(From “Diaries...) Behind Locked Gates Apr 5: I’m getting a flashback from the movie Deliverance–the part where they are shuttling in their vehicles to the take-out, before starting their ill-fated canoe trip. Not unlike the Deliverance adventurers, today we are winding our way into a remote tributary to the main river. We negotiate a labyrinth of jeep trails passing through multiple locked gates. A local real estate agent has made all the arrangements. He’ll drive us in and drop us off; we’ll hike our way out the 10 miles or so following the stream. With luck, we’ll arrive back at the main road about dark, somewhere close to where my vehicle has been ‘spotted’ and should be waiting. This is brand new country to me. And there’s a brand new landowner for most of it. We are told that he is a major “dot-com mogul,” a real household name, and that he’s “improving the land’s management,” whatever that means. But the previous owners–or more likely, squatters–clearly had their own ‘management’ regimes in mind. We quickly begin finding plastic piping, hundreds of feet of it, leading from the stream off to clandestine places unknown. And we quickly conclude it would not be in our best interest to go searching out the ends of these obvious supply lines. That’s not all. We also quickly find the stream to be a textbook example of the watershed devastation–and its long-lasting effects–often wrought by the early logging of redwoods. Despite the last logging era being at least 50 years ago, logging battle scars abound. Old steel cables, rusted pieces of logging equipment, erosion holes, piles of sediment, saw-cut logs still where they were felled (waiting no doubt, for a float-out on high water which never came), and logjams are all here. Some of the larger logjams are spitting waterfalls directly onto slabs of bedrock below. No pools exist, only white water against a backdrop of smooth rock. The literature tells us that no super-swimming adult steelhead will be able to ascend these chutes! Nevertheless, upstream of several of them we discover some adults attempting to spawn in the silt-laden gravel. They seem oblivious to the ‘impassable barriers’ they have just ascended, perhaps preoccupied with the other obvious issue. Will their eggs be smothered by sediment during the next high stream flow? And once again all I can do is marvel at the strength, adaptability, and perseverance these remarkable fish continue to demonstrate despite everything we throw at them. They never cease amazing me.