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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the EcoNews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And we are traveling to the Elk River today, and joining me in the muddy waters of the Elk River are Katy Gurin and Bill Matsubu of Caltrout. Hey, friends.

WILLIAM MATSUBU:

Hi, how's it going?

WHEELER:

Good, Bill, congrats on joining Caltrout. I know that we know each other from your previous work at the Blue Lake Rancheria and your time on the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, and you are now in the Caltrout family. So tell us about yourself for folks who haven't met you before and what you're doing at Caltrout now.

MATSUBU:

Yeah, well, my name is Bill Matsubu. I just started yesterday as the North Coast Director for Cal Trout. I'm really excited to step into this role and continue working on restoration and resilience across the region. My background is in fisheries. I actually went to graduate school at the same place that Tom Wheeler did, UW, go Huskies. Background is fisheries, estuarine ecology, and I've been really fortunate to work a lot in tribal resource preservation, cultural preservation of cultural resources the last several years.

So this work, especially in places like the Elk River, is something I care deeply about. I also wanna say how grateful I am for my time with Blue Lake Rancheria. It was truly a privilege to work for and alongside such a strong team. There are so many smart, passionate, and motivated people doing meaningful work there, and I learned a lot from that experience, and hopefully we will continue to work with them in the future. Looking forward to building on those relationships, expanding those relationships in places like the Elk.

The Elk is also special. My parents live on Elk River Road, and I have other family members that live on Elk River Road. They aren't as impacted by flooding, but the Elk is a very special place to my family, too. I wanna thank you for that opportunity to introduce myself.

WHEELER:

And I mean, the great thing about Caltrout and Blue Lake Rancheria, to kind of get to your point about working together in the past, is Blue Lake Rancheria has been such a great leader in fisheries restoration work, as has Caltrout, so I'm sure that you're going to continue to get to work together. Katy Gurin, you also have a special relationship with the Elk River, if I'm not mistaken. What's your history with this river?

KATY GURIN:

I lived very close to the Elk River until I was nine years old, and I spent a lot of time playing in the river. I just thought it was the most beautiful place in the world, and I still kind of do.

WHEELER:

Yeah, I still kind of do too. I mean, let's go back in time perhaps. Let's think about the Elk River throughout the course of history and let's talk about it maybe prior to European colonization what the Elk River once was. Katy, do you want to describe the Elk River? And also geographically set the stage for us. Where are we in the world in case you're not familiar with the Elk River? So set the stage and tell us about the historic Elk River.

GURIN:

Yeah, so the Elk River is the largest tributary to Humboldt Bay. Its mouth is just south of Eureka, and it's within the ancestral territory of Weyat people. So moving upstream from the mouth, there once was an extensive dune area. And then there was a tidal marsh zone with a wide riparian area, a really broad network of tidal channels, so much more extensive than there are now, a patchwork of marshes, so various springs and seeps with freshwater marshes and then brackish marshes, so a pretty wide variety, and also a wide variety of plants in those marshes. You have brushy areas and open prairie grasslands that were probably kept open by cultural fire and management. There would be like herds of elk in these grasslands.

And then moving further upstream, you have this lush, beautiful old-growth redwood forest. And so just to further answer your question, within that tidal marsh zone, you have these processes that were really important to all the critters that live there and to the geomorphology of the area. So you have tides coming in in the tidal marsh, bringing in sediment, and with each tidal cycle, you would have a little bit of deposition of sediment on the land, so the land is kind of being built up. And then the tides are also delivering nutrients and invertebrates, decomposing algae, et cetera, from the bay. And so you can kind of think of this tidal channel network coming into the land from the bay as arteries or veins, and then the marsh is kind of like the kidney of the river.

So you have this like regular influx of water, sediment, and nutrients. And within that tidal channel network and off-channel areas, you have slow water habitat, which is really important for a lot of fish. A lot of fish can't really survive in very swift water. And then you also have this extensive marsh complex that may have been like a catcher's mitt so that when you have spawning in the upper reaches of this stream estuary ecotone area for longfin smelt, they would like sort of drift down with the floods and get caught in the marshes and like be able to sort of hang out there and grow. And so you would also have a range of salinities within this estuary area and a lot of nutrients, a lot of slow water.

And so for anadromous fish like salmon and trout, essentially you have this like comfy living room with a big comfy couch where it's like you can relax. And there's this refrigerator that just like magically refills with food with every tidal cycle. And you can just kind of like hang out there and like wait for your body to change from freshwater to saltwater. And so it's a really great place.

WHEELER:

I feel like estuaries never get enough love, right? So let's give them all the love that they deserve because they're super critical and important.

GURIN:

Totally. Totally. And so, so continuing to move up the valley, you have, you know, again, like right now there's, you know, mostly grasses in, in this zone that was, was more complex. So that's why I'm kind of talking up like the complexity of it. But you'd have like riparian scrub, Martian swamp, elk, and, and then moving further up with, you know, the old growth redwoods, you have, you have those redwoods like really holding the sediment. We have this very unstable geology in the elk watershed and the redwoods were able to kind of keep that sediment from like running down into the lower reaches of the watershed. And they're also producing logs that would fall into the river. And those have really important habitat functions for lots of species, in particular coho salmon. So coho salmon really, really need to hang out by big pieces of wood.

WHEELER:

So it was once a verdant place where the indigenous people, the Wiyot, were able to harvest a bountiful crop of salmon, of elk, and that was in this natural state, or natural is probably not the right word because there was indigenous land management practices going on there, but in the state of stewardship, it was abundant and it was productive and it was ecologically healthy. So I think that everyone knows where the story goes next, which is European colonization of the North Coast. So the Elk River was hit by colonization. Can you tell the next stage in the story?

GURIN:

Right, so the watersheds became impacted in the mid-1800s. So in that time, there was the forced removal of the valley's original land managers and stewards, the Wiyot people, the logging became really prevalent in the mid-1800s. And then you also have diking and draining of the estuary in the late 1800s. So much like other places in the Humboldt Bay area. So diking and draining in the estuary had a huge impact on fish species. And just in Humboldt Bay in total, lost about 90% of tidal marsh. So this really, really important habitat is mostly gone. And then also fast forwarding a little bit, like sea level rise has and will continue to have an impact on the estuary as well.

So, but yeah, in the estuary, you have diking and draining, which is just a, it's a simplification of this really complex system. You lose connectivity between the water and land and the patchwork of plant species turns into a monoculture. So it's like, kind of like you took the veins and arteries and kidneys out of the land. And so just focusing on the estuary again, we are seeing some fields starting to revert to salt marsh with sea level rise and with some failing infrastructure, but they're still not well connected to the channel.

So fish and other aquatic species can't really access these areas that they used to be able to access. And marshes and pools form seasonally, which is great for some species, but they're also, they're sort of stagnant. They heat up, they lose their dissolved oxygen because they're not receiving regular tidal inundation. And they're also subsiding. So that means when marshes, and when the dikes start to overtop due to sea level rise, which will happen all around Humboldt Bay, the ground below behind those dikes is lower than it would normally be. So it's not like, oh, the water is gonna return and like the marsh will return and everything will be great because the ground is so much lower than it was.

And so what could happen if you don't restore these areas is that they could convert to mud flat. So they would not be salt marsh, they would be mud flat. And mud flats are great. But as I mentioned before, salt marshes are really rare and they're important habitats. So we wanna see them persist as long as possible. So yeah, a little bit of a digression, but yeah, so with that simplification, you also have a simplification of plant communities. So you have like this loss of a lot of the sensitive species like Humboldt Bay Owls' Clover, Angelica, Western Sandsbury, you see a decline in fish populations. And then with logging, you have really just this glut of sediment coming in.

So you used to have like these big trees like holding all the sediment in the hills. And so that just ran down. And we have records from the 50s to the 2010s showing four to six feet of aggradation in the channel. So the channel just became four to six feet higher during this period of intensive industrial logging. And so that's a five to 50% change in the channel bed of elevation. It's a really substantial difference. And this led to increased flooding of homes and roads. And so that started back in the 1850s, 1860s, but there have been some accelerated periods. So with Maxxam, for example, and this not only produced changes, glut of sediment, a lot more sedimentation coming down from the upper watershed. It also changes the water quality and impacts the aquatic community quite a bit.

So you have impacts to like the bugs that are living in the channel, things like freshwater mussels, dissolved oxygen. For the people that live in the valley, they're also experiencing a loss of drinking water supply because so during the Maxxam period, drinking water became so muddy that people couldn't use it. And you have other uses of water really not being usable anymore.

WHEELER:

So not only for, like, drinking water. It's no longer fishable, swimmable. This is one of the big things that we talk about with water quality. Well, we want water bodies to be fishable and swimmable. We have a friend who lives up in Elk River who grew up in the watershed and who was there as a kid prior to this wave of logging-induced sediment pollution. And she talks about, as a kid, the river had a gravel bottom and it was pleasant to step in and swim. And now it's gross and mucky. You step into the river channel and your foot sinks into all the accumulated sediment that's not being flushed out, that is accumulating and making flooding conditions worse.

Bill, I saw that you came off mute. I wanted to check in with you to see if you had anything to add.

MATSUBU:

Yeah, Katy's been doing a fantastic job. I was just going to say some of the work that Katy and Darren's been working on and will be starting soon is going to have a lot of different benefits. And that creation of salt marshes, it reduces flooding severity. It actually provides space for the sediment to go from that legacy logging that has impacted the watershed so poorly. It creates fantastic fish habitat. It's like a fish growing factory. Some of the most productive environments are created through that.

But also it helps the entire world with carbon sequestration and carbon storage. Salt marshes and coastal wetlands can like sequester and store more carbon than like redwood forest. So the benefits of doing this work is like very place-based, very locally and globally benefit. And it benefits fish, which I'm a fish person. So I like to benefit fish. Well, yeah, it's fantastic. I'm stoked to be joining early. I don't know the technical information as well as Katy, but I was just excited and wanted to say my little spiel about.

WHEELER:

Yeah. You are listening to the Econews report. We are traveling to the Elk River today and joining me in the muddy waters of the Elk River are Katy Gurin and Bill Matsubu of Caltrout.

So, so we have, we have a history of European colonization or Euro-American colonization that has radically transformed the Elk River. So we have the diking and draining of the lower Elk to create things like pasture for cows, whether for beef or for, for dairy and then further up river, we have the transformation from these once ancient Redwood forests, whose lateral root structures were holding the hill slope together and when they were logged, the support that those roots provided fell apart and things like landslides became more prevalent.

We also have a history just logging in, you know, 1950s to the 2000s almost. We had really poorly constructed and maintained roads by the timber industry that were just routinely bleeding sediment into watercourses, changes to the forest practice rules, better management practices by timber companies have significantly cut down on the amount of sediment coming from these routine sediment sources. But the hill slope is still crisscrossed with old logging roads as well. And so we have from all of this sediment pollution, we have a filling in of the river channel, which has resulted in more routine flooding of the Elk River.

Katy, can you talk about the flooding in the Elk River for folks who are not familiar with it, what it means for Elk River residents, you know, these people who have their houses along the Elk River, who have had the houses along their Elk River for multiple generations, what it means for them and for community safety?

GURIN:

Yeah, so in its most severe form, this can be flooding of homes that has been exacerbated by aggradation. Folks in the upper watershed as well who are not directly impacted by flooding of homes also experience being cut off from emergency services during floods. So they can't really leave the watershed at certain times, you know, for often extended periods of time. In the lower watersheds, flooding is more something that impacts agricultural operations. So it's something that reduces the productivity of fields and the period of time that fields are usable. So there are different impacts depending on where you are.

WHEELER:

And so this history of mismanagement or poor land management by Euro-American settlers has then prompted the California state government to take a hard look at the management of the Elk River. So we have the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, which Bill once sat on, has issued waste discharge requirements. The permitting vehicle for sediment pollution in the watershed has issued a number of these permits to upland landowners and has taken a real critical view of land management practices here. Katy, can you talk about the response by the state to try to reduce sediment pollution? Right.

GURIN:

So the Elk River is 303D listed. So the Elk is listed as sediment impaired. And so that means that it's under a TMDL program. And so there's a number of best management practices that the landowners in the upper watershed, the industrial timber operators are required to implement as part of that program. There's also a monitoring component and our program is sort of loosely part of that effort. So we're aiming to restore fish habitat, which is one of the beneficial uses listed as impaired under the TMDL.

WHEELER:

So it's a kind of complimentary effect. So on one hand, you're trying to get pollution stopped by implementing best management practices, by doing things like rocking roads, having correct out-sloping of roads, by limiting the amount of total harvest in the watershed, so as to reduce land sliding or sheet sediment runoff. And then on one hand, you do that. And then on the other hand, the state is engaging with folks like Caltrout to do restoration projects. So let's end this conversation by talking about restoration. Let's start at the mouth of the river, the estuary, and start to move up. I know that some things are in progress or completed and some things are TBD. So, and I think it kind of works in that order too.

So let's start at the mouth and work up. What is Caltrout and other partners working on in the Elk River?

GURIN:

Right, so we're working to restore that extensive tidal channel network or part of it that I spoke of earlier. So that involves removing dikes, filling ditches, and then reoccupying those historical channels. So we're putting the veins and arteries back into the land. Moving up the watershed, it also involves restoring the stream estuary ecotones. So we wanna have off-channel habitat reconnect to springs and seeps. So that means connecting to some of these marshy areas at the valley walls and connecting them to the river the way they probably used to be. It involves daylighting a creek that now runs in a culvert and putting it back in to somewhat of its original alignment. So instead of going into the Elk River, it would go into Swain slough.

And then all along the main channel, we will install woody debris structures. So I was talking earlier about how much Coho needs large pieces of wood to hang out by. So we put that wood back in the channel that was previously removed. There's some grading of the banks that also kind of creates these areas that fish can hang out in. One of the main things that we can do for flooding in the Elk River is to create more diversity in the riparian corridor and remove some of the monotypic clonal willow stands that now grow into the channel and choke the channel. This is really good in combination with those other things like woody debris structures and bank grading. It's really good for habitat and it also improves the ability of the channel to convey flood flows. Another major thing that we can do for flooding in the lower watershed is create high flow pathways. And actually throughout the watershed, you can do this.

But in the lower watershed, those high flow pathways handle some of that flood flow in the winter. And then so the fields dry faster, but you've also created these channels that fish can use to make it to the main channel. Right now there's this network of ditches and at high flows, when flows recede, fish will go out onto the fields and they can get stranded in this like ditch network that's all disconnected. So we wanna be able to move those flood flows in a more natural way, which is like down valley instead of like draining right across the valley as it currently does. Yeah.

WHEELER:

It sounds interesting in multiple ways. So one thing that always strikes me about restoration projects is that the tools that cause the destruction of the watershed are also then often the tools that we use to fix the watershed, right? So if we're talking about manipulation of the landscape, we're talking about things like bulldozers and chainsaws and whatever else. I imagine that you're using the same sort of heavy machinery at times to do some of the work. Can you talk about how the work is accomplished? Like physically, how are you able to go in and help to create new estuary channels?

GURIN:

Yeah, so yeah, excavators, haul trucks, those big pieces of machinery. I think there's a couple cool things about this. In the future, like that machinery can be electric. Like there are date targets to convert some of that diesel powered machinery to something a little bit more sustainable. And the other cool thing about this work is that a lot of the money that we bring in through grants to do this work stays within the local economy. So we're hiring local contractors. Most of our consultants are local firms. So there's a lot of work that has to be done to restore the elk and other places, but it is actually good for the economy. And it's exciting to be part of a more regenerative economy and start building that restoration workforce.

MATSUBU:

And I do want to say that some of the tools that, some of the things that were omitted from what caused us to get in this place are being differently organized. I mean, I think one of your previous episodes, Tom, you had the Wiyot tribe and the Bureau of Land Management on talking about some like co-management of the headwaters. That was including, instead of excluding the native people, the indigenous people, they're including them, co-managing with the Wiyot tribe, for the example.

Also, this program has to be able to conserve and restore this land. We have to try to get some of this land back. So some of these, one of these parcels were given back to the Wiyot tribe. Caltrout was able to get secure funding to acquire it and then give it back to the Wiyot tribe. So yeah, some of the tools will be used that caused the destruction, but we're a different framing of it. I also want to pitch on May 9th, a Saturday, there's a not using tractors or anything, but removing of some invasive species happening in Elk River courts with the Watershed Stewards Program. Feel free to email me or somebody else on my team that can provide the information, but there'll be, I think there'll be some refreshments and maybe some food and get some, bring gloves and pants and we'll be ripping out invasive species.

WHEELER:

Bill, give me the information for that and I will put it in the show notes that you can find on the Lost Coast Outpost or in the kind of notes section if you're listening to this as a podcast. Bill, I thank you for bringing in that the Wiyot tribe is playing an important role in the restoration of these lands too and that the idea of incorporating traditional ecological knowledge or incorporating co-management by the tribe in these areas is part of this larger approach to doing watershed restoration.

And something else that struck me besides just we're using the tools of our own destruction for our own salvation here is that we are thinking about things as a whole again, right? This restoration program is thinking about the river as a whole and the connections to seeps and springs and the estuary and lowlands and uplands and thinking of it as one connected piece but then almost in this is where it will get a little bit spiritual, maybe a little bit woo, but now we're also thinking about this as a whole in terms of the justice of managing the Elk River and the restoration and the renewal of the Elk River and incorporating traditional ecological knowledge, incorporating the Wiyot tribe, indigenous land management practices, hopefully back into this like river system.

So I love this idea of we got to this point because we stopped thinking about things as a complex whole but started to think about things of well I own this marshy land so therefore I'm going to dike it and fill it and I'm going to graze cattle over it and whatever. I don't care about my adjacent neighbors or whoever else, this is my land and now we can again think about things as a whole. So Katy, in this idea of thinking about things as a whole, we've talked about where the Elk River once was prior to Euro-American colonization, we talked about the effects of Euro-American colonization on the Elk River and the degradation of the system.

Let's transport ourselves 100 years into the future. Let's conceive of what the Elk River can be again when we start to have better management. Just tell me what the Elk River will be and it can be things as specific as well-connected estuary system but it also can be things like wholeness, it's functioning, it has salmon, it has people. What do you think of when you think of the Elk River in 100 years?

GURIN:

Well, I do hesitate to impose my own personal vision here. I mean, that can be pretty broad, but the program that we're working under is a program that was developed within this TMDL framework. So we have specific goals and those include the recovery of beneficial uses, which is kind of like a technical term, but essentially that's drinking water. Water is good enough to drink. Water is good enough to support a healthy aquatic ecosystem. The sort of structural elements of the river and the processes are functioning well. You can swim in it, you can drink it, those types of things.

So I think really keeping focused on those goals is really important. And then within that, there's also, there was the specific elk recovery program that Caltrout has been involved in with all of our partners. I mean, that's a partnership with agencies, with the Wiyot tribe, but and also with the people living in the Elk River Valley. And so those goals, again, are really focused on this recovery of beneficial uses, things like land back. So those are specific to that program. But yeah, I think being able to be part of a program that returned land to the Wiyot tribe and be able to have the Wiyot tribe be able to perform ceremonies and have land within the watershed is really important.

And as well as the recovery of those beneficial uses and just the recovery of some of these processes that can help the tidal marsh keep pace with sea level rise, that can help recover listed species like coho, all of that is really important. And then, yeah, I think from there, once we start to recover those things, the conversation can continue about what that means in terms of changing values with respect to land and all that. I would love to have that discussion, but I don't wanna impose my own views.

WHEELER:

All right, that's very fair. Well, unfortunately we are out of time. Katy and Bill from Caltrout, thank you so much for joining the Econews Report. All right, thank you listeners and join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.