Blue Creek (United States)

Photo credit: Western Rivers Conservancy

In 2013, the Wyss Foundation provided a $5,000,000 grant to Western Rivers Conservancy to acquire land that is now the Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and Yurok Tribal Community Forest in northern California’s Klamath Mountains. The 24,860-acre property acquisition contributed to a broader effort by the Yurok Tribe and the Conservancy to purchase more than 47,000 acres of ancestral lands from Green Diamond Resource Company and return them to the tribe.

The Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and Yurok Tribal Community Forest connect the cloud forest of the Siskiyou Wilderness Area with the Klamath River and, ultimately, the Pacific Ocean. The Klamath River is the primary artery of the Klamath-Siskiyou, an ecoregion spanning nearly 10 million acres. The Klamath-Siskiyou is home to wild salmon runs, old-growth forests, wild rivers, and unique botanical diversity. The region’s biological integrity depends upon a complex of Wilderness Areas, National Recreation Areas, State and National Parks, and Wild and Scenic Rivers.

The property encompasses the remaining previously unprotected lands within the Blue Creek watershed, the most crucial cold-water refugium in the Klamath River ecosystem. All migrating Klamath River Chinook salmon rest at Blue Creek. Here, their body temperature drops an average of eight degrees Fahrenheit, enabling them to complete their journey from the Pacific Ocean to the spawning areas of the upper Klamath and Trinity Rivers during the low, lethally warm flows of late summer. The property also contains a vital habitat for the recovery of diverse wildlife, including marbled murrelet, northern spotted owl, California condor, Humboldt marten, and Pacific fisher.

Protecting the property from development allows wildlife to continue moving from coastal redwood forests to the peaks, mountain meadows, and open glades of the Siskiyou Mountains and prevents continued unsustainable timber development.

This conservation success was made possible by the work of grantee Western Rivers Conservancy.