Falls at Lacks Creek Photo courtesy of Bureau of Land Management

Lacks Creek: A Key Connection
This article appears in the Fall 2005 Bulletin (PDF)

Each fall chinook salmon return to Redwood National and State Parks and the Redwood Creek watershed. After a life at sea, they make the arduous journey back to their birthplace to spawn in Redwood Creek. Winding their way upstream, they impress the Park’s human visitors with their determination and pluck. As they ascend beyond the Park’s upstream boundary, many of them head up one of Redwood Creek’s largest tributaries, a steep and deeply cleaved waterway known as Lacks Creek. Here they find the fresh, quickly moving waters, gravel and food required for successful reproduction. From the high, steep slopes on the eastern side of Lacks Creek, waterfalls drop cool water into deep pools, which provide a sanctuary for the salmon.

The chinook are not alone in the waters of Lacks. It is also a key creek for the area’s cutthroat, steelhead, and coho. It is the only tributary to Redwood Creek, upstream of the park, which hosts all four of the anadromous species so central to the identity of the Park five miles downstream.

This summer, Save-the-Redwoods League spearheaded the purchase of 4,500 acres of the Lacks Creek watershed to restore the area’s own ecological integrity and to ensure the safety of the Park downstream. When the National Park was established by Congress in 1968 it included 58,000 acres, focused on the majestic oldgrowth redwoods of lower Redwood Creek. Ten years later, to address the impacts of the upper watershed on the health of the redwoods on the alluvial flats, the Park was expanded by an additional 48,000 acres reaching up Redwood Creek. At the same time, Congress designated a “Park Protection Zone” identifying the area even further upstream in which acquisition and restoration would be a priority. Lacks Creek is the heart of that Protection Zone.

Today, Lacks Creek is still a very wild place. Open prairies are linked by a Douglas-fir forest suited to the drier climate further inland than the moisture-rich environment required by the redwoods. But for all of its wildness, and all of its beauty, park ecologists and geologists recognize that it also “contains some loaded guns that are pointing at the salmon and at the Park downstream,” says Greg Bundros, a geologist with the Park.

Those loaded guns are major erosion events waiting to happen. Timber has been harvested from much of the area over the decades and both active and abandoned logging roads lace the hills rising from the creek.

Bundros has spent a decade studying the Redwood Creek watershed, identifying the areas that pose the greatest threat to the ecology of the Park downstream. Lacks Creek follows a seismic fault and its inner gorge is “remarkably steep, unstable, and prone to land sliding,” says Bundros. Over the years, logging roads have further destabilized the hill slopes surrounding the creek. According to Bundros, road density exceeding three miles per square mile on such land is considered dangerous. Here the densities are often twice that. A major landslide event could not only devastate the spawning habitat, but could also wreak havoc downstream in the Park itself. Lacks Creek has already begun to recover from years of intensive logging but treating the roads in Lacks Creek will prevent sediment that combines with erosion from upper Redwood Creek, to alter its hydrology and pose risks to some of the big trees that are the crown jewels of the Park.

Bob Barnum has been involved in the Park since its inception. As a major landowner in Lacks Creek and Humboldt County, Bob was part of the original Park planning committee in the 1960s and recognized that one day his lands in Lacks could play an important role in protecting the Park.

A few years ago, when a variety of factors led Barnum to consider selling some of his land, he thought of the 2,000 acres in Lacks Creek that he has been logging for decades as part of a family ranch centered in Redwood Creek. Barnum liked the idea of both adding to the Park’s Protection Zone and ensuring that he knew his downstream neighbors.

Bob is the fourth generation of Barnums in Humboldt County. His great grandfather ran mules on the trails linking the Pacific Coast to the gold country in the Trinity Alps. Over the years, Barnum Timber has accumulated forestland throughout the area. But as timber values have dropped, and the price and complexities of securing timber harvest plans in California have risen, it has become increasingly difficult to make the land profitable through logging, according to Barnum.

Some might see that as a good thing. After all, it was getting the logging industry to assume responsibility for more of the real ecological costs of logging that motivated the adoption of the regulations that are now straining the pocketbooks of the timber companies. But with dwindling profits and growing costs, many private forest owners today are looking for another easier way to get returns from their lands. At the rate of about 30,000 acres a year, California landowners are chopping up their holdings and turning their second growth into second homes for affluent vacationers or urban refugees.

“When a forest is subdivided and built on, the environmental impacts on the area may be far worse than those of good logging practices,” says Kate Anderton, the League’s former Executive Director. More roads are built, more water is diverted or drawn from the aquifer, and pesticide use and runoff increase. And once a large forest has been divided into pieces, and each one sold for the highest price, it is virtually impossible ever to put it back together again. As long as a forest can remain in large tracts, there is a chance it can be restored or preserved. “In the case of lands in the Redwood National and State Parks Protection Zone, this is particularly important,” says Anderton.

Several years ago, Barnum asked the Park Service if they would like to buy his 2,000 acres in Lacks Creek. He was well aware how valuable it was as the upstream spawning ground for the watershed’s salmon and trout and for ensuring a safe future for the Park’s key biological assets.

Although the Park Service acknowledged the importance of the holdings to the Park, there was simply no budget for acquisitions at that time. He then turned to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which already owned about 4,100 acres of Douglas-fir forest in the Lacks Creek watershed. The BLM said they would very much like to acquire the land, but their budget wouldn’t allow it either.

That’s when Save-the-Redwoods League stepped in, raising money and working with Barnum and another private landowner, Eel River Sawmills, and the BLM to make the deal. And this summer saw the conclusion of the project with purchase and transfer to BLM of some 4,500 acres, protecting virtually the entire Lacks Creek watershed except for a single, large, well-managed, historic family ranch.

BLM’s lands, known as the Lacks Creek Area of Critical Environmental Concern (LCACEC), include an impressive old-growth Douglas-fir forest, providing key habitat for spotted owl, marbled murrelet, and golden eagle. The addition will allow BLM to extend recreational use for hikers, horseback riders, and cyclists while also securing its ecological integrity. “Lacks Creek is a key link in a chain of public and private lands extending inland from the coast,” says Lynda Roush, BLM Arcata Field Manager.

We encourage you to make a visit to Lacks Creek, to walk through its prairies and forests in a landscape that is now protected for all time, immune to the pressures of subdivision development and further logging. Then, plan a hike down into the Tall Trees Grove in Redwood National and State Parks and experience the connection of Redwood Creek’s tributaries to the magnificent ancient redwoods of the lower River.