleta got bigger, the people of the town started to complain about the smell from the hogging, which gave Mr. Foss a chance to offer his eighty acres on the marsh to his creamery for $25 per acre and in addition furnished them a strip of land twenty feet wide for road purposes and a pipeline right-of-way to pump the milk through one and one half to two miles long. Now they had to have somebody to attend to the hogs, so a man by the name of Jake Petersen offered to build them a house free of charge, but for them to furnish the material, if they would give him a job; so they did. That house is there yet and cost $100. It is 24 × 26 feet and 6 feet from the ground; having withstood many floods, storms and the big earthquake of 1906. The owners of the ranch are now Mr. and Mrs. Langhen, who bought from John Helt August 1, 1961. I sold the ranch to John Helt November 1, 1920. My first three children were born in that $100 house.

It was about 1899, when Swauger had been renamed Loleta, that three brothers came to that town. They were the Mitchell brothers. One was a schoolteacher who taught in the small school in Loleta, the second started a blacksmith shop where the Loleta Hotel now is, and the third went to Eureka to live and attend high school there.

This third brother was Clyde Mitchell, well-known by all creamerymen and dairymen. The second Mitchell brother, who was the blacksmith, later sold his location to a man named Hans Clausen, who built the hotel there. The blacksmith shop was moved down to the southwest corner of Montgomery and Market Streets where it later became the property of Chris Hansen, who operated it for many years.

Alongside Mr. Hansen’s blacksmith shop, a Mr. Sowash built a harness shop. Mr. Sowash was also a judge for several years. Halley Brothers built a store on Montgomery Street next to Sowash and rented it to a Martin Ericksen. Mr. Frank Bertsch put in 3 or 4 cabins alongside Ericksen’s store. On this same street, was Sam Merritt’s house, Holt blacksmith shop and house, and what you might call Van Duzen’s covered parking lot for horses and buggies of customers doing business in their store on the northeast corner of Montgomery and Market. On Market next to Van Duzen’s store was Mrs. Van Duzen’s home. Next, on the corner of Market and Main was Finney’s or Finney’s Saloon. If you followed Market Street up over and across the railroad track, you would find the Diamond Spring Creamery on your left. Back down on Main Street and directly across from the railroad tracks and depot, was the store of Dickson & Dickson.

The Community Church in Swauger had been started and erected under the supervision of a Rev. Jasper, who came to the town in 1895. He also started a small newspaper here, which he later moved to Fortuna and published under the name of the Humboldt Beacon. Mr. Jasper also built a church over on the Island, along by the Excelsior Creamery, which was built in the same style as the Diamond Spring Creamery, near Peter Nissen’s corner—but neither the church nor the creamery is there anymore.

There is just this one last incident in Loleta’s early history that I want to tell you about. It proved the risk of selling real estate in those days in that part of our county. Mr. Herrick had a wealthy prospective buyer coming from back east to buy his entire ranch. So, Mr. Herrick asked permission of Mr. Nis Petersen to use the part of the road (now Copenhagen Road) that ran through his ranch.

Originally, this road had been graded to become a railroad bed for some railroad company which was going to run the track around Table Bluff. But the Vance Company, which built their railroad to Eureka through Table Bluff, probably bought the other company out and the land reverted to its original owners. So, these owners fenced off the old railroad right-of-way, and it was this road Mr. Herrick wished to use when his prospective buyer arrived. He could have taken the buyer up over the Bluff and then down to his ranch but, up from the top of the hill, the ranch looked like it was half-submerged and cut up in small sections. This was the impression Mr. Herrick wanted to save the buyer from by going across the lower road.

Everything went well and Mr. Herrick was talking and stressing all the good points of the ranch to the wealthy buyer when, all of a sudden, the Easterner disappeared into a blind slough! Needless to say, that ended the sale, and the buyer took the next boat back home.

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The author, born Jorgen Matthiesen in Denmark, wrote this article in 1962. He passed away three years later at the age of eighty-eight and was buried in the Table Bluff Cemetery alongside his wife, Olga, who died in 1935 and his son, Jakob, who died in 1978.

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The story above is excerpted from the Spring 2024 issue of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society, which itself had reprinted it from a 1962 issue of the Society’s newsletter. It is reprinted here with permission. 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.

Eileen Frances Fox Parker, 76, passed away on March 30, 2025, leaving a devoted family behind.

Born on March 18, 1949, at Providence Hospital in Washington, DC. She was the first-born child of Edward and Josephine Noone Fox. She spent her early years growing up in District Heights, Maryland. She married the love of her life, James B. Parker, on February 4, 1967, at Mount Calvary Church. They lived in Stevensville, MD where they raised two children, Victoria and Buzz. In the early 1980s the family moved to Fullerton, Calif. and later to Arcata, to be near their grandchildren, Amelia and Nicholas.

She is also survived by her siblings, Barbara, Carol, Ed, Jeanne, Bill and Bert and multitudes of nieces and nephews.

Eileen’s legacy is one of love, generosity, and unwavering dedication to her family. She was an avid fan of the Humboldt Crabs Baseball team, who play at the Arcata Ball Park, and the San Francisco Giants. Her presence will be deeply missed, but her spirit will live on in the hearts of all who knew her.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Humboldt Crabs in Arcata.

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