VIEWED FROM ABOVE, Northern California’s Eel River looks like two hundred miles of indecision; a waterway that couldn’t quite decide whether it wanted to reach the ocean or not. It’s a salmon and steelhead river running through a Mediterranean climate. Starting on the flanks of Bald Mountain in the Mendocino National Forest, the Eel begins by flowing south, then turns north and parallels the coast for more than a hundred miles before entering the Pacific west of Fortuna.
Near its headwaters, the Eel empties into
