LOS ANGELES — This fog-shrouded patch of coastal forest in the heart of Northern California's Yurok Country was tended by the tribe for millennia.

But in the Gold Rush era it was taken away and, later, used by the logging industry, reshaping the landscape.

Now, as the land heals from the scars of a long-running lumber mill, it has been returned to its original stewards, who will operate it as a public gateway to Redwood National and State Parks about 50 miles south of the Oregon border.

Save the Redwoods League last month conveyed the 125-acre property to the Yurok Tribe following a years-long project to restore the degraded industrial site to a diverse riparian habitat. It opens to the public Saturday as 'O Rew Redwoods Gateway, which features interpretive exhibits and trails leading to old-growth redwood groves.

The announcement comes as California's most populous Indigenous nation works to reclaim its homelands, a mission inscribed in its constitution. The Yurok Tribe has so far regained 60,000 acres — about 12% — of its 500,000-acre ancestral territory, which stretches along the North Coast and the Klamath River, according to a spokesman. The majority was returned in a series of transactions that culminated last year in what is thought to be the largest "land back" deal in state history.

The gateway's 'O Rew name doesn't have a direct translation in English, said Rosie Clayburn, director of the Yurok Tribe's Cultural Resources Department. The land is known as a place where trails come together, she said. It sits at the confluence of Prairie Creek and Redwood Creek, important fish-bearing streams where Yurok people once caught steelhead and salmon.

But the Yurok lost 90% of their land, including 'O Rew, during the Gold Rush. Although many families stayed — Clayburn calls it an "attempted colonization" — they endured massacres, boarding schools and other atrocities as invaders sought to extract abundant stores of salmon and old-growth coast redwoods.

Some of those trees were milled at 'O Rew when it operated as the Orick Mill for more than 50 years, starting in 1954.

The mill builders dug a new channel for Prairie Creek and paved over the floodplain. What was once a meandering stream became a straight and narrow trench, shoved off to the side of the property against Highway 101, said Barry McCovey, director of the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department. The move wiped out a variety of aquatic habitat, like ponds and slow-moving waters that act as nurseries for juvenile salmonids, McCovey said.

"All the life that depends on that stream, whether it's salmon or lamprey or bugs, had evolved with that stream having this active connection with its floodplain and off-channel ponds" he said. "When you disconnect the stream from its floodplain and put it into a man-made channel, you lose all that habitat complexity, and you start to lose some of those species."

McCovey described Prairie Creek as key habitat for coho salmon, which are federally protected in this portion of California. The stream has the potential to be particularly productive because its headwaters are already protected under the jurisdiction of Redwood National and State Parks, he said.

Save the Redwoods League purchased the property in 2013. After years of planning, the nonprofit in 2021 launched a $33-million restoration effort with the Yurok Tribe and the nonprofit California Trout. The project was funded by a combination of philanthropic and public sources, including support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California State Coastal Conservancy and California Wildlife Conservation Board.

Yurok Tribe construction and fisheries crews pulled up roughly 20 acres of thick asphalt, restored the channel to a mile-long braided waterway and built wetlands and two ponds. They added logs and woody debris to the water to create deep pools and other places for baby fish to hide.

Yurok revegetation crews culled invasive weeds and planted nearly half a million native seedlings across 50 species, including redwoods and black cottonwood.

Juvenile coho salmon began to use the ponds within weeks. The site has also attracted blue herons, kingfishers, otters, deer, bears, California condors and a resident herd of elk notorious for tearing up new seedlings.

"They're kind of mischievous — they tend to pull up trees we just planted," said Steve Mietz, president and chief executive of the Save the Redwoods League. "It almost seems like a game. They're not even eating them."

The tribally operated and maintained gateway will be free to the public. Crews also built a pedestrian plaza with lunch tables and a mile of new trails that provide access to the popular Lady Bird Johnson Grove inside Redwood National and State Parks.

"It's been an amazing transformation to see it turning from what was essentially a giant parking lot into what is now this absolutely gorgeous property," Mietz said.

The project creates a new southern gateway to Redwoods National and State Parks. More important, it provides an orientation to the famed destination through Yurok culture, said Jessica Carter, senior program director at Save the Redwoods League.

"It's so exciting to see the land returned to its original stewards," she said, "and to welcome the world in to experience it."

Although Redwood National and State Parks draws more than a million visitors a year and is a world UNESCO site, until recently, you could visit and never know that Indigenous people lived there, Clayburn said. Now, she said, when people visit Yurok ancestral territory, they'll know.

'O Rew features interpretive exhibits that tell the story of the site and the Yurok people from a Yurok perspective, she said. An information kiosk resembles a traditional Yurok house. Even the seating is a nod to Yurok culture — designed to resemble traditional stools and, in one instance, a canoe.

The tribe hopes to also reconstruct a Yurok village and build a cultural center to serve as both a gathering hub and a repository of items repatriated from museums and institutions, Clayburn said.

Many Yurok people had a complicated relationship with the mill, she said. On the one hand, the Yurok believe that redwoods are living beings and use them only to build special and specific things like homes or canoes.

On the flip side, many Yurok became loggers or mill workers to support their families, she said. Although that may have been primarily out of necessity, they viewed their work with pride.

"Now, you have this multi-generational thing happening where you have folks whose parents and grandparents might have worked at that mill who are actually working on that landscape, restoring it, so that's kind of beautiful," Clayburn said.

"By healing the land and healing our environment, healing our waters, that's healing our people too."

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