on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Boom or Bluff?

Natural gas prospectors are swarming the Eel River Valley, making some folks hot.

(March 1, 2007)  Some time ago — about 10 million years, around about the time humanlike apes were transitioning to apelike humans and dogs were starting to look like dogs — the Eel River Delta was taking shape. Great quantities of land continuously washed into the ocean, forming layers of sand, rotting plants and other deposits atop another deeply complicated geologic structure.

Nine million years later, the delta and surrounding area, always fitful what with two tectonic plates shoving under an opposing third plate, folded like ribbon candy and jumped up and down into broken blocks. In some of these compressed and faulted layers, hydrocarbons formed from the rotting plants, saturating the pores in the sandstone and rising until they hit an impermeable layer of rock in the tops of the folds.

Calvin Shultz, Weymouth Bluff rancher. Photo by Heidi Walters.

GALLERY >

Then, in 1963, some men from Zephyr Oil Co. came along poking holes into the tiny bit of Eel River Delta raised above the ocean. They weren’t the first humans here — up until about 1850, Wiyot Indians had thrived for thousands of years down in the verdant bottomlands pocked with conifers and seamed with alder-lined creeks. And they weren’t the first men to seek hydrocarbons in Humboldt County — gas wells on Tompkins Hill, to the northeast of Eel River, have been producing since the late 1930s, and people had long ago tapped into oil and gas reserves in the rugged region to the south in Briceland and the obviously-named Petrolia.

Anyway, these Zephyr men came along looking for oil. Finding none — just a buncha pesky gas — they went away. More petro-men came exploring in the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s. They, too, found gas. They, too, plugged their wells and went away, and it grew quiet out there.

Until recently, that is. In the past five or six years, it seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry Gas Man has been sniffing around the Grizzly Bluff Gas Field in the Eel River Basin. They want that natural gas. They’re driving up and down the skinny, oft-flooded ranch roads named after the people living in the faded Victorians and farmhouses alongside them, no doubt getting chased by that feisty pair of caramel-colored shepherds down in that one elbow bend, and knocking on doors to ask folks to pretty please sign some papers. May we lease your mineral rights? May we build a road on your land, bury a pipe, build a well pad? May we come on your property and lay some cables and, just for a couple of weeks, shoot some explosives into the ground to size up the subsurface geology? It’s for America, ma’am, so we can become self-sufficient and get off that foreign oil. Maybe Ferndale, now on propane, will get hooked up to gas. And you might make some money off it.

Dozens of ranchers have signed on. But a few are balking. It’s an intrusion, they say. A gamble, where the gas man wins biggest and hauls his loot back to Texas or Bakersfield or somewhere twangy like that. And nobody’s actually committed to hooking up Ferndale. Is all this disturbance worth it?

Calvin Shultz is 49, a big man, often clad in loose faded jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt under a dark padded vest. He’s got a short-cropped oval mustache-and-beard and wears a ball cap on his balding head. He drives a big pickup and wears brown leather work boots. Runs a hundred sheep, more or less, up on his 96-acre hilly ranch on Weymouth Bluff, east of Ferndale overlooking the Eel River Valley. Makes his real living installing wood and gas stoves in people’s houses.

If you were the conclusion-jumping sort, you might jump to one about Shultz. A Republican, probably. And if you drove out to his ranch and stopped to read the sign posted on a tree at the entrance to his long driveway, you’d be certain of it. It’s a trespassers-beware notice, talking about a person’s constitutional right to keep and bear arms and to defend against unreasonable search and seizure of his property. At the bottom it’s signed, “Briceland Family Ranch.” It’s something his son Jonathan, in a fit of fury, printed from the Internet after those gas guys came around one too many times.

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