LATE ONE RECENT AUTUMN AFTERNOON on the Klamath River Estuary, shortly after fishing opened again for tribal members, it was easy to imagine that nothing had changed since the time when only Yurok people lived here. The tide was going out, and turbulent water rushed through the channel between two sand spits at the river's mouth. The last of the fall-run chinook were struggling upstream, the coho were expected, and Yurok fishermen stood on both sandbars, casting and pulling in drift nets and dip nets while watching out for the sea lions diving for the same fish. Whenever anyone - sea lion or human - caught a fish, others converged on it too, in a great bubbling frenzy. Above them circled seagulls and pelicans, alert to any morsel that might hit the water. Upstream, in the forests, others would be fishing at ancestral fishing sites. A tribal monitor counting fish on a recent night had reported seeing a bear on every outcropping.

"This is better for you and it is better for us," said his customer, Carolyn Fujimoto. Other seafood lovers have flocked to harbors up and down the coast from Newport Beach to Humboldt Bay this autumn to buy wild fish directly from the people who caught them.

The impression of abundance was illusory, however. Coho salmon were recently listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and steelhead are being considered for listing. In the 1990s, so few chinook returned that the off-shore commercial fishery was devastated. This year, the quota-driven sports fishery on the Estuary was abruptly shut down in the middle of Labor Day weekend, to the dismay of local businesses. Although the Yurok and Hoopa Valley Tribes have the reserved right to 50 percent of the Klamath salmon harvest (of which the Yurok harvest 85 percent), "only once in this decade did our Tribe choose to sell fish," says Troy Fletcher, fisheries manager for the Yurok Tribe. "There has not even been enough for minimal subsistence needs."

On the north side of the Klamath River Estuary stands a rock that, from certain angles, resembles a woman with a burden basket on her back. The Yurok know her as Oregos. Legend has it that in times past she would sometimes stretch a leg out across the tidal channel. The people would then gather for a ceremony to persuade her to let the fish pass.

Looking over a traditional roof towards Oregos and fishing boats, several dozen years ago.

The Yurok have lived on the Lower Klamath for uncounted generations. They continue to do their ceremonies, including the Jump Dance to restore balance to the world. But to bring back the salmon, which are central to their culture, they now use management techniques based on the best available science. The Tribe employs 15 fisheries biologists, three geologists, and 40 to 60 technicians, depending on the time of year. Such expert power is comparable to, and may be "more than the Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have in the area," said Fletcher, a fisheries biologist.

What happened to the salmon is no mystery: dams, water diversions, and a century of logging without regard for the needs of fish or fishers. From the river mouth the forested hills look pristine, but that too is an illusion. They are a maze of tractor trails, abandoned stream crossings, and logging roads - up to ten miles of road per square mile in some areas. Eroded soil moves down into creeks and rivers, blocking the way for fish, filling in pools and spawning beds.

Now, however, efforts are under way to repair the damage, and the Yurok are in the lead. "We can't afford not to be," said Tribal Chairperson Susan Masten. "The Yurok are so intricately interdependent with the salmon that if there weren't any salmon, I'm not sure there would be any Yurok."

Among several tribal initiatives, perhaps the most promising is the Lower Klamath Restoration Partnership, a cooperative endeavor by the Tribe, the Simpson Timber Company, and the Coastal Conservancy. It is designed to accomplish three goals simultaneously: improve the health of the Klamath River and its tributaries, improve the health of the anadromous fishery, and train unemployed tribal members to become experts in the new and growing field of watershed restoration. All three goals are served by reducing sediment flow into streams. In late October, the first group of 16 tribal members, 14 men and two women, completed four months of intensive training. They acquired the whole spectrum of needed skills, including mapping, recognizing potential landslides, calculating slope, and operating excavators and other heavy equipment. They learned mostly on the job, repairing the logged-over watersheds of McGarvey and Ah Pah Creeks.

Their job prospects appear to be good. Both public agencies and private landowners on the north coast will be required to adopt and carry out habitat conservation plans for threatened and endangered anadromous fish species. This will inevitably require watershed restoration, and the Yurok will have qualified crews ready to take on the job.

The Yurok Tribe, with 4,000 members, is the largest tribe in California. It was formally organized in 1988 with the passage of the Hoopa-Yurok Settlement Act. The 59,000-acre Yurok Reservation extends 44 miles upstream from the estuary, a mile on each side of the Klamath River, and encompasses more than 24 tributaries, which drain 450 square miles of forest lands. About 80 percent of the Lower Klamath watershed, however, is under the ownership of Simpson Timber.

With the formal organization of the Tribe came the sovereign government's responsibility to manage the Tribe's affairs. The fisheries' resources are one of the Tribe's most impormant assets. However, "it was soon obvious: the tribal right to 50 percent of the fishery was meaningless unless we restored the fishery," said Fletcher. This would require cooperation with Simpson Timber and others.

O'Dell, who taught in the forestry department at Humboldt Sate University from 1971-79, knows well why the soil is eroding and what that does to the fish. "Early timber operators - even though they followed what were the best practices at that time - built bridges, 'Humboldt crossings,' with not much thought about coming back." They made corduroy paths by laying logs across streambeds, then dragged the cut trees out with teams of horses and oxen. They built layouts - mounds of earth for trees to fall into - and left them to become sources of sediment. "We inherited many of these, and we built some as well," said O'Dell. "Their lifetime is over."

Simpson is the largest timber company on the north coast, with 456,000 acres in Humboldt, Del Norte, and Trinity Counties. Because it has been family-owned from its beginning in 1890, it is not driven to maximize profits as some publicly-owned timber firms are. "We tend to spend a lot more on rehabilitation, management, tree improvement, and genetics. And our ability to respond to opportunities is better," said O'Dell. After the northern spotted owl was listed as threatened, "we checked if we had these birds and found we did. So we did the biological assessments, wrote a habitat conservation plan, and acquired an incidental-take permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service so we could continue to conduct our business." This was the first habitat conservation plan for the owl to be adopted and approved in the entire northwest. In autumn 1994, as the coho and steelhead were being considered for listing, Simpson was ready to be even more proactive.

"We know that the public has a big interest in our business," said O'Dell. "The Endangered Species Act has been a very potent force in driving changes in timber practices, and it increased everyone's awareness of public trust resources - air, water, and wildlife. I feel, however, that federal regulators made poor decisions because they were required to act before the complete biological evidence was available."

In the early 1990s, the Coastal Conservancy's north coast representative, Mark Wheetley, approached the Tribe and Simpson Timber with the suggestion that the agency could play a useful role here for everyone's benefit. The Conservancy has helped to resolve many tough land use conflicts up and down the coast by bringing diverse interests together on common ground.

In the early days of logging, corduroy roads were built in streambeds so horses or oxen could haul out ancient trees.

"In the beginning, both were quite wary - not only of each other but also of us," said Wheetley. For a company in the business of cutting trees, neither Indians nor state agencies concerned with conservation were necessarily good news. To many Yurok people, the words "state" and "federal" brought back memories of the 1986 fishing wars. Masten recalls that "agents in full riot gear were on the river to stop Yurok gillnet fishermen, even while non-Indians continued to fish." She recalls a bumper sticker: "Save the salmon: can an Indian." The Tribe now manages its own fishery. Yet both parties saw merit in Wheetley's proposal.

To build the foundation for a common effort, the Conservancy funded a study by Balance Hydrologics, Inc., that led to publication of Background Report and Strategic Workplan for Watershed Restoration Planning for the Lower Klamath, covering all the watershed lands below the confluence with the Trinity River. It confirmed what was already common knowledge: the main cause of impaired habitat in the tributaries was sedimentation - the consequence of intensive logging and road building on naturally fragile slopes in the 1950s-70s.

Because rainfall in the steep-sided Lower Klamath is higher and the soil more erodible than farther inland, 10 to 20 times more sediment runs into creeks and rivers here than upstream, according to the report. This silt fills pools where salmon would have spawned and builds sandbanks at the mouths of most tributaries, preventing the passage of both adults and juveniles.

Many meetings were held before the Partnership was formally entered into in 1996. A goal was adopted: increase habitat for four key species - coho, chinook, steelhead, and cutthroat trout - in the tributaries by reducing sediment flow. The Coastal Conservancy provided $200,000 to the Northern California Indian Development Council, a nonprofit organization based in Eureka, to work with the Partnership to prepare a strategic plan and prioritize tributaries to ensure that the work would begin where the highest return for the investment could be expected. McGarvey Creek was selected as the first restoration site, and the Tribe obtained funding to conduct an inventory.

Pacific Watershed Associates was hired to train tribal staff to quantify the major causes of sedimentation. "A lot of other organizations would hire consultants to do the work for them," said Fletcher. "We wanted the consultants to train our tribal people to do the work from beginning to end." The Partnership used this information in applying for funds for a pilot program - part of a four-month training program for tribal members - that would begin to repair the hydrology on McGarvey Creek. From 11 different sources, the Tribe raised more than $700,000.

The first day she climbed into one of these huge earthmovers she had been terrified. Never in her life had she expected to be doing this when she signed up for the training in watershed restoration offered by the Tribe. "Now I get a thrill every time I get on that thing," she said. "You do have some fear; you need it so you don't get overconfident. You have to be coordinated - it's like a joystick on a game board. And that's not the only satisfaction: "The other day I worked on a stream crossing, and when I saw the fish come down after we cleaned it, that felt good." Little had worked at two jobs to make ends meet. Now she expects that one job, with better pay, will do fine. With her new skills, her employment outlook is good.

"So now we have staff that can do assessments, inventories, and watershed maps," said Fletcher. "We have people who can look at a stream crossing and measure the dirt to be removed. We have equipment operators who can survey a site and jump on the equipment to do the work."

The contractors conducting this training are David Burnson and Richard Duree, partners in TerraWave, Systems, Inc., which offers educational programs in watershed management. "What we're doing is hydrological decommissioning," said Duree. "It's not really restoration. We're reforming the earth so that water can go where it wants to go without sediment load." Once that is done, plants and trees will do the rest. He pointed to places where a rivulet of water would eventually cause a landslide, to places that, flattened out to create landings for logs to be felled, now gathered and held water. He looked happily at a stump Connie Little had placed at the former entrance to a road she had closed. "It's a satisfying feeling when you close off a road," he said. "You realize you just gave it back to the bears."

Connie Little was terrified on her first day, but Richard Duree saw she had the "delicate touch" needed to run an excavator.

There are about 2,000 miles of road in the 450-square-mile watershed, according to the Tribe's watershed restoration director, Jim Bond. Some are to be closed and hydrologically decommissioned, the rest need stormproofing. With three crews of three people each, (the number trained so far) that's 20-25 years of work, Bond figures. With more crews, of course, the watershed's health could be improved more quickly.

Whether the jobs materialize will depend on willingness to invest public funds to restore fisheries, streams, and forest lands. Some federal and state funds are available under various programs, including President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan, which aims to generate new jobs and economic opportunities in the wake of the timber industry's decline. But funding opportunities need to be expanded, says Fletcher.

Would Simpson Timber hire the Yurok crews? "I can see that as a possibility," says O'Dell. To those who question the expenditure of public funds to restore private lands, he responds that "it's not just a private problem, it's a much broader issue. The only way we can remediate these watersheds is through cooperation."

O'Dell is pleased with the way the partnership with the Yurok Tribe has worked thus far. It's been successful, he says, because it is a relationship of "equality, ability to discuss issues openly, and ability to stay on the agenda without getting into ancillary issues. They don't interfere with our timber business, we don't interfere with their fishery. It's very important that people working together have mutual respect for each other. Without Troy Fletcher, it likely wouldn't have happened. We hope now we can march right on up to the top of the Lower Klamath."

But the heart of the culture is linked to the salmon, and the hope is that salmon can once again become a main means of sustenance. "The more salmon, the better for everyone. What we are doing is for everyone's benefit," said Fletcher.

In Eureka, Jimmy Smith, a commercial fisherman for decades, agrees. On the first day of the autumn chinook season, he scanned the water for the Humboldt Bay fishing fleet and saw only three boats out. "Now it's all geared up so there are probably 12," he said sadly. "In the '70s, there could have been 300." The California fleet has shrunk from 6,000 vessels licensed to fish to fewer than 2,000, and many of those who hold licenses now don't actually go out on the water. "I don't think people realize the magnitude of the pain," Smith said. As to the future? "It's grim," he said. "The only hope is that someday we will get a state and federal administration that decides it's important to protect some of the resources we all depend on."

He has nothing but praise for the Yurok-Simpson project, and the overall fisheries management by the Tribe. "Not only have they shown they are capable; they've been able to demonstrate they have the staffing, the education, and the ability to implement restoration programs as well as or better than anyone else. I was a skeptic at first. But they'll forge ahead. They won't slow down. They told me that and I believe it."

Humboldt County Supervisor John Woolley sees the Partnership on the Klamath as "a model of major magnitude for restoration of Pacific Coast fisheries, wildlife, and wetlands. As a society we all have to recognize that we can't do much about the past; we have to find ways to work together toward the future."