Goat Rock and the Russian River Mouth

The Russian River meets the Pacific below Jenner across a sandbar that opens and closes on its own schedule. Through the dry months the waves pile sand across the mouth and the river backs up behind it into a lagoon; winter floods punch through again. Goat Rock, the big headland at the south end of the beach, is smaller than it was because people tried to change that.

Beginning in 1929, crews blasted rock out of Goat Rock and ran it on a narrow-gauge line to a jetty at the river mouth, meant to hold the channel open for barges. Storms wrecked the first rock-and-timber version, and it was rebuilt in the early 1930s in steel, rock and concrete. A seawall running north from Goat Rock came out of the same quarry, and pieces of it still break through the sand. Neither one kept the river open. The bar went on closing every summer.

Since 1995 the Sonoma County Water Agency has done the breaching with machinery, and a 2008 federal biological opinion changed what it is for. In summer the agency now tries to hold the lagoon high behind a shallow outlet channel, because young coho and steelhead grow better in fresh water than in the tide.

Harbor seals haul out on the sandspit at the mouth through the year. Watch them from a distance; a seal that lifts its head at you is already being disturbed.