By Teddi Lynn Chichester, Earth Island Journal
This story originally appeared in Earth Island Journal.
Bright-yellow excavators, swathes of ocher fabric, and sculptural piles of large logs lie scattered across the floodplain of Prairie Creek, just off US Highway 101 in the northernmost reaches of California’s Humboldt County. A noisome lumber mill once spewed smoke here as it processed the region’s last unprotected ancient coast redwoods, while cattle grazed near a faded green barn.
Yurok Tribe Construction Corporation staff members Roger “Bronc” McCovey and Troy Cairns build a weed barrier on Prairie Creek. All photos by Matt Mais / Yurok Tribe.
But before it became a mill site and ranch in 1954, and before goldminers and homesteaders seized it from the Yurok Tribe in the 1850s, this land was the site of ‘O Rew, one of more than 70 Yurok villages that once hugged the Pacific coast and embraced the banks of the Klamath River.
Now the ‘O Rew Redwoods Gateway & Prairie Creek Restoration Project, set against the majestic backdrop of surviving old-growth redwood forest, is transforming “Orick Mill Site A” back into the salmon stronghold and seat of Indigenous sovereignty it once was. ‘O Rew is also writing an important chapter in America’s land-back story, whose keynote is “Indian lands in Indian hands.”
Save the Redwoods League bought the 125-acre property, located a mile and a half north of the tiny town of Orick, in 2013, four years after the mill closed. The League has partnered with the Yurok Tribe, Redwood National and State Parks (RNSP), the nonprofit California Trout, and other organizations to bring the severely degraded floodplain back to health, with a recontoured Prairie Creek and nearly 400,000 native trees, shrubs, forbs, sedges, and grasses — all hand-planted by the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department Revegetation Crew.
Work began in 2021 and is now nearing completion, with planting set to conclude in late December. The excavators, haul trucks, and bulldozers are now gone, their job here done, as the Yurok Tribe Construction Corporation finished restoring the creek itself in October.
An important tributary of Redwood Creek, which skirts the property and empties into the Pacific three miles west, Prairie Creek provides ideal cold-water rearing grounds for juvenile salmonids — including threatened species such as Chinook salmon and steelhead — before they head out to sea. Even in the project’s early stages, salmonids and other fish began swimming into the site by the thousands, something they hadn’t done in decades.
Overseeing the Prairie Creek Floodplain Restoration Project, Cal Trout’s North Coast regional manager Mary Burke invokes the phrase “build it and they will come.”
“Regional monitoring shows that these young fish are traveling between watersheds, sometimes journeying many miles in the ocean and finding suitable habitat up a stream they weren’t even born in,” she says.
‘O Rew will soon return to the Yurok people. Last year, the tribe, Save the Redwoods League, and RNSP signed a historic agreement forming the first-ever co-management partnership involving a tribe, the National Park Service, and California State Parks on tribe-owned land. According to Jessica Carter, the League’s senior program director, upon the 2026 transfer, “the Yurok Tribe intends to build a cultural and visitor center at ‘O Rew and will be in the lead for all programing and stewardship.”
The restoration — both ecological and proprietary — of ‘O Rew slots into the larger picture of recent victories for the Yurok community. In 2024, after decades of protests and litigation led by the tribe, the last of four fish-blocking dams came down along the Klamath River (Heyl-keek ‘We-roy in the Yurok language). Now the largest dam removal and river restoration project in world history is also underway, with the tribe at the helm, its Revegetation Crew sometimes toggling between the oak woodlands of the Upper Klamath and the redwood ecosystem of ‘O Rew, a hundred miles southwest.
Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department Revegetation Crew member Gabe Hayden plants a Pacific blackberry (Rubus ursinus), one of nearly 400,000 hand-planted native shrubs, trees, forbs, sedges, and grasses that now cover ‘O Rew.
Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department Revegetation Crew member Mikayla Logan prepares to plant a slough sedge plug (Carex obnupta); these native sedges stabilize the creek’s banks and fend off invasive species.
Joshua Chenoweth, senior riparian ecologist for the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department, praises the crew’s versatility as they work within these very different biomes, noting their “respect for the plants and seeds, their deep-seated care.”
Summer 2025 saw another huge step forward in the tribe’s fight to regain its ancestral lands: the culmination of “the largest single ‘land-back’ deal in California history,” as announced by the tribe in June. With help from Western Rivers Conservancy, the final parcel of a 47,097-acre property along the Lower Klamath River and within the crucial Blue Creek watershed is once again enfolded into the Yurok homeland. In full, the return of these conifer-covered shores, now called the Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and Yurok Tribal Community Forest, has more than doubled the territory the tribe now holds.
As Rosie Clayburn, Yurok Tribal Heritage Preservation officer and Cultural Resources Department director emphasizes, reclaiming tribal land is a central facet of Yurok law, enshrined in the tribe’s Constitution. “We don’t hide our agenda in any way,” she says, “It’s a mandate: return all of our ancestral territory. Every piece we get back is important.”
Celebrating these monumental achievements, Clayburn, a Yurok citizen, sees a unique role for ‘O Rew, within both the land-back movement and the tribe’s ongoing efforts to tell its own story — including to the thousands of people visiting the region to see the world’s tallest trees, yet perhaps unaware of the forest’s original stewards.
Blue Creek, a tributary of the Klamath River, is somewhat remote. “Part of the importance of ‘O Rew,” Clayburn points out, is that “it’s so visible — it’s right there,” at the intersection of Highway 101 and Bald Hills Road, “the main travel corridor” that overlays ancient trails long traversed by Yurok people.
As envisioned by the project partners, ‘O Rew will be the southernmost gateway to RNSP. For Clayburn, it will also be “that place, that hub where we can tell our stories” — including that of ‘O Rew’s history and repatriation. “We can tell people what it means to have that reconnection with the land. And who can tell the Yurok story, the Native story, better than us?”
Redwood country has always been Yurok country, and the parks that attract nature lovers from around the world are starting to convey that message more clearly. In 2021, at the behest of the tribe, the California State Parks and Recreation Commission changed the name of Patrick’s Point State Park to one honoring the site’s original Yurok village. Now Sue-meg State Park visitors can learn about the region’s ecological and cultural history from Yurok citizens serving as state park interpreters. And in 2022, the Stone Lagoon Visitor Center, about five miles south of ‘O Rew, became Chah-pekw O’ Ket’-toh, the first tribally run center within the California State Parks system.
Tania Estrada-Rodriguez, Yurok Tribe interpretation manager, will help ‘O Rew build upon these successes with a slate of interpretive programs, guided tours, and educational outreach. In May 2026, even before the visitor center breaks ground, tribally led interpretative programs will begin at the site. For Estrada-Rodriguez, balancing ‘O Rew’s “roles as a public space and a living cultural landscape” — at times reserved for Yurok events — will be central to the tribe’s partnership with RNSP, as will highlighting the inextricable ties between ecology and tribal culture throughout the Yurok homeland.
“The land doesn’t exist without us and we don’t exist without the land,” Clayburn says. “We talk about what people now are doing as they try to restore the landscape, and what they’re actually trying to restore it back to is a managed landscape. That’s part of the reason redwoods exist and why they were so large: they were managed with fire.”
Newly planted soft rushes (Juncus effusus) line the banks of the recontoured Prairie Creek, where strategically placed woody debris slows and deflects the streamflow, creating ideal habitat for juvenile fish.
In other words, as Yurok citizen and Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department director Barry McCovey Jr. puts it, stewardship will entail “Yurok people having their footprints on that landscape.” Noting that the work will also involve “reconnecting these ecosystems back to the people,” McCovey looks forward to tribal members gathering basket materials, fishing, trail-walking, or simply companioning with the land.
“The tribe and the landscape are healing together,” Clayburn adds. “When you have tribal folks going back out there, you’re bringing joy back to the land. You hear people laughing, you hear just the pure joy of being home.”
McCovey also sees the use of heavy equipment as part of the process of reconnection and especially of “restoring and maintaining balance in our world.” As he says, “Tools change, times change, but the tenet remains the same.” In addition to low-tech tools such as shovels and hoedads, workers used excavators to carve the meanders, alcoves, and ponds that create ideal rearing grounds in Prairie Creek for imperiled chey-guen (coho salmon), kwor-ror (candlefish), and key’-ween (Pacific lamprey) central to Yurok lifeways. The arresting log-piles littering the floodplain and tumbling into the creek mimic the woody debris that naturally slows and shapes waterways.
Such habitat structures also provide “bug hotels” for the mayflies and midges that feed the fish sheltering beneath, according to Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department habitat restoration biologist Aaron Martin, who designed these “engineered log jams.”
Biodegradable coir fabric secures streambanks and helps block unwanted plants. The native species that now cover the site offer another tool to battle interlopers. John Bair, senior riparian ecologist for Applied River Sciences and designer of ‘O Rew’s revegetation plan, points out vast swards of slough sedge, sprouting from seeds gathered from a nearby wetland. Amy Livingston, the riparian botanist who orchestrated the planting work, calls them “mighty warriors” that stabilize streambanks and outcompete notorious non-natives like Himalayan blackberry and aggressive strains of native reed canary grass.
The site’s revegetation zones, defined by their proximity to the water (in-channel, emergent, riparian, transition, and upland), create a kind of riverine microcosm, the biodiverse “mosaic” that the tribe has always stewarded. While the recently planted redwood saplings here gesture ahead to the “future old-growth forest” envisioned by Save the Redwoods League, 630-year-old Keehl Chpaak ‘We-No’-o-muen (Redwood Which Endures A Long Time) stands sentry in ‘O Rew’s upper reaches as a guardian of the past: the forest’s, the creek’s, and the tribe’s own.
“This landscape has a memory,” Bair affirms — of towering trees, surging salmon, and hardy sedges. Its seedbanks and streambanks hold the promise of renewal, rippling forward as Prairie Creek itself flows toward the sea.
The restoration and repatriation of ‘O Rew parallels the epic story unfolding along the now rewilded Klamath River in Yurok territory to the north. Sweeping river, gently meandering stream: both trace paths of memory, and of healing. When McCovey and his colleagues discovered a tagged juvenile coho from the Klamath in ‘O Rew’s Prairie Creek, the lesson was clear: these are all home waters.
