Hikshari’ Trail undergoes a makeover and now it shines with amenities

1/6/13

Down at the foot of Truesdale Avenue in southwest Eure­ka, beyond Marie Callender’s, Best Western, Shamus T Bones and Ray’s Food Place, stands a sign at the Truesdale Vista Point. The sign identi­fies the Hikshari’ Trail and explains that Hikshari’ is the Wiyot place name for the coastal area west of Broadway where the Elk River flows out into Humboldt Bay.



Eureka resident Thomas McCutchen and his family visited the newly refurbished trail recently and highly rec­ommend it to folks who like a flat, paved place to walk or bike.



“I’m a family hiker, our kids have bikes, so flat paved trails are our preference,” said McCutchen, who works at Cypress Grove Chevre in Arcata. “I’m a big fan of the Headwaters Trail and Ham­mond Trail, and just really impressed that Hikshari’ came up to that level.” The trail, McCutchen said, has always been there, but it “could not be counted among the best Eureka had to offer. as it has in recent years been well attended by home­less campers and was always somewhat trash-strewn. The trail was dirt, winding through rubble and weeds, but still boasted a great look at the bay.” Over the course of the last six months, McCutchen said, the city of Eureka, Redwood Community Action Agency and Humboldt Trails Council “have done something great out there.” He said the finishing touch­es are still being applied, with strategically placed boulders near the picnic tables, raked gravel and new plantings readied along the river bank where, in spring, they’ll “burst forth and make it all better still.” But don’t expect to find it on any local or online maps yet.



“It is all literally brand spanking new,” said Mc-Cutchen. “Google Maps doesn’t even show the com­pleted access lot at the end of Truesdale Avenue as of yet, though it does reveal 1.5 miles of winding asphalt that I had no idea was there until of late.” Truesdale Vista Point, he said, is “a small marvel unto itself ... something new under the sun,” although at this time of year he admits that, perhaps, “sun is too strong a word for Humboldt sensibili­ties.” In fact, his family’s first visit to the new-and ­improved trail last month was a rather soggy one.



“As luck would have it, I opted to revisit this trail a week ago, with my wife and four small children in tow, and was pleasantly surprised to find a new parking lot at the trailhead (23 spaces) and a beautiful new paved walk­way,” said McCutchen, whose wife, Rose McCutchen, owns Children’s Cottage Preschool in Eureka and has lived in the area all her life.



“This was to be a short December hike, honestly, as the sky decided not only to open its vaults of rain but also offered us a rare onslaught of battering hail pellets. Imagine us wet and cold and then being literally attacked by the sky, my infant daughter narrating the adventure with her terrorized wails. Even as we made our miserable retreat I made plans to return and I have been there twice since.”

He says the area is perfect if you like “leisurely walks with your dog, your kids, your best friend from Albuquerque or just by your lonesome, and you like to do that same walk­ing somewhere with a view and a nice, paved trail and park benches to rest on.”

After some investigative work, McCutchen found that the groundbreaking for the site improvement project took place in June and was attended by Eureka Mayor Frank Jager and 4th District Supervisor Virginia Bass.

He also learned there was a photo opp with the usual cer­emonial golden rakes, along with food, music and the unveiling of signs that would soon be posted along the new trail. “Who knew? I didn’t,” he said.

McCutchen believes the trail improvement bodes well for the area in general, what with several relatively new businesses located nearby, not to mention the shopping and dining opportunities nearby.

“That whole corner itself is poised for more commerce,” he said.

McCutchen’s photos, which accompany this story, will give readers a good overview of what they’ll see on the trail — some of which has always been there but unable to be properly appreciated.

“The pilings sticking out of the water with a view across to the Coast Guard station out on Samoa Peninsula are a treat for any amateur photog­rapher,” he said.

“Birds of all kinds are aplenty, and frog song and flora would fill the bouquet for your senses as you strolled. Still, the issues of safety and a lack of mainte­nance sullied the experience.”

Now that it’s been rehabili­tated, the public will hopeful­ly make good use of it.

“Eureka is a small town and as such does not see much rapid change,” said McCut­chen, who has lived in the area for about a decade. “It is rare to find something new in our midst of any scale. It then behooves us to run out and see what’s afoot when a grand and sweeping renovation occurs. This is that.”

Eureka’s new jewel should make it a better place to live and a nicer place to visit, he said. “Whether or not we can keep it that way has little to do with the fact that it is there right now. Go and see!”

And when you’re there, keep an eye out for the McCutchens, with daughter Quinn, who turns 18 months on Tuesday, along with her sister Kahri and brother Neiko on their bikes.

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NOTE: This overview of the 5 Counties Salmonid Conservation Program was published in 2009 in the final edition of California Coastal COnservancy's magazine, California Coast & Ocean.

In 2001, a small miracle occurred in a stream south of the city of Arcata: the salmon came back. Lots of them. The stream, called Morrison Gulch, flows into Jacoby Creek, which empties into Humboldt Bay. Biologists knew it had once been spawning ground for salmon, because for several years they had counted hundreds trying to make their way upstream to mate--600 in one winter alone. But an old culvert under Quarry Road blocked the way; not one fish could make the jump into it from the pool below. Faced with such a barrier, some fish will try to find other places to spawn; others will die of exhaustion from their futile attempt to reach historic spawning grounds.

Then, in August 2001, the County replaced the Quarry Road culvert with a wider one and regraded the stream above and below to raise the channel, allowing the fish to move freely through the new culvert. With the barrier gone, the salmon moved right back into the stream. That winter, biologists counted 70 coho returning to spawn, and the following winter they observed 238 adults and 116 redds (spawning nests).

What happened in the Jacoby Creek watershed is happening, or beginning to happen, in many watersheds along the coast from Del Norte County to Monterey. In the past ten years, through collaborative efforts by counties, state and federal agencies, private landowners, and nonprofit organizations, almost 300 miles of streams have been reopened to salmon and restored to conditions favorable to the fishes’ survival. At a time when everything else seems to be going wrong for West Coast salmon, this achievement is a ray of sunshine.

Locked Out

Culverts and other small stream barriers may seem trivial compared to the large and intractable difficulties salmon face--drought, water diversions, hydropower dams, changes in ocean productivity--but there are so many of them that they have effectively locked fish out of huge areas of spawning habitat. A 2004 report by the Coastal Conservancy identified more than 19,000 barriers in California’s coastal watersheds, at least 1,400 of them severe or impassable.

Even obstacles that are not completely impassable to adult salmon can exhaust the fish before they reach spawning grounds, or keep juveniles, which can’t jump as high as adults, from reaching tributaries that serve as safe havens during floods. “It’s a huge problem,” said Tom Weseloh, North Coast manager for California Trout. “If you’ve got a barrier at the mouth of a watershed, the whole watershed is impaired.”

Long before people knew about the life cycles of anadromous fish, they understood that salmon needed to be able to move freely up- and downstream. In his 2003 book King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon, geologist David R. Montgomery wrote of a 12th-century English statute requiring that English rivers “be kept free of obstructions so that a well-fed three-year-old pig could stand sideways in the stream without touching either side.” Pigs were not at issue; the purpose was to protect salmon.

Despite many such laws and restrictions over the centuries, the needs of fish have rarely been considered when roads and other structures were built, until recently. In California’s early days, many coastal roads were cut right next to creeks for the logging industry, and streams were constricted and blocked by pipes and culverts. In 1935, federal fisheries biologists surveying streams in the Klamath and Shasta National Forests reported that culverts were cutting off salmon from the Klamath River and other main streams, and recommended that small bridges be used instead. They were ignored.

Those roads, usually built quickly and cheaply, have eroded over the years, spilling sediment into the creeks and causing creekbanks to fail. During heavy rains, the old culverts block water and sediment flow, causing floods. But quick fixes cost less up front than bringing back a more natural streamflow, and because there are so many barriers, removing any one of them seemed a waste of time and money--until 1996 and 1997, when coho salmon on the North and Central Coasts were listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

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12/27/12

MY WORD


Mr. Bressman’s loyal­ty to his livelihood and his harbor is to be commended and admired (“We can’t afford to just sit on our harbor,” Times-Stan­dard, Dec. 22, Page A4).



However it is my opinion that the adage “build it and they will come” is excellent fodder for a movie script but very thin forage anywhere else. There is absolutely no argument with the fact that Humboldt Bay forms an excellent, if somewhat limited in draft-depth, harbor. But the same can be said about several hundred other sites around the world; say, for example, Kwajalein Atoll. An excellent, fully enclosed harbor, ideal for anchoring vessels, but no one would consider building a port there.



A successful port requires many things, including a source of outgoing cargo, a market for incoming cargo, a transportation net to move cargo to or from elsewhere and the ability to compete economically with other ports in the same country, as well as modern cargo han­dling facilities. Other things are helpful, such as existing vessel supply facilities (ship chandlers), shipyards capable of emergency repair work on large vessels, recreation and service facilities for onshore crew leave. With the excep­tion of an adequate, trained and willing work force, Humboldt Bay can boast of none of these, nor any hope of any of them soon.



It is more than time to face a few facts. There is no rail connection from here to anywhere, nor is there any sign of repair to that ruined utility any time in the near or distant future. The rail­road served one, and only one commodity, redwood.



That commodity is now long gone, and in view of the many cries for preservation from the tree-huggers, prob­ably never to return. Truck transportation is now ade­quate to serve the present needs of the immediate area, but expanding it to the extent needed by a modern port facility would over­whelm the present network with no signs of any real improvements, such as the much debated but non­active widening of 101 through Richardson Grove.



The direct route inland — truck or rail — to the East through the mountains is a silly pipe dream involving a vast amount of engineering marvels such as large bridges, many switchbacks and tunnels of huge size in order to accommodate trainloads of containers stacked two-high. Such an enterprise faces an expense of many billions of dollars and is certainly not feasible in the face of the present harbor situation.



The Longshore labor agreement negotiations of the early ’60s in San Francis­co spent many, many hours and days struggling with the problems occasioned by the newly agreed 8-hour guaran­tee, as opposed to the tradi­tional 4-hour callout. After one year under the new guarantee, one port on the coast boasting only a tiny fraction of the entire work force — Eureka — con­sumed a huge proportion of the negotiators’ time because of the death of the redwood trade. Special travel rates, meal allowances and board payments had to be worked out so as to provide work opportunities in other ports for the Eureka workforce.



They still exist today for the same reason, and many, many experts were consulted on the future of that port at the time.


I know, because I was there as one of the employer nego­tiators. I have spent 33 years as an employee of the Pacific Maritime Association, the last 25 as Southern Califor­nia Area Manager, responsi­ble for the payment of wages, training, safety pro­grams and day-to-day indus­trial relations for the four ports of San Diego, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Port Hueneme.



John D. MacEvoy resides in Cutten.

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11/13/12

The Passaic River in New Jersey isn’t one of those waterways with its source in a pristine mountain lake.

From its spring in Morris County to its mouth at Newark Bay, the Passaic’s shores are lined by suburban subdivisions, factories and depots.

The lower part of the Passaic is a federal Superfund site: during the Vietnam War, Agent Orange was manufactured on the Newark Waterfront.

When Sandy struck, the Passaic spilled its banks, sweeping into residential streets and mixing with waste from backed-up sewers. Dozens of houses were flooded.

“It’s stuff that’s washing into these people’s homes. And we don’t have a clue what that mix looks like,” said Ana Baptista, director of environmental programs at the non-profit Ironbound Community Corporation.

Baptista said the government has done a poor job informing people with flooded basements about the potential health risks.

“The only advisories that I saw were the advisories from the city condemning the properties because of flood and structural damage to their properties,” Baptista said. “No one came out and told them, be careful with the flood water because it could be contaminated.”

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection hasn’t directly addressed what’s in the water that has flooded homes. When asked about the flooding, the Department told WNYC concerned homeowners should seek testing, but that local authorities were responsible for assessing the risks.

Elias Rodriguez, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesman, said in an email there is no immediate hazard connected with the superfund site, but that “the EPA is continuing to assess impacts from the storm throughout the area and we will reach out to the community to get more information about potential impacts to the community.”

But there may be a long-term health risk, according to Ryan Miller, a research engineer at Rutgers University who has spent two years studying the lower Passaic. Miller said if toxic sediment from the Passaic was churned up by the storm, it’s possible toxins like PCBs ended up in basements.  

“Soil particles or sediment particles at the bottom of the river act as colloids, they’re kind of like the car, and the contamination is kind of like the passenger, they bring it along for the ride,” said Miller.

Once inside someone’s basement, dioxins and PCBs can turn into gases, and start to poison the air. Toxicologists say this kind of exposure is dangerous only over a prolonged period of time.

And Miller said the risk that this has happened is probably low. Storm surges from the sea, like the one Sandy caused, tend to destabilize river sediment far less than heavy rains.

Last year, Hurricane Irene’s rains flooded the Passaic, exposing a seam of dioxin- and PCB-tainted sediment in the river at Lyndhurst. The EPA did testing and decided to decontaminate a section of river, but not an adjacent little league ball field.

With more mega-storms predicted for the years ahead, the Passaic will almost certainly flood again. Environmentalists hope the next time, the government will quickly tell citizens what it knows about what’s in the water.

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