off the pavement / By Hank Sims

Down on the Delta

It’s a whole ’nother world out Loleta way

(Oct. 25, 2007) 

Looking toward Pedrazzini Park from Cock Robin Island. Photos by Hank Sims.

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You think of the great Humboldt County outdoors and first you think of one of two things: deep dark redwood forests or stark, windswept beaches. Afterward, you think of the mountains, the oak-and-madrone scrub to our east and south. Then the bay. Dunes. Rivers. Bottoms. Valleys. Lakes.

You can keep going down the list, working your way through all 3,572 square miles of the Humboldt County landscape, and chances are it’ll take you quite a while before you get to “swamp.” But swamp — or “marsh” or “wetlands,” if you prefer — was once one of the defining features of the area all around Humboldt Bay. Early European settlers bogged down in it and cursed it, even as they unknowingly profited from the richness of its biota. They diked it and drained it as quickly as they could.

But Humboldt County swampland survives, and not just in man-made wetland theme parks like the Arcata Marsh. Get down to the mouth of the Eel sometime, out west of Loleta down Cannibal Road. Take a trip over the bridge out to Cock Robin Island, out there in the middle of the river, on a rainy winter day. Look out over the swollen estuary and squint your eyes. Let your mind drift with the water. Except for the temperature, you might as well be standing somewhere in backwoods Louisiana or in the Everglades.

“You feel that Delta feeling — all the channels, wending around the island,” says Hawk Martin, owner of the waterborne expedition outfit known as Humboats. “You expect to see a tupelo gum tree out there.”

Acre for acre, there’s few places in the county as rich in natural beauty as the area around Loleta, and it’s densely packed with gorgeous and remarkably underutilized public facilities. Get out a map and draw a rectangle upon it, with the south shore of Humboldt Bay and the Eel River estuary to north and south, the Pacific Ocean and Highway 101 to west and east. Inside the rectangle, you’ll find the bay hiking trails and kayak put-ins at Hookton Slough. You’ll find the public hunting and hiking land on Cock Robin Island. You’ll find Crab Park, the strange, beautiful beach at the mouth of the Eel. And you’ll find the South Spit — the massive wild dunes that separate the bay from the ocean.

Crab Park, at the mouth of the Eel.

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