Loggers, Tribe in Rare Partnership

It was hard for the Simpson Timber Co. to give the keys to its Klamath River forests to the Yurok Indians, knowing that the tribe has always regarded the property as part of its ancestral homeland.

It was even harder for the Yurok to accept them.

For as long as the Yurok and Simpson officials can remember, they have lived in uneasy proximity, viewing each other with mutual suspicion. It galled the Yurok that 80% of their reservation, a narrow strip of land along the lower Klamath River in Humboldt and Del Norte counties, is owned and logged by Simpson. It irked the company that the Yurok routinely trespassed into Simpson’s gated forests to hunt and fish.

In the end, it took a crisis--the sharp decline of salmon and other fish in the river that has always been the heart and soul of Yurok culture--to bring the tribe and the company together.

After years of sometimes tense negotiations, California’s largest Native American tribe and the North Coast’s biggest owner of timberland are forging a partnership aimed at doing what they can to bring back the salmon that once abounded in the Klamath.

In a region long riven by resource wars that have pitted environmentalists against loggers, commercial fishermen against farmers and neighbor against neighbor, the Yurok-Simpson partnership offers hope that even longtime combatants can find enough common ground to work together.

For the logging company, helping the fish makes good business sense because declining salmon runs prompt state and federal regulators to think about restricting timber harvesting on the slopes above the river.

“Simpson’s primary objective is to raise and harvest trees,” said Lowell Diller, senior biologist for the company. “So Simpson and the Yurok are interested in some of the same issues, but for different reasons.”

For the Yurok, helping the fish also makes business sense. Living on a narrow, 43-mile strip of reservation along the Klamath, the Yurok dream of someday seeing salmon runs big enough to sustain a commercial fishery.

But the salmon mean much more than money to the Yurok.

“It would be devastating to the Yurok tribe to lose the fish,” said Troy Fletcher, director of the tribe’s effort to study the fish and monitor water conditions. “The tribe’s life has always centered around the river, around the fish,” a staple of the Yurok’s diet and centerpiece of its rituals.

For years, Fletcher said, the Yurok have complained about Simpson when silt from logging roads poured down slopes in the winter, choking the river’s tributaries with mud and debris, and making it hard for salmon to swim upstream to spawn. The tribe cursed federal and state governments for allowing upstream farmers to divert water from the Klamath, and for building dams on the upper river that restricted water flows, raised its temperature and hurt its quality in the lower river.

Nowadays, there is almost no commercial fishing of Klamath salmon. Sportfishing is strictly limited and even Yurok subsistence fishing is regulated by federal quotas. Last year, just 2,500 Chinook salmon made it up the river to spawn in the Shasta River, one of the Klamath’s main tributaries. In 1930, more than 80,000 Chinook swam up the Klamath to spawn, according to the state Fish and Game Department.

The Yurok and Simpson acknowledge there is little they can do to ensure that more water flows into the Klamath every summer. But they have a lot to say about what happens to the steep-sided lower Klamath watershed. In 1996, they signed a formal agreement that allowed the Yurok to survey Simpson logging roads and decommission or repair ones that were sloughing silt off the slopes into the Klamath and its tributaries.

With initial seed money and a lot of mediation from the California Coastal Conservancy, the tribe and timber company have embarked on an ambitious program to restore hundreds of miles of watershed along the lower Klamath. Using state and federal grants, the Yurok are training tribal members to use heavy equipment to erase abandoned logging roads and recut existing ones so they produce less silt.

Loggers began cutting roads through the forests of Humboldt and Del Norte counties in the latter part of the 19th century. Today, there are thousands of miles of logging roads on the forested slopes above the Klamath and its tributaries.

“Logging roads have a huge impact on water quality across the western United States,” said Tim McKay, director of the Northcoast Environmental Center in Arcata. Old roads often were built so badly that they crumbled during winter storms, sending mud and debris cascading into the streams below.

The Coastal Conservancy hopes that the Lower Klamath Watershed Restoration Project will eventually provide a model of cooperation for watershed restoration projects across the Pacific Northwest, where the needs of business, agriculture and ranching often clash with environmental concerns.

The Yurok view the effort as a rescue mission for both the fish and the tribe. California’s largest Native American tribe with nearly 4,000 members, the Yurok have no industry on their reservation, where unemployment is as high as 80% among the more than 700 residents. The only resource they have, the Yurok say, is the river.

The 263-mile-long Klamath, which rises in southern Oregon and crosses three California counties before emptying into the Pacific in southern Del Norte County, is California’s third-largest river.

Before California’s Gold Rush, the river teemed with coho and Chinook salmon, steelhead trout, Pacific lamprey, candlefish, perch and other fish.

“We would wait for the salmon runs every year--the spring and fall runs. We used to have a celebration on the mouth of the river when the first salmon came,” said tribal elder Glenn Moore, head of the Yurok Cultural Committee. Even when the Great Depression hit the tribe hard, he said, “we always had plenty of salmon to eat, so we didn’t have any worries.”

But today, the federal government lists Klamath coho salmon as a threatened species. Several other species have declined so sharply in numbers in the past decade that they are being considered for listing. High summer water temperatures are killing mature fish, and the silt is suffocating the eggs of those that do spawn in the river and its tributaries, said Mark Pisano, a Fish and Game biologist who has monitored fish in the river since 1984.

The Yurok training program got underway last year, with 18 Yurok receiving on-the-job training in watershed restoration techniques on Simpson lands. It is continuing this summer, with eight more Yurok being trained. Eventually, the tribe hopes to employ at least 50 members in full-time restoration work.

The tribe has mapped thousands of miles of logging roads around the Klamath’s tributaries and assigned priorities for restoration. Yurok project director James Bond believes it will take at least 20 years to complete.

The plan is not without critics, both within the tribe and among environmentalists.

“Simpson is getting a public subsidy to do this work on their property,” said McKay, the Northcoast Environmental Center director. “That is an issue for some environmentalists. The logging companies typically battle any regulatory initiatives, then work to get federal or state money to get the work done when they need to.”

The logging company contends that it has always complied with whatever regulations were in place when it built its roads. At issue, says Simpson, are “legacy” roads built before any standards were developed, often on pieces of property that were not owned by Simpson when the roads were constructed.

Out in one of the Simpson forests, Tyke Robbins, a 30-year-old Yurok intern, said he is delighted that the tribe decided to work with Simpson.

“This is a big career step for me,” said Robbins, who for years worked as a logger for local timber companies. “I’m learning how to operate heavy equipment and I’m learning a skill that I could take off the reservation if I wanted to.”

Robbins and the other trainees work 10-hour days, four days a week for about $8 an hour, dividing their time this summer between classroom and field. In the field, they are taught by tribal elders who worked in logging for years and are trained in using the heavy equipment needed to erase the old roads.

“Logging’s going out in this county,” Robbins said. “This is doing something good--fixing the land instead of tearing it up.”

At first, Robbins said, the classroom work was hard. “They taught us geology, they taught us about landslides and about taking a road to its original grade.

“Now,” he said, “I feel real good about it. I feel like maybe my kids can grow up and have a job close to home” in restoration. “They won’t have to move away, and we’ll be giving something back to mother earth.”

Like most Yurok on the reservation, Robbins said he grew up net-fishing on the river and is teaching his four children how to catch, clean, smoke and roast fish just the way his grandfather taught him.

“We still fish. We just don’t catch much fish,” Robbins said.

Tribal elder Moore, 80, who went to work as a logger in 1937, watched his interns struggle with backhoes and bulldozers.

The restoration program, Moore said, “will be good for our young people because logging is a thing of the past. When the Europeans came here, our elders told us: Our ways are no more, we have to live differently. So the Yurok became good loggers.”

Nevertheless, he said, the tribe has had a love-hate relationship with the logging companies that many of its men worked for, appreciating the chance to earn a good living in the forest and hating what logging was doing to the land.

Moore said he came out of retirement to help direct the restoration training program, glad for a chance to repair some of the damage he and others did decades ago. Besides, he said, being in the forest beats retirement.

“What am I supposed to do,” Moore asked, “sit in my chair and wait to die? I try to figure out how to get these roads taken care of and I forget about my other problems.”