Talk:Eel River (California)

Rationale for assessment
clearly beyond a stub, but does not yet reach B class. in terms of importance, this is a long river with complex tributary system that travels through significant wilderness areas of high ecological value. has also been the subject of considerable environmental controversy. Anlace 04:26, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Overhaul
Hi.. I began to make a few edits to this page and ended up doing a large overhaul. If I made any mistakes or took out something important, my apologies -- feel free to fix and edit! Essentially I copyeditted the text, added some links, removed redundant links and some redlinks, organized the sections a little, added references and a geobox.

Some comments. The page said "The Eel River is the third largest river in California" -- an unclear statement (3rd largest by what measure?) Reading the Friends of the Eel River page I found the "3rd largest" claim as being the watershed, so I clarified and footnoted. Also clarified the "five counties" as including all the tributaries. The main Eel flows through four as far as I can tell. I'm guessing the fifth is Glenn County, in which a few headwater streams originate according to my map. I also took out the comments about "great mountains", "majestic and ancient redwood forests" -- true enough! But a bit sensationalized for an encyclopedia.

Removed the external links to historical landmarks as they seemed tangential at best, and the linked-to pages had little or no mention of the Eel River. Also removed the wikipedia links from the external links section. They could go into the "See also" section, but, as above, they seemed tangential at best. I also removed link to Humboldt Redwoods State Park, since there is already a link to Humboldt Redwoods State Park, which is good enough. The Friends of the Eel River link I kept. Its the only external link now. Feel free to edit my changes if I'm out of line!

I removed the "Top 10 historical flood events" section because I can't tell what purpose it serves, being just a list with no explanation (also, it would go out of date if future floods reach the top 10). But in case there's a good reason for the section, I've copied it here:

Top 10 historical flood events
Monitored @ Fort Seward (1955 flood totals missing here. Why, since it was the largest on record until the Great Flood of 64?)
 * 1) 82.60 ft on December 22nd 1964 (561000 ft³/s)
 * 2) 59.27 ft on February 17th 1986 (306000 ft³/s)
 * 3) 57.34 ft on January 9th 1995 (287000 ft³/s)
 * 4) 56.75 ft on January 16th 1974 (281000 ft³/s)
 * 5) 51.20 ft on January 24th 1970 (230000 ft³/s)
 * 6) 50.08 ft on March 30th 1974 (221000 ft³/s)
 * 7) 47.88 ft on January 26th 1983 (201000 ft³/s)
 * 8) 46.49 ft on January 20th 1993 (195000 ft³/s)
 * 9) 43.60 ft on March 9th 1995 (166000 ft³/s)
 * 10) 43.33 ft on January 4th 1966 (163000 ft³/s)

I also removed redundant wiki-links and most of the redlinks, which seemed to mainly link to things unlikely to get pages made any time soon. The one I kept is Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness. I think all wildernesses deserve pages, but most unincorporate places (like Leggett, Piercy, Benbow, etc) don't, unless they are notable for some special reason. The redlinked "South Fork" town isn't even shown on the maps I have.

Also, there were apparently two images once on this page but removed due to copyright issues. Rather than have the wiki-code cluttering up the main page, I'm moving them here (invisible comments, click "edit page" to see the code):

A photo or two would be nice, I'll try to find one properly licensed.

Finally, I added a geobox and populated it with what info I could find. Usually I use the USGS GNIS data for source coordinates, but oddly enough, they appear to be wrong for the Eel River, indicating a "source" very near the mouth and clearly wrong. The page says, however, that the Eel "Heads on the south slope of Bald Mountain in Mendocino County". So I used topozone.com and found the source and used that for source coordinates and elevation. The page had mentioned "Hull Mountain", which is the name of the topo quad that includes Bald Mountain, so I dropped Hull and substituted Bald. The discharge stats are referenced, although the USGS's page for California streamflow data is annoying, the info is in there. The most-downriver stream gage seems to be at Scotia, above the Van Duzen River, so it is not the Eel's final, total discharge into the ocean, but it seems to be the best available data.

Anyway, hope I've done more help than harm! Pfly 23:12, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Updated geobox, some comments
Just a day or two ago I made some changes to the geobox, specifically moving from "geobox 1" to "geobox 2", which is basically the same but with some added features, and some weirdness about moved fields and field names and so on. I discovered the new geobox could automagically make a locator map with a dot for the river's mouth, which seems nifty. It doesn't work for every state yet, and I tried it out for California using the Eel River page. As a result of my eagerness to test this new feature, I ended up dropping some fields, specifically the tributaries. My mistake. I just updated the page again, hopefully adding the lost info back in correctly. But in doing it I came across a few issues. First, I had used GNIS's source coordinates, which I now realize are way to close to the river's mouth. And I see now on this talk page I already wrote about this very thing over a year ago. I was wondering where the page's source coordinates came from until I read my own comments just now. So ok, but one problem is that topozone.com no longer works the way it used to and the footnote reference probably won't work right. A different source should be used. I might be able to come up with one that uses USGS topo quads the way topozone did. I'll try. Also the old geobox had a map that was commented out, which I ended up removing. The map field was commented out, saying: "Commented out because image was deleted: | map = Eelrivermap2.jpg". Just thought this ought to be mentioned here in case that map ever reappears. Otherwise, I think I've corrected my poorly done geobox update. Sorry for the confusion. Oh and, hooray for the Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness page! Pfly (talk) 03:22, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok, I think I figured it out. There seems to be an error on the page. The "source" coordinates and the final "Sequence 29" coordinates appear wrong. At the least they are not on the "Hull Mountain" map quad as claimed. The "Sequence 28" coordinates are, however. So I used those for the source. Pfly (talk) 03:31, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Ambiguity in History section
The current history section includes a paragraph which reads thus:


 * As part of the Potter Valley or Eel River Project, a pair of dams were built across the upper reaches of the Eel beginning in 1906 to divert water to the much more populous but smaller Russian River drainage area to the south, resulting in a much higher flow in the smaller river and a drastically decreased flow in the Eel. In 1914, the Northwestern Pacific Railroad built a rail line running along much of the Eel River, and later, Pacific Coast Highway was constructed along the South Fork and along the Eel River downriver of the South Fork. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation proposed in the 1960s to construct the enormous Dos Rios Dam (Spanish: Two Rivers) near the confluence with the Middle Fork, to provide water storage (creating the largest man-made lake in California and the fifth largest in the United States) and to control flooding. The proposal was later defeated with public initiative to protect the remaining relatively wild rivers in the state. Nevertheless, the heavily changed ecology of the main stem downstream of the dam, combined with increased erosion from logging activities, almost wiped out the river's salmon run when several large storms hit in the 20th century.

Emphasis mine in the last sentence. It's unclear what location is being referred to there. Downstream of the proposed dam? Downstream of the diversionary dams (and if so, which one, or both?) I suggest the wording "downstream of the proposed dam" if the former is accurate, or "downstream of the preexisting dams" if it's the latter. Or something else if I'm completely wrong about both. Moppet (talk) 21:26, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Streamgages
The lowest USGS stream gage to the mouth is not at Scotia, there is one attached to Fernbridge. Gage and cam at this USGS page. The historical summary of all data is here. Ellin Beltz (talk) 19:43, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
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