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ALICIA HAMANN:

Welcome to another edition of the EcoNews Report. I'm your host this week, Alicia Hamann from Friends of the Eel River. Today, we're going to talk about the Great Redwood Trail, 320-mile rail-to-trail project that's going to ultimately connect Humboldt Bay to San Francisco Bay, traversing some really wild, rugged sections of the Eel River, going alongside the Russian River, and through some more urban areas, and then in the south, going through cities. The trail also will provide access to roadless areas, as well as safe, non-motorized transportation in these urban areas. It will enhance access to the Eel River.

It's also the pathway to conducting cleanup of environmental harms caused by nearly a century of abuse by the old railroad. This cleanup is over 20 years in the making, going back to an agreement reached between various state agencies and the state-owned railroad back in 1999. That was a year after the Federal Railroad Administration ordered the line to be shut down.

Today with me, Ross Taylor, fisheries biologist and principal at Ross Taylor & Associates. Hi, Ross. Hello, happy to be here. Ross is probably the most knowledgeable person when it comes to the fish barriers that were created by the railroad through the Eel River Canyon. He's going to be able to tell us what it's really like on the river out there. Also with us today is Colin Fiske, executive director for the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities. Finally, my colleague, Scott Greacen, conservation director for Friends of the Eel River.

I'd like to start just by getting a little bit of background on the agencies that have been responsible for the mess that we're in and then for creating the opportunity to clean it up. Scott, can you tell us a little bit about the North Coast Railroad Authority and Friends of the Eel River's history with that organization?

SCOTT GREACEN:

We'll start by just skipping the first 50, 60 years of this tangled history in which the Northwest Pacific Railroad was assembled out of various small timber railroads. Ultimately, that railroad that served the Humboldt County to San Francisco proved to be the most expensive railway in the country to operate. It was on the way to being abandoned when the state swept in to acquire it and formed a joint powers authority called the North Coast Railroad Authority, which was given ownership of the line and acquired the rest of it in bits and pieces.

HAMANN:

It was in the late '80s.

GREACEN:

That's correct. But that was after another owner had gone bankrupt after acquiring it from previous big railroad. What never happened was the provision of a steady supply of funding to meet the need to maintain a railroad in the incredibly erosive, failure-prone Eel River Canyon. Even though the state owned this rail line with the stated purpose of maintaining rail operations, there was never a steady supply of money to keep the railroad open. That was a big problem because in 1998, the federal railroad authorities shut the entire line down and said, you can't operate in here until you've brought it up to basically safety standards.

Fast forward about a decade, the NCRA as a state agency, again composed of various local county governments and others, had gone to the state of California and said, we would like funding to reopen that stretch of the canyon, and we kept insisting, and to clean up the mess that the railroad has left in there. And they said, oh, yes. So the state awarded that money, but then the railroad turned around and said, we don't have to follow CEQA because we are a railroad shielded by federal railroad law from having to follow state or federal environmental law. That's what got us into a lawsuit with the NCRA. It was basically the question of whether they had to follow state environmental law in spending the money that the state had given them as state agency to do work on state property. The California Supreme Court said, yes, unanimously, you do have to follow environmental law. July 14th of 1999, the Attorney General of California, Bill Lockyer, entered into a consent decree and stipulated judgment with the NCRA on behalf of the California Department of Fish and Game, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board.

What that said is the railroad has got to stop doing these things it's been doing, and it has to clean up and agrees to clean up these major problems it has created in the course of its construction and operations. And those included rail cars in segments of the railroad in the Eel, but it also includes things we don't usually see, but are actually quite dangerous, toxic hot spots left by oiling stations and things like that.

It's worth noting that the first things the NCRA agrees are that it won't discard railroad ties. Any location where it may enter the waters of the state shall not burn railroad ties. It starts with the basic stuff. And for us at Friends of the Eel, getting this consent decree implemented was always one of the basic goals of our fight with the NCRA. It was, you've got to get this stuff cleaned up. And they said, sure, we'll clean it up, but we got to reopen the railroad and operate it so we can clean it up. We still haven't gotten that.

HAMANN:

So fast forward again back to that victory at the California Supreme Court where the state justices said, yes, the state agency operating a state-owned railroad does have to follow state environmental law. What came next? There was a transformation from NCRA to Great Redwood Trail Agency.

GREACEN:

Okay, next is Mike McGuire. Our state senator is also now the leader of the California State Senate, and he did something pretty important. He said the NCRA has failed. It had been a matter of common knowledge that the NCRA wasn't working for decades previously, but nobody in Sacramento had ever had the courage to say, we need to deal with this. McGuire proposed and then passed a bill to rail bank the NWP/NCRA rail line from San Francisco Bay north to Humboldt Bay under a provision of the Surface Transportation Board's rules that allow an unused railroad right-of-way to be used as a public trail, pending need for it as a rail line again.

And what that allows is to keep that right-of-way, that series of easements and property ownerships that tie the line together intact. And that's really important because with a thing like a railroad right-of-way, if you break that at any point in the middle, the part that's unconnected to the national line legally rolls up and goes away. Rail banking implies a need to turn the whole rail line into a trail to get that done, and most important, to maintain the entire right-of-way as a cohesive unit.

HAMANN:

And you've probably heard us talking about rail banking in the context of the threat that we faced during the rail banking process in 2021 and 2022, when there were entities that were trying to seek the opportunity to take over the right-of-way. At least one of those entities wanted to use it to ship coal from the Powder River Basin across Central California, up the Eel River Canyon and out of Humboldt Bay. Thankfully, that didn't pan out for them. So Colin, what other kinds of opportunities does this provide for safe transportation, reduction of greenhouse gases, connecting communities?

COLIN FISKE:

So here in Humboldt, folks will probably remember that for many decades, there have been efforts to build a regional trail system. We're just now finally about to get this connection between Arcata and Eureka, the Humboldt Bay Trail, and there are other legs of that going along the Eureka waterfront and up through Arcata and other portions that are planned, but it's taken a really long time to do that. Part of the reason is that previously it had to be negotiated, each segment, different landowners, and a whole process. Now, a lot of that under the Great Redwood Trail is required to be built out as a trail, and so the Humboldt Bay Trail that I mentioned, following that all the way down, all the way up through the Annie and Mary Trail to Blue Lake and a spur that goes off to Samoa and Manila, that's all part of this system that will provide these great opportunities for active transportation, both within and between communities on the north coast.

A lot of the attention about the Great Redwood Trail has gone to recreation, and rightly so, because it's a great recreational opportunity. At CRTP, we're really excited about the opportunities for transportation, for providing these safe and separated and comfortable ways for people to walk and bike and roll within their communities and between them, because we're talking about some of the bigger towns on the north coast, but also smaller towns and even smaller communities, many of which don't have great active transportation infrastructure currently, and also not a lot of ways to get in between them other than getting on the highway, which is not safe for folks. So, really providing that separated infrastructure, and also having a mandate to do it, instead of having to struggle piece by piece to put this together, is what's so exciting for us about this.

HAMANN:

The community connection is particularly important in some of the more rural areas where there's a lot of new regions that have historically been dependent on resource extraction for their economies and like boom, bust, boom, bust, boom, bust, right? But according to the Great Redwood Trail Agency and many of their municipal partners, it could provide an opportunity for a different kind of economy.

GREACEN:

As I read the Great Redwood Trail Agency Master Plan, it outlines a proposal to prioritize developing trail segments around Alderpoint, but not at this point to prioritize opening of a GRTA connection to Scotia and Rio Dell, nor to extend the GRTA segment up 36 to Carlotta. It seems to me that that set of priorities is in some tension with the transportation connectivity priorities you've elucidated.

FISKE:

Yeah, I believe they rank it into three prioritization tiers. They did consider the potential for usage, which is higher in population centers and between towns. They also considered the difficulty of doing it because even though we have the right of way now, a lot of infrastructure challenges in some of these places to completing the trail. And so I think that part of the reason that some of them got lower ranking was because of those logistical difficulties in actually building out the trail. One of our comments on the master plan was that we think that some of those segments really should get higher prioritization where it's long been planned to build trails between some of these communities and the need is really great, even though there may be some challenges, it's just so important and has such a potential to be transformative for people's transportation habits that we really think that should push it up the priority level.

HAMANN:

Scott brought up the master plan, and so I just want listeners to know that right now, the Great Redwood Trail Agency has a draft master plan out that they're seeking input on. That window is about to close on June 3rd. You'll have just a couple of days to visit greatredwoodtrailplan.org. There you can look through the master plan. If you haven't started already, care about this, please dedicate some time. The agency actually has this cool system where you can just highlight portions of their PDF document and input your comments directly on the section that you want to comment on. It's an easy way for the general public to provide comments.

Confusingly, there is another process underway seeking public input on scoping for the program EIR that the agency is undertaking. This is just the very beginning of the EIR process, but those comments are actually due just before this episode airs. But don't worry, you haven't missed your opportunity to give input on the CEQA process because the scoping, like I said, is just the very beginning. The agency will develop a draft program EIR that's going to come out, anticipated sometime at the end of this year.

GREACEN:

CEQA: California Environmental Quality Act. EIR: Environmental Impact Report

HAMANN:

Colin, did you want to say anything else about the process that the agency is undertaking or what specific segments, ways that they're working with different municipalities, for example, the city of Eureka or anything like that?

FISKE:

The master plan is a broad brush picture of the whole length of trail throughout the whole region, but each segment of trail will be developed separately and so we'll have to engage with the planning for each segment and make sure that that's done well and meets the local needs.

A couple of things that really stand out to me -- this segment going south from Eureka to College of the Redwoods, which Humboldt County has started planning, been planning for the last year or so, hopefully will get a boost from from the master plan. And then another thing that's a big concern of ours is that the City of Eureka sometimes says that it's completed its waterfront trail, but there's actually a segment in Old Town where really there is no trail and the trail moves on to the street and creates an environment that isn't super comfortable and safe for all users, and so one of our priorities is making sure that as part of this process a true separated low-stress trail environment connects the entire system including through Eureka, where it's likely to get some of the highest usage.

HAMANN:

Ross, I'd like to turn to you and hear about your experience documenting fish passage issues along the right-of-way through the Eel River Canyon. And if you could first just start with painting a picture of the canyon. It's such an incredible place. It would be great just to like orient them with what it's like out there.

ROSS TAYLOR:

Sure. So it is a fairly inaccessible area of the Eel River. To survey the culverts and inspect the stream crossings within the Eel River Canyon, we actually hired a rafting company to take us on a float to access all the stream crossings that the railroad crossed in the Eel River Canyon. We floated from Dos Rios down to Alderpoint. The overall survey, we looked at stream crossings on the railroad from Willits all the way to around Eureka.

So the Eel River Canyon was very inaccessible. It's a wild, beautiful stretch of river that is marred with a lot of railcars sitting on railroad tracks, railcars sitting in the middle of the river channel, hanging tracks on huge landslides that go from the top of hillsides thousands of feet down into the river itself. So there's a lot of impacted rails out there. In my opinion, creating a trail is going to take a lot of work.

HAMANN:

Econews Report, where we're talking about the Great Redwood Trail with fisheries biologist Ross Taylor, Colin Fiske of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities, and Scott Greeson from Friends of the Eel River.

I just want to take this moment to share a personal story that I like to tell people to help paint the picture of why all this junk in the river is not just an eyesore but is also quite a hazard. Several years ago I was on a float trip, my first ever actually from Dos Rios to Alderpoint. We unexpectedly got stuck up on a rock and it was a pretty like low flow time and seemingly safe region of the river.

The person who was piloting the raft that I was in was like, oh, well maybe you can just hop out and float downstream a little bit and that'll make it easier for me to like maneuver this without having to worry about your safety. And I was like, great, and I'm about to do that when one of our friends who was in a kayak just a little downstream of us was like, stop, don't do that because there's a ton of twisted, jagged, sharp metal just downstream of you and it is going to cut you up. So yeah, there's a lot of places where it's like, oh, this looks like a beautiful area to swim, but it's actually extremely hazardous.

TAYLOR:

Right. Our fish passage assessment was funded through California Department of Fish and Wildlife. California Trout, a nonprofit organization, wrote the proposal and hired my firm to do the fish passage analysis. We started looking at maps of creeks and tributaries that flow into the Eel River that cross the railroad, and we came up with about 70 different creeks that we needed to look at in the field. Out of those 70, we did full fish passage assessments on about 25 of those sites. Many sites we deemed were not necessary for fish passage analysis because they either had bridges on them and had a natural stream bottom underneath them and required no analyses. There were some sites that were inaccessible to us because they were dangerous to access.

A lot of the streams that had culverts on them that we would want to assess fish passage at had very steep upstream channels, too steep for salmon and steelhead use for spawning or rearing purposes. Out of those 25 sites, we did full passage analyses and then tried to prioritize the sites for treatment, specifically for salmon and steelhead, through a competitive process through Cal Fish and Wildlife. We found a handful of high-priority sites. Several of them are within the Eel River Canyon, and several of them are actually farther upstream in the south end of the town of Willits. We completed our surveys in 2011, and our final report was released in 2012. In the mid-teens, two of the sites were treated for fish passage, Woodman Creek and Bridge Creek.

HAMANN:

Reading the Great Redwood Trail Draft Master Plan, they reference your study from 2012 quite a bit. One thing that I find kind of interesting is that the prioritization process you were using was for this competitive grant process, kind of a different situation than what the Great Redwood Trail Agency is facing, having access to the properties in many cases and having really the responsibility to remediate the harms caused by the railroad. Can you speak a little bit to the difference in those different lenses of you're a non-profit and you're trying to just get the biggest bang for your buck or you're a state agency that actually has a responsibility here?

TAYLOR:

Through the restoration grant process, you have to have a project that's going to have a fairly positive big impact on salmon and steelhead. So if you're trying to replace a culvert on the railroad that has a lot of fill in the prism, which costs a lot of money to excavate out, and you have limited habitat upstream, it's not going to rank very well in a competitive process. If you read into the fine print of our report, many of those crossings with limited habitat upstream were in poor condition. Many of these crossings were built in the early 1900s, and they're still on the landscape, and they're falling apart. When there's a trail along the railroad, many of these crossings will have to be upgraded and replaced, so they're safe for conveying storm flows and sediment to the river, and they're safe for people to access. I find that is a different level of priority, and they would be very easy to put in fish passage-friendly structures that would probably be more focused on juvenile fish rearing out of the main stem of the Eel River in the lower parts of these different tributaries.

HAMANN:

Can you talk a little bit about the difference between spawning or rearing habitat?

TAYLOR:

Probably over the last 15 or 20 years, fish biologists have been putting a lot of pit tags in fish. We're able to track where these fish move and how they behave in the freshwater and estuary environment. We're finding that juvenile fish move around a lot more than we ever thought, and oftentimes they're seeking smaller tributaries and off-channel habitat in the winter for rearing. So even if a tributary has very limited habitat for an adult salmon or steelhead to lay eggs, these tributaries can be very important refugia during high water or even for cold water during the summertime when the Eel River heats up. So even these small sections of the channel can be very important for juvenile fish life history.

HAMANN:

I was speaking to a fisheries biologist recently who was talking about long-term goals for the Eel River. And if we're really trying to reach that historical abundance of say, a million fish in the river again, the amount of space that we have for rearing habitat before they go out to the ocean is not enough if we want to grow that many fish in the watershed. Do you think that it's important that they alter prioritization? In the master plan document, they do have pretty clear plans for removing culverts and ensuring that the trails are hydrologically disconnected and it does seem like they're headed in the right direction, but they use some of that old prioritization framework of if it doesn't benefit more than one species, we're not gonna go after it.

TAYLOR:

The short answer is yes. Those tributaries are important for salmon and steelhead. The process I was working through is very salmon-centric because it's dollars coming to California for salmon and steelhead restoration. There's so many more organisms that use stream corridors for passage, be it other species of fish. Different amphibians utilize stream corridors for passage as well as different mammal species. So creating passage opportunities for salmon, all the organisms in the system that use stream corridors for transportation, both upstream and downstream.

HAMANN:

Yeah, a lot of opportunities to take advantage of here. We've talked a lot about the different opportunities that this project presents. I want to acknowledge that there are some significant obstacles as well. To start off with, we all know that California has a truly awful history of abusing its indigenous inhabitants. And this was definitely the case when the railroad was built. The railroad likely cuts through ceremonial sites, former village sites, graveyards. Given its proximity to the river, there's no question that there's a number of cultural sites that exist along the right-of-way because that's where people live.

The GRTA, which is the Great Redwood Trail Agency, the difficulty that the agency faces is that they have a legal right to develop the trail along that right-of-way. For the most part, they have an easement that goes 50 to 100 feet on either side of that right-of-way. They can't deviate from that path. They can't just say, oh, hey, private property owners, we're actually going to come a quarter mile up onto your property and move this trail because there's something really special here that we want to protect and avoid interfering with. They can only deviate from the path where either they own an adjacent property or there are private property owners who are willing to negotiate new easements or other agreements with the agency.

The Wildlands Conservancy has recently purchased some really large pieces of property along the main stem between the North Fork and the Middle Fork. There, there's already discussions about where to reroute the trail when necessary to avoid sensitive cultural sites or even difficult geologically fragile regions. But in other places where there's privately owned property, there's a lot more resistance. So I just want to highlight that that is a significant issue that the agency is trying to work through. They've begun their consultation process doing government-to-government meetings. They're also engaging in a lot of community-based meetings with a wide diversity of people, but it's going to be a difficult process and a complicated solution.

TAYLOR:

A perfect example of that was the restoration work that was done at the barrier at the mouth of Woodman Creek, a very isolated area, basically over the hill from Laytonville. You have to access it through private property. And at the time that project was completed, it was basically large parcels of mostly cannabis being grown. California Trout did a great job of getting the road association within Woodman Creek to provide access to have the project completed. It was completed.

Unfortunately, since then, several properties have changed hand and access is no longer available to do any type of biological monitoring of Woodman Creek to see if the barrier removal had a positive effect as far as Chinook salmon and steelhead accessing Woodman Creek. I'm working with Pacific Watershed Associates with a willing landowner upstream on Woodman Creek, so we may have some access in the near future to replace some private culverts in the upper watershed and have some opportunities to look for fish in Woodman Creek in those upper tributaries.

GREACEN:

the story of Woodman Creek and your history with these culverts inspired. To build the railroad, they put in a lot of fill, and it's worth thinking about what that meant. We constructed a really flat line for the railroad by filling in a lot of the hollers and hills of the side of the Eel River. So what that means is where you've got these fish passage impairments, the bad culverts and so forth, you've got a lot of fill, as you noted, that's expensive to remove. But what happens if that culvert gets blocked up? What happens to that fill? And what happens to the fish in the

TAYLOR:

A lot of culverts that they block up, the whole culvert and the rail prism is going to fail, potentially introducing thousands if not tens of thousands of cubic yards of sediment into the Eel River or the lower sections of these tributaries, causing more impact to the watershed. And it's interesting that you again mentioned Woodman Creek because the barrier there was not a culvert. It was actually, they put so much fill, they rerouted Woodman Creek over a bedrock drop right adjacent to a tunnel. And the whole idea was to keep the railroad on a level plane. And so they basically put about 15 feet of fill for hundreds of yards out of this tunnel and rerouted the creek that once flowed freely to the Eel River to cascade over a bedrock drop, thus creating the fish barrier.

GREACEN:

My concern is that if we don't come up with a comprehensive plan to deal with what seemed like afterthought fish passage, we're going to actually have a lot of problems.

TAYLOR:

Yes, and part of our analysis, too, in the field was not just looking at the passability of the structures, but we also qualitatively looked at the condition of the culverts, and we also sized them for stormflow capacity, so we could identify the undersized culverts for stormflow conveyance, thus those are the sites at higher risk of failure.

HAMANN:

Another obvious obstacle that the agency needs to surmount for this project to be successful is the aging rail infrastructure. We've mentioned there's a good deal of tunnels, probably 30 or 40 tunnels. There's quite a few bridges and railroad trestles, some of which could be really, really cool aspects to this trail, but they need some assessment and a lot of funding to make sure that they're safe. For listeners out there who want to get a better picture of what the landscape of railroad debris looks like out on the river, we've got a whole section on our website about the railroad and the trail project and lots of pictures of railcars in the river. There's one place where there's something that looks like a railroad engine that's right horizontal in the river that at times creates maybe a fun, if you will, obstacle for kayakers, but obviously very dangerous.

The last obstacle that is worth noting here is the issue of paying for this grand vision. It's not exactly clear how that will happen, though the draft master plan does list a variety of potential funding sources. What's your take on the agency's approach to the way that they're really heavily relying on community partners to make this happen? Is that a good way of making it happen or potentially fraught?

GREACEN:

For me, the echoes of the NCRA's fatal flaw, that it never had funding to complete its mission, are really disturbing. I'm quite concerned that we don't have any overall plan to fund this project. There's a lot of hoopty-doo about the potential economic benefits of it, but there won't be any economic benefits if we don't spend the money to make it happen. By putting this burden on the local groups to organize and fundraise for local segments of the project, we're putting the weight on the parts of our community that can at least support it.

FISKE:

I agree with that over the long-term, it would be really great if there were dedicated funding source to build this out. In the draft master plan, given that they don't currently have such a funding source that's dedicated, they did a pretty good job of exploring a wide variety of potential options, including some pretty nontraditional sources of funding. The agency is doing a pretty good job of trying to find funding, but over the long-term, it's not clear if that will be enough, and it would be really good to have a dedicated source of funding to make sure it happens.

HAMANN:

We work pretty closely with the Great Redwood Trail Agency staff. It is a really small entity. People hear state agency and they think, Oh, there's like 50 people working on this. No, there's three, two of which are technically staff for the Coastal Conservancy. They're doing a pretty good job of trying to get this project chugging along. And it's a huge vision. I mean, it will be the longest rail trail in the country. That's a really big deal.

FISKE:

The opportunities are so cool and the fact that we have one project that can take on safe transportation, reducing greenhouse gases, cleaning up toxic waste, providing access to the river, wildlife and fish passage, all these things that we've been talking about, the upsides are so big that hopefully it will draw that funding that it needs in the future to make it happen.

HAMANN:

I will put in the show notes links to the Great Redwood Trails master plan website where you can review that master plan. It's also where you can sign up for an email list to be notified of future opportunities to comment on the draft environmental impact report. You can also follow Friends of the Eel River. We do our best to keep people informed about those opportunities. We talked a little bit about rafting the river and how spectacular it is this time of year. The season of rafting on the main stem is just about drawn to a close. It's getting pretty bony out there, but if folks have questions about recreating on the river, you're also welcome to get in touch with our office, eelriver.org. Well thanks everyone for joining me today.

TAYLOR:

All right. Thank you for having me on the show. Thanks.

HAMANN:

Hopefully I'll see you out on the trail someday. Join us next week at this same time and place for more environmental news.