Eel River

About

Eel River, California — Round Valley and Wailaki Homeland. For thousands of years before Wood arrived, the Eel River watershed sustained salmon-dependent cultures. The Wailaki, Cahto, Yuki, and Pomo peoples relied on the river, and the Pacific lamprey Wood named it for was a primary food of the Yuki, Wailaki, and Pomo. That world was shattered in the 1850s. The Round Valley Indian Wars, fought over the Eel River basin between 1853 and 1856, and the Round Valley massacres of the 1850s and 1860s devastated Native populations throughout the watershed. In 1856 the Round Valley Indian Reservation was established, in operation from 1856 to 1891 and known today as the Covelo Indian Community.

Timber followed. From the 1830s through the 1920s, the Eel River watershed was logged to feed the regional timber industry of the 1850s–1910s and the railroad expansion of the 1860s–1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators until the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910; state forestry conservation began in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale logging. The river drew scientific attention too: USGS surveys in the 1870s–1890s and gauging stations established between the 1880s and 1910s produced the first comprehensive hydrological studies of the basin.

The mid-twentieth century brought the fight that defined the modern Eel. In the 1960s, conservationists battled the proposed Dos Rios Dam, which would have flooded 110,000 acres. In 1964, fifty miles of the Middle Fork Eel were designated part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System—one of the original rivers in the System. That same year, the 1964 flood, the largest in the river's recorded history, destroyed the town of Weott.

On January 19, 1981, the federal government designated the Eel a Wild and Scenic River, shielding many of its reaches from dam construction; California also recognizes it as a state Wild and Scenic River. Yet one obstruction remains at the headwaters. The Potter Valley Project—Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam—still blocks migratory fish from roughly ten percent of the watershed. In 2024, the proposed decommissioning of the project advanced as one of the largest dam removal efforts in California after the Klamath, promising to restore the Eel's natural flow for the first time in over a century.

Today the Eel remains a working fishery and one of the most important salmon and steelhead streams in the lower 48. Coho, chinook, and steelhead persist; in normal years the chinook run begins in August and crests in late October, with populations recovering after the 1964 flood over the 1999–2024 period. Paddlers know the river by its sections: the remote Class II–III Pillsbury Run on the upper river, the scenic Class I–II canyon from Dos Rios to Alderpoint, and the Class I–III South Fork Eel through redwood country, the most popular reach. The seventy-mile Middle Fork drains 753 square miles and joins the mainstem at Dos Rios, a favored put-in for rafters and kayakers who commit four days to the famous Eel River canyon. Optimal flows run 1,000 to 5,000 cfs.