Six Rivers National Forest: The Six Rivers, the Hupa, and the Redwood Corridor

Six rivers run through this forest. They give it its name. The Smith, the Klamath, the Trinity, the Van Duzen, the Mad, and the Eel drain the Klamath Mountains from east to west, cutting through ridges of ancient metamorphic rock to reach the Pacific. The Six Rivers National Forest, at just under one million acres, is one of the smaller national forests in California, but it occupies a watershed so biologically diverse that ecologists have called the Klamath Mountain region one of the most complex temperate zones on earth. Salmon still run in all six rivers, though in numbers far below historical levels. The forests include both coast redwood and inland Douglas-fir, an unusual pairing made possible by the fog that pushes inland along the river corridors.

The Hupa, whose traditional name for themselves is Natinixwe, have lived in the Hoopa Valley at the confluence of the Trinity and a smaller tributary since time before memory. The Hoopa Valley Tribe holds the largest reservation in California by area, approximately eighty-nine thousand acres that the federal government formally established in eighteen sixty-four, and that the Hupa never left. They are one of the few California tribes who were not removed from their homeland during the dispossession era. That persistence is not accidental. The Hupa mounted a sustained resistance and negotiated a continuous presence on their own land through a period when neighboring tribes were scattered by federal removal campaigns and vigilante violence.

Adjacent to the Hoopa Valley, Redwood National Park protects the world's tallest trees: coast redwoods that exceed three hundred eighty feet, trees that were already centuries old when European contact began. The forest corridor between the river mouths and the inland ranges is where redwood meets salmon, and both depend on the same cold, wet, uncleared watershed to survive.