A Game Changing Acquisition for Trinity River Restoration Efforts

This Issue:

Trinity River, CA

WRC commits to purchase a critical property on the largest tributary to the Klamath River

Racetrack Creek, MT

New effort to protect a key inholding on a headwater tributary to the Clark Fork River

Emigrant Creek, OR

WRC launches new project to bolster habitat connectivity in a global biodiversity hotspot

Yakima River, WA

In eastern Washington, WRC seizes opportunity to reconnect a stretch of the Yakima River to its historic floodplain

Okanogan River, WA

A conservation success for fish, wildlife and people in the heart of the spectacular McLoughlin Canyon

Trinity River

California

In Northern California’s remote Klamath Mountains, Western Rivers Conservancy has committed to purchasing a small but vital property on the Trinity River, downstream of Junction City. By transferring the parcel to the BLM, we will set in motion the critical next phase of a multi-decade restoration project aimed at reviving one of the great salmon streams of California.

The Trinity River drains more than 3,000 square miles of steep, rugged, densely forested mountains that are home to some of the greatest biological diversity on Earth. It is the largest tributary to the Klamath River and historically produced more salmon, steelhead and cold water than any other river in the Klamath system. For the Yurok Tribe and the Hoopa Valley Tribe, it has always been a vital source of fish and integral to life and culture.

But the Trinity was put through the wringer for over a century, first by gold mining and logging and later by two hydroelectric projects

Saving Oak Savannah in a Biological Hotspot

Southern Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is an ecological wonderland, with some of the greatest diversity of plant and animal life in the West. Located at the convergence of three distinct mountain ranges—the Klamath, Cascade and Siskiyou—it is an area of global biological importance and the country’s only national monument set aside specifically for its biodiversity. It’s an extraordinary place, with more than 200 bird species and some of the widest array of butterfly species in the country. Many of its plants and animals are found nowhere else in the world.

Within the boundaries of the monument, WRC has launched an effort to conserve a 1,425-acre property called Emigrant Creek Ranch, which includes three miles of perennial streams that all feed the Rogue River. The ranch lies at the doorstep of the Soda Mountain Wilderness, in a vital transition zone between the monument’s higher-elevation conifer forests and its lower-elevation oak savannah and grasslands. Roughly 1,200 acres of the ranch contain oak habitat, one of the monument’s most underrepresented plant communities.

Our goal is to purchase the ranch and transfer it to the BLM to preserve this critical transition zone and bolster habitat connectivity within the monument. The resilience of the area’s biodiversity depends heavily on this type of connectivity, especially across the disappearing woodland ecosystems of the Rogue Valley foothills, where Emigrant Creek Ranch lies. Conserving the ranch will also protect a mile of the Applegate Trail (part of the California National Historic Trail network), which meanders through the property. g