For over 60 years, an 8-foot-high dam sat across Cedar Creek, a tributary of the South Fork Eel River in Humboldt County — a relic of a fish hatchery that had been decommissioned decades earlier after a 1964 flood and had long since stopped serving any practical purpose. Located just a few hundred feet upstream from where Cedar Creek meets the Eel, the dam cut off migrating Chinook salmon, coho salmon, steelhead, and Pacific Lamprey from nine miles of habitat, including cold water that Cedar Creek contributes to the South Fork Eel during the hottest months of summer — water that gives steelhead a refuge from rising temperatures and the invasive predators that thrive in warmer conditions.

CalTrout led the removal effort in partnership with Rangjung Yeshe Gomde California (formerly the Yangshe Gomde Buddhist Retreat Center), which provided land access, along with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Wildlife Conservation Board, McBain Associates, SHN Engineering, and Hanford Applied Restoration & Conservation. The dam came down in 2022, and the results showed up fast: adult Chinook salmon were observed spawning above the former dam site almost immediately, and by November 2023, juvenile coho salmon were documented upstream of the barrier for the first time — a striking result given that 15 years of prior surveys in Cedar Creek had never once detected coho.

As California's summers grow hotter and cold-water refuges become more valuable for salmon and steelhead survival, this small, quiet stream is now doing double duty: providing spawning and rearing habitat in its own right, and helping cool the larger Eel River system that depends on tributaries like it to keep fish alive through the warmest months of the year.