- elevation 868 ft (265 m) - elevation 338 ft (103 m) Basin area 945.3 km² Country United States of America | - location Southeast of Anderson Length 76 km Mouth Sacramento River | |
- left South Fork Battle Creek, Spring Branch Battle Creek - right North Fork Battle Creek - location Near Manton, California Source South Fork, Madera County, California | ||
Battle Creek is a 16.6-mile-long (26.7 km) creek located in Shasta and Tehama Counties, California. It is a major tributary to the Sacramento River.
Map of Battle Creek, California, USA
The eastern side of the Battle Creek watershed falls within the northernmost part of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, as it transitions into the southern Cascade range. The undisturbed part of the watershed is richly diverse in both plant and animal species. The tributaries of Battle Creek originate from dozens of underground springs.
The creek is part of a $67 million Chinook salmon restoration project, a PG&E Battle Creek Hydroelectric Project. Many adjacent properties hold conservation easements protecting them from development.
In addition to the Chinook salmon, the creek has steelhead, rainbow, and brown trout. Counterintuitively, first-year data from a post-wildfire soil erosion study funded by Sierra Pacific Industries, a large industrial timber company, show that control sites disturbed only by fire produced substantially more water runoff and soil erosion than did sites that received post-wildfire salvage logging. However, given this document was written by an employee of the large timber company which has extensively salvage logged the watershed, the results are questionable. Furthermore, two hydrologists' reviews of the document found substantial flaws in it.
The industrial timberland in the Battle Creek watershed is upstream of the restoration project. The clearcutting and post-fire salvage logging which has been occurring since 1998 is the subject of the documentary film "Clearcut Nation", produced by local residents. A Citizen’s Water Monitoring Project has been collecting water quality data both upstream and downstream of the industrial timberland since 2009. This data was analyzed by a statistical hydrologist in 2014.