Smith River Alliance | Programs | Watershed Protection

The Smith River Alliance, in cooperation with many conservation partners including Save-the-Redwoods League, Wildlife Conservation Board, Department of Fish and Game, Department of Parks and Recreation, State Coastal Conservancy, and California Trout, succeeded in adding the 25,000-acre Mill Creek property to the State Parks system in the summer of 2002. Acquisition of this property by the State of California promises to provide protection and opportunity for recovery of critically important salmon and steelhead populations -- including the federally listed coho salmon. Mill Creek now presents a premier opportunity to apply state-of-the-art watershed restoration techniques to the benefit of the region’s wildlife, including marbled murrelet, northern spotted owl, mountain lion, Pacific fisher and marten.

Located at the northern extent of the redwood range, the project area includes the Mill Creek and Rock Creek watersheds, tributaries to the wild and scenic Smith River. Almost the entire Mill Creek and Rock Creek watersheds are in protected public ownership: Mill Creek within Redwood National and State Parks and Rock Creek within the Smith River National Recreation Area. Mill Creek flows through the superlative ancient redwood groves of Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park before joining the Smith River. In addition to its redwood values, Mill Creek has been identified as a priority wild coho salmon refugium.

The Mill Creek property is a forty square mile area located approximately six miles southeast of Crescent City in Del Norte County, California. The property is characterized by steep mountainous terrain typical of the Coast range, with an elevation range of of 200-2,400 feet above sea level. The property is bordered by Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park to the north, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park to the west, Smith River National Recreation Area to the east, and private industrial timber lands to the south.


	Redwoods in Mill Creek watershed. by Stephen Corley

The property has a long history of timber harvest dating back to the 1850s. Between 1954 and 2000, the property was intensively managed for commercial timber harvest, which included constructing an extensive road network and converting most of the property from old-growth to early-successional coniferous forest. Approximately 200-acres of old-growth forest remain in five separate stands.

The property includes portions of five watersheds including: Mill Creek, Rock Creek, Wilson Creek, West Fork Hunter Creek and Terwer Creek. Stream morphologies vary from colluvial, boulder cascade, step-pool, and bedrock channels in the upper basin to forced pool-riffle and plane-bed alluvial channels in the lower basins.

Until its acquisition in 2002, Mill Creek was a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle of preserved lands. Its protection has the potential to provide complete watershed protection for Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, while forging landscape linkages between the region’s ancient coastal forests and the inland forests of the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion.

Moreover, at a time when declining salmon populations have become a crisis issue for communities throughout the western United States, the protection and restoration of Mill and Rock Creeks will provide significant additional opportunity for the Smith River to be managed as a demonstration watershed or refugia for native fish and other aquatic species.


	Coho salmon in spawning colors. by Thomas Dunklin

There is broad-based academic interest in this property as a rich living laboratory for exploring many of the issues associated with fisheries, forest health/management, and biodiversity. In addition to its overwhelming promise for salmonids, and key protection of the watershed of the ancient redwood forest, the property includes a serpentine area on its eastern edge supporting numerous threatened and endangered plants.

Airport/Visser Road Restoration Project Briefing Packet (776KB PDF)

Note: Reading PDF files requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Download free.

Click the left-side links on this page to learn more about our conservation programs and to view our useful Resources pages.

Smith River Alliance
PO Box 2129
Crescent City, CA 95531