North Coast Coho Project
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| Photo Credits (L-R): Christopher Blencowe and Lisa Bolton. |
Our North Coast Coho Project (NCCP) is a partnership of unprecedented scale and scope. Trout Unlimited, timber, gravel, and wine industry leaders, other private landowners, and state and federal agencies are working cooperatively to restore coho salmon runs in northern California. The NCCP assesses watershed conditions, develops and implements projects to reduce sediment input to streams, installs large woody debris and rocks to diversify instream habitat, and improves fish passage. TU and our partners also conduct fish population monitoring to quantify steelhead, chinook and coho populations. Since 1998, the Project has raised and invested about $9 million for restoration.
- TU and our partners have assessed and/or restored thousands of acres in the Mad, Hollow Tree and Standley creeks (South Fork Eel), Cottaneva, Ten Mile, Pudding, Noyo, Big, Albion, Navarro, Elk, Garcia, Gualala, and Russian River watersheds.
- The NCCP started with Mendocino Redwood Company, LLC (MRC) in the Garcia River watershed. TU worked on the South Fork of the Garcia with MRC, Pacific Watershed Associates (PWA), government agencies and others to develop and fund the project for the benefit of coho. The partners prevented 70% of the predicted road-related future sediment load from reaching the river, which is an amount equivalent to 3,500 dump trucks worth of dirt. TU continues to partner with MRC on restoration projects within seven key coho watersheds along the Mendocino Coast.
- Hawthorne Timber Company, LLC and Usal Redwood Forest Company, LLC, both managed by Campbell Timberland Management, LLC, are engaging in similar efforts on several streams in California. These projects include road upgrades and decommissioned roads, sediment reduction and instream habitat enhancement on South Fork Noyo River, Pudding Creek, Ten Mile River and Standley Creek, some of the most important coho streams.
- More recently, TU expanded its restoration footprint in northern California. In 2008, TU entered into a cooperative restoration partnership with Humboldt Redwood Company. In 2007, TU’s timber partner, Mendocino Redwood Company, successfully acquired 240,000 of coho-important timberlands in Humboldt County, and created a new company called Humboldt Redwood Company through the bankruptcy reorganization of Palco. TU and HRC, along with PWA, are pursuing projects in Larabee Creek, Elk Creek and Freshwater Creek.
- MRC, HRC and Campbell are the dominant land managers in over a dozen key coho watersheds or sub-watersheds. Together with TU, the three companies and other private landowners are changing the face of several hundred thousand acres of forest land in Northern California. The NCCP’s cooperative approach serves as a model for restoration work on California’s North Coast and elsewhere.
- To date, TU and its partners have improved or eliminated over 450 miles of logging roads, removed four major fish migration barriers, reconnected 17.5 miles of stream habitat, and installed over 250 instream structures to improve coho salmon and steelhead habitat.
Golden Trout Project
The Golden Trout Project is a collaborative effort between Trout Unlimited, California Trout, the Federation of Flyfishers, the California Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Forest Service to protect and restore the California Golden Trout, our state fish. The Project partners coordinate opportunities for volunteers to participate in restoration and monitoring in and around the Golden Trout Wilderness in Inyo and Sequoia National Forests and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks in the southern Sierra. This is a nationally recognized restoration project to protect the state fish on public lands.
For more information:
Lisa Bolton
North Coast Coho Project Coordinator
P.O. Box 1966
Fort Bragg, CA 95437
(707) 962-0115
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