Smith River, California and Oregon
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candidate
- Smith River, photo courtesy of Tim Palmer
On California’s far northern coast, the Smith drains the Klamath and Siskiyou Mountains of southwest Oregon and northwest California and heads straight for the Pacific. The Smith is a beautiful, large coastal river that supports an astonishing diversity and abundance of fish runs, including wild winter and summer steelhead, spring and fall Chinook salmon, a small return of chum salmon, and coastal cutthroat trout and lamprey. The Smith’s ownership is largely dominated by two national forests, with limited permanent protection of lands within the watershed.
