• The upper South Fork Eel River watershed is home to the last viable metapopulation of California’s endangered coho salmon. Dutch Charlie Creek is one of two reliable coho spawning streams in the upper South Fork Eel River. Other streams in the region do not have the consistently cool temperatures and critical habitat necessary for coho. CDFW and NMFS have identified Dutch Charlie Creek as top priority coho habitat. [source]

• Hundreds of old growth trees still live in this watershed. While most nearby watersheds have been logged multiple times including recently and have very few old trees left, the last significant timber harvest in the Dutch Charlie watershed occurred 25 years ago, and much of it was only ever logged once. The watershed’s remaining large old trees and abundant diversity make it an extremely high priority for protection.

• The 2,800-acre watershed has no public roads. Roadless areas provide unique sanctuaries for wildlife that are increasingly hard to find.

• Dutch Charlie Creek is adjacent to over 30,000 acres of protected areas (see map below): the Elkhorn Ridge Wilderness, South Fork Eel River Wilderness, and the UC Berkeley Angelo Coast Range Reserve. Protecting Dutch Charlie Creek will extend this protected wildlife habitat connectivity another 3 miles toward the ocean.

The logging operations currently being done in this watershed include:

• Cutting the largest oldest trees will severely set back the recovery of this forest, increase wildfire risk [source], [source], temperature increases [source], and reduced long term streamflows [source], directly killing coho and eliminating their habitat.

• Operating heavy equipment on dirt roads and steep slopes that will dump sediment into the coho habitat. One of the primary haul roads is a legacy road situated 20ft above the prime coho spawning pools. [source] The plan includes winter operations, bulldozing new roads and stream crossings [source], and logging on steep slopes with identified landslide risk [source], which will contribute to slope instability and erosion and result in excessive sedimentation and other impacts to the creek and the South Fork Eel River.

• Numerous exceptions from the standard Forest Practice Rules include driving bulldozers and using skid trails on the steepest slopes and freedom to cut any unmarked trees immediately adjacent to the creek.

• Applying non-selective, highly toxic herbicides throughout THP areas [source], contaminating soil and water for generations. Constituents of these herbicides are known to be teratrogenic and carcinogenic to wildlife and humans. They do not break down, and would permanently contaminate and harm this biologically fragile ecosystem.

• Eliminating “undesirable” hardwoods such as tanoak and madrone which would trigger a cascade of biocultural diversity losses. For hundreds of years this landscape contained groves of giant tanoak and madrone, many of these original massive trees remain, and the root systems of those that were cut are still living in the same places growing new trunks. Herbicides will eliminate millennia-old diverse forest structure, replacing it with only conifers.

[See our public comments here to read about all of this in much more detail]