Exciting moments as water flows into restored Prairie Creek

Site visit shows amazing progress on floodplain restoration

The first thing you realize when you visit the Prairie Creek restoration project is the sheer scale of it. For someone like me who had only seen the project through photographs and maps and artist renderings, it was shocking to see how much land is being restored to nature. It might take 30 minutes to cross from one end to the other on foot.

Here’s a quick refresher: The Prairie Creek restoration is park of a larger project where Save the Redwoods League and a number of partners are returning this giant asphalt lot—which is the remnant of a large redwood mill on the site—to nature, with an extensive restoration of Prairie Creek and adjacent floodplains as well as the creation of new visitor amenities and trail access to nearby old-growth groves within Redwood National and State Parks and Yurok ancestral lands. Work will continue through 2025. 

Key partners on the project include the Yurok Tribe Construction Corporation and Fisheries Program, California Trout, Redwood National and State Parks, California State Coastal Conservancy, NOAA Fisheries, and more. 

Last week was a great time to visit, as crews from the Yurok Construction Corporation and Fisheries Program were reconnecting to the main flow a 1,000-foot section of the creek that they had spent the last several months restoring. Now fish can make full use of the new habitat. A lot of the partners were on-site to witness the occasion, including Rep. Jared Huffman, whose 2nd District includes the project site.

Probably best to let the pictures tell the story: