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In our January-March 2007 feature, “Valley of Water and Wine,” we highlight the innovative work of landowners along the Napa River who are initiating restoration projects on the upper reaches of the river. The Rutherford Dust Society, a group of … Read more
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The Napa Valley was once a place of enormous natural bounty, fed by a vibrant, healthy river teeming with salmon and steelhead. Today, the valley is more famous for its managed bounty of grapes and fine wine. The river, hemmed in by vineyards, has too often been relegated to the status of a waste canal. But now a unique alliance of growers and scientists has come together to give the Napa’s upper reach a chance to regain some of its wildness.
Since their listing as endangered in 1997, wild coho salmon have begun a slow but steady comeback to their native Central California streams.
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Waterfall Lover’s Guide (Northern California), by Matt & Krissi Danielsson, The Mountaineers Books, 2006, 256 pages, $16.95 www.mountaineersbooks.org I never considered myself a “waterfall lover” before, but what’s not to love? Last summer, I found myself pulling over in my … Read more
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The Cosumnes Preserve near I-5 in the Central Valley is a surprising mosaic of flooded rice fields teeming with birds, breached levees creating new forests, and a river reclaiming a landscape.
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Thirty years ago, few people gave a second thought to the Laguna de Santa Rosa, the North Coast’s largest freshwater wetland. The once-teeming marshland had become a dumping ground. But things are changing, and this complex waterway is finally beginning to recover some of its former glory.
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The East Bay is home to 44 creeks that drain into San Francisco Bay—from small but well-protected Wildcat Creek in the north to the 700 square miles of Alameda Creek’s watershed to the south.
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Lakes aren’t a natural feature of the coast range landscape. But since cities need places to store drinking water, we drowned some valleys for reservoirs. While precious creek habitat was lost, these man-made lakes now draw bald eagles and other wildlife, as well as thousands of human visitors for swimming, fishing, boating and other summer pastimes.
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The return of endangered coho salmon to their ancestral spawning grounds in this west Marin watershed is an essential component of the connective tissue that holds a fragmented ecosystem together. Greeting the salmon tethers us to the landscape’s seasonal rhythms and reawakens a lineage that goes back to the first inhabitants of this place.
