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Staff Report –
A tribe whose reservation covers fewer than 200 acres is about to become the steward of nearly 40,000.
The State Water Resources Control Board has approved funding for the Quartz Valley Indian Reservation to purchase close to 40,000 acres of ancestral territory in the Scott River headwaters of Siskiyou County, a deal the state calls the second largest tribal land return in California history.
Siskiyou News published the announcement from the Water Board, which adopted the resolution at its July meeting.
The land sits in the Klamath River Basin and takes in the headwaters of multiple Scott River tributaries, streams that feed critical spawning habitat for coho and Chinook salmon. The Trust for Public Land is partnering on the acquisition, and the Water Board is financing it through a low-interest loan tied to water quality improvements.
The Quartz Valley tribe, based near Fort Jones and Etna, plans to manage the forestland for watershed restoration and salmon recovery while using thinning projects to cut catastrophic wildfire risk in a county that knows fire all too well.
The purchase lands at a remarkable moment for the Klamath watershed. The Yurok Tribe completed the largest land return in state history last year with 47,000 acres along the lower Klamath, and salmon are recolonizing hundreds of miles of habitat opened up by the 2024 removal of four Klamath dams.
Piece by piece, the Klamath Basin is being handed back to the people who managed it for millennia.
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Reporting from Active NorCal.
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