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cultural practices. In 1984, they restored the Jump Dance at Pek-won, along the Klamath River. In 2000, they brought the White Deerskin Dance, also a 10-day ceremony, back at Weitchpec, where the Trinity River flows into the Klamath. It is a world-renewal dance. Both it and the Jump Dance, Peters said, are connected, and used to take place every two years. They are called high dance ceremonies. “Not many other tribal nations in the world has that healing and renewing the earth as a central, philosophical approach to who they are as people,” Peters said. “We — Yurok and other groups here in Northern California — that’s why we’re put here, to heal and renew the earth. It’s our central purpose in life.”
A guy once told Don Allen
that he used to gather butter clams on a beach at Stone Lagoon. “And when the lagoon got full, he would not be able to get to his butter clams,” Allen said. So the man would take a shovel out to the spit and start the breach. “I know a guy who did that with his boot,” Allen added. Terry Roelofs said he, too, saw a guy taking a boot to Stone Lagoon’s spit. He figured the man would have been swept away if he’d succeeded. “I’ve threatened lawsuits against one of my best friends for breaching out Big Lagoon,” Roelofs said. “I was so pissed. It messed up a field trip up there at the lagoon. And he was so thrilled, so excited just to see it go! My concern was for wa-
View from the highway in late December of Stone Lagoon and its recently breached spit. The lagoon has breached five times since February 2003, according to California State Park records. Photo by Ken Malcomson
terfowl nests in that marsh out there. And when that thing is drained for the summer, it significantly reduces the surface area of the lagoon.” Someone breached the lagoon in the summer of 1993, just after hatchery bred young cutthroat trout had been planted in the lagoon. The next winter, Roelofs said, fish traps in the creek yielded just seven cutthroat — there’d been more than 2,200 in there before the breach. The theory was that most of the planted cutthroats had gone through the breach (some were later seen in Redwood Creek). It closed, and they couldn’t get back in. Stone Lagoon won’t breach naturally in late spring or summer. The water is too
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low. Both Big and Stone lagoons need the winter rains to raise their levels above the ocean. Then, lagoon water seeps through the sand, and washes over it, nibbling away. Once open, over a couple of days the lagoon level drops to sea level. Big Lagoon breaches frequently because it has two big creeks flowing into it, filling it more often. Stone Lagoon just has McDonald Creek and its small north fork. Stone’s watershed needs at least 60 inches of total rainfall in a season for the lagoon to breach, according to a breach study published in 2006 by Humboldt State student Jill Beckmann. This happens, she found, on average about two out of three years.
The irregular regime — the timing — at Stone Lagoon seems to work well for the creatures living in it. When it’s closed, the fish and other animals grow and proliferate. When it opens, small creatures might get washed out, it’s true. But big ocean fish ready to spawn can come in. It stays open until the longshore currents and waves rebuild the spit again. On Jan. 10, Ken Bechtol, the rowboater, wrote to a friend saying the breach at Stone Lagoon had closed. He was keeping an eye on it. “At a 3.5 foot tide, wave wash just carried over to the lagoon side at 5 to 10 minute intervals,” he wrote. “Water is just above previous breach level … .” l