Trinity River

About

Trinity Alps Gold Rush — Major Pierson B. Reading, July 1848. The Trinity rises in the Trinity Alps Wilderness, a 39,000-acre high country protected in 1964, and flows southwest through Trinity and Humboldt counties before meeting the Klamath on Hoopa Valley and Yurok homelands. The USGS streamgage at 11530000 records an average of 4,849 cubic feet per second, and paddlers find the river's optimal window between 600 and 3,500 cfs. Rated Class II–IV overall, the corridor ranges from the mellow blue-ribbon trout water below Trinity Dam to the expert, remote Burnt Ranch Gorge — a 14-mile Class IV–V run — with the Cedar Flat stretch serving as the most popular whitewater section.

The Hupa people have lived in the lower Trinity River valley since time immemorial. Their 1864 treaty with the United States established the Hoopa Valley Reservation, one of the largest in California, and reserved their fishing rights to Chinook salmon and steelhead. Those salmon runs are central to Hupa cultural identity and food sovereignty, which is what made the twentieth-century engineering of the river so consequential.

In 1963 the Bureau of Reclamation completed Trinity Dam, the centerpiece of the Central Valley Project's Trinity River Diversion. Together with the 1964 Lewiston Dam, the system diverted between 75 and 90 percent of the Trinity's natural flow east to the Sacramento Valley for irrigation and power, with as much as 90 percent of the water entering Trinity Lake sent to the Sacramento–San Joaquin Valley. The 1964 Whiskeytown Dam extended the project. The ecological cost was severe: Chinook salmon runs that once exceeded 100,000 fish annually collapsed to fewer than 3,000 by the 1990s.

Congress designated the Trinity a National Wild & Scenic River in 1981 and began a multi-decade effort to restore minimum flows. By 2000, federally mandated minimum flows had been increased, and that same year the Trinity River Restoration Program was established to undo the diversion's ecological damage downstream of Lewiston Dam. Salmon populations have partially recovered, though full restoration remains an ongoing effort.

The most recent chapter came in 2023, when the Hoopa Valley Tribe, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reached an agreement establishing new flow restoration targets — the most significant step toward full salmon recovery since the 1990s restoration work. Today the Trinity flows as both a working reservoir and a river in recovery, its gold-rush origins now a footnote to the harder question of how much water a diverted river needs to stay alive. Guided trips through the gorge and Trinity Alps expeditions remain a mainstay of the corridor, run by outfitters like Trinity River Rafting and Big Foot Rafting.