In a look at a river and watershed (which also didn’t build a large dam on it in the 1960’s) somewhat comparable in size to the American, and the various issues arising from various and sundry policies taken over the past.
Educational article and somewhat congruent with our situation.
An Eel River Run
By BEN BROWN The Daily Journal
Article Last Updated: 05/03/2007 08:50:58 AM PDT
A tour through a critical system
Editor's note: This is the first of two stories by Ben Brown on his two-day tour of the Eel River with the Mendocino County Farm Bureau.
The Eel River is 200 miles long, it runs through five counties and numerous mountain ranges, it drains 3,684 square miles of countryside and has three forks at various points along the way.
The river is home to at least 30 species of fish and the watershed supports a large number animals. It runs through mountains and forests, into and out of lakes and is joined by at least two major rivers and countless streams and tributaries on its way to the Pacific Ocean.
To say that it is big would be an understatement.
For the last three years, the Mendocino County Farm Bureau has taken people on a two-day trip through the Eel River watershed, hoping to foster a better understanding of where some of Mendocino County's water comes from and what it goes through on the way there.
Among the early stops on the tour is the small town of Dos Rios, on a bridge far above the area where the Main Fork and the North Fork of the Eel River meet and head north toward Humboldt County and the Pacific Ocean.
On the way to Dos Rios, forester Bill Smith, who was lived and worked in the forests around the Eel River his entire life, points out where a previous bridge over the Eel River once stood.
The bridge, which must have been easily 60 feet above the bed of the river, was carried away in the flood of 1964.
Looking at the river now, it can be hard to believe it was that high.
Both forks are running low this year and even to an untrained eye it is easy to see that the Eel is usually a much wider river than it is on this day.
The water is running only in the deepest parts of the river, often in channels no more than a dozen feet wide.
The Middle Fork of the Eel River is running higher than the main stem. Janet Pauli, chairwoman for the Mendocino County Inland Valley Water Commission said it was due to snow melt in the Yolla Bolly Mountains in Trinity County where part of the Middle Fork originates.
From a vantage point further down the road the snow-capped peaks of the Yolla Bolly Mountains were visible in the distance, but rain and snowfall in California have fallen short of average this year and no one expects the snow melt to last very long.
Not far up the road from Dos Rios, the tour stopped at a steep and narrow canyon that was once the proposed site of the Dos Rios Dam in the 1960s. The dam would have created a massive reservoir in the Covelo Valley with a tunnel to carry water back to the Sacramento Valley.
