Elk Creek

Hey All,

You may remember that Deep Green Resistance’s next big project is to protect Elk Creek, the creek that runs near my home, from it’s mouth at the ocean up to its headwaters inside Redwood National Park. It’s a doable but daunting project, in that Elk Creek runs maybe 6 or 7 miles total, and the total run of all of it tributaries is maybe 30 linear miles. It’s a coho bearing and lamprey bearing stream, both of whom are critically endangered. It also bears steelhead and chinook, as well as a lot of other species.

Yesterday we made our first tiny steps toward it. I met today with people from the Smith River Alliance, a great organization doing really great work on protecting and restoring the Smith River, which is, I think I’ve mentioned, the longest free-running river in the US. It’s also, until it gets to the coastal plain, one of, if not the, cleanest. There it runs into problems I’ve written about in my books, mainly caused by agricultural run-off. They work with a lot of landowners on the lower Smith to pollute less.

One of their projects, also, is to protect Elk Creek. That is important for its own sake, and also in case something catastrophic ever happens to the Smith to the north or the Klamath to the south, Elk Creek populations could be crucial to helping those other populations to reinhabit.

Anyway, we met for about five hours, and walked a lot of the land here, and walked to two parts of Elk Creek, and two of its tributaries.

I’ve said this before, that I know this stretch of Elk Creek almost undoubtedly better than any other human, maybe by an order of magnitude, but that doesn’t mean as much as it could, in that no humans go to parts of Elk Creek. Which of course is good. A lot of it the undergrowth is so thick that you go maybe a half mile an hour, and it’s remarkably easy to get lost. There are some places on Elk Creek I’ve walked to maybe 100 times in the past 25 years—heading south on the path from my mom’s house to my cabin, and then taking off east toward the creek, going through maybe 200 yards of thick forest—and almost every time when I get back to the path, I’m nowhere near where I got started. This time we didn’t make it to one of my favorite places to get to the creek, because I got lost, but on the way back we, surprisingly ended up right where we started.

Partly it was to look over this land, and partly it was to get to know each other. I love hanging out with decent people who are biocentric.

Thank you,

Derrick