Redwood Creek

Redwood Creek is the small steelhead stream that runs out of Redwood National Park and meets the ocean at Orick. It drains about 280 square miles of steep, rain-fed Coast Range hills with no dam and no hatchery, so the winter steelhead here are all wild, mostly 4 to 8 pounds, and in practice every one goes back. The legal water is short: from the mouth up to Bond Creek, roughly ten miles, and CDFW shuts all of it whenever the Orick gauge reads under 300 CFS. The live gauge and the NOAA forecast on this page are the reason to look here first. They tell you whether the creek is open, and whether it will still be open by the weekend.

The fishing comes down to the drop after a storm. The creek rises and falls fast, but it clears slowly, because decades of logging-road erosion left fine sediment through the channel, and it stays off-color days longer than the Smith. In late December 2025 it peaked at 11,600 CFS at Orick, fell to about 1,400 CFS ten days later, and was under 1,000 CFS by mid-January. Roughly 500 to 1,500 CFS with a green tint is the window. A dry spell then pulls it under the 300 CFS line in a few weeks, which happened on February 6, 2026. Through Orick it runs flat between flood-control levees. Above Prairie Creek, inside the park, it turns into braided gravel bars, riffles and log jams, and that is the better fly water. Swing a light sink-tip and a dark leech, or drift an egg with a stonefly nymph under an indicator in the softer seams. It is wade-only water. A drift boat has no place in the legal reach.

Few people fish it, and almost nothing is written about it. No shop or guide publishes a Redwood Creek report, and the regional columns mention it only on the low-flow open-or-closed list, so you will be scouting runs on your own. Most Humboldt steelheaders drive past it to the Smith, the Mad or the Eel, which means a good drop can leave you alone on the gravel with the elk. Plan on late December through March, and in a normal winter expect six to ten fishable weeks at most. Steelhead, coho and Chinook here are all listed as threatened. Keep fish wet, and stay off the spawning gravel in January and February. Check the CDFW low-flow page before you drive.