LAST SUMMER, paddlers who pulled their boats onto a wet strip of sand near Forestville in Sonoma County were met by private security guards and signs telling them to leave.
The fight wasn’t new. It was the latest round of an old Russian River argument: where does private property end, where does the public’s right to be on the river begin, and who — if anyone — is going to walk down to the beach and sort it out?
Homeowners along the river have real complaints: noise, trash, fire risk, the steady grind of summer crowds, people wandering into their actual yards. River users have real rights: floating, swimming, fishing, boating, hauling boats around a shallow stretch, and the ordinary use of a river that thousands of Californians have grown up on.
Most of the time the two sides coexist. They run into each other when a neighborhood strings a buoy line, hires a guard or builds a barrier where the public has a right to be.
That’s been the picture at Hacienda Beach in Forestville, one of the most visible flashpoints on the lower river. Last summer, signs and buoys warned boaters off a beach that county officials and river advocates said was, in substantial part, below the high-water line and open to the public. The California State Lands Commission hasn’t gone in and drawn a formal line on that stretch. The signs are expected to go up again. The sheriff and the California Highway Patrol cover long pieces of river with thin patrols. Nobody with a badge is walking the wet sand on a regular basis.
The county supervisor whose district covers most of the river has been saying the law is clear for at least two summers.
“The law is clear that obstruction of a navigable waterway is not allowed, and that the public has a right to access the beach up to the ordinary high water mark,” District 5 Supervisor Lynda Hopkins said in 2024, in the middle of the Vacation Beach fence fight just downstream of Hacienda.
Hopkins also pointed to ongoing violations of those rules across the Russian River and the need for clearer ways to enforce them. Two summers later, many of the obstructions are still there. The enforcement is still not.
Ownership stops at the high-water line
This summer, the same fight is set to start up again. And for the next 20 days, the state agency with the clearest say over California’s rivers is asking the public what to do about it.
The California State Lands Commission — the agency that looks after the state’s interest in tidelands, rivers and the ground under the water — opened a public comment window Friday on its 2026-2030 Strategic Plan. Comments close at 11:59 p.m. on May 31, and go in through a Microsoft Forms link.
For anyone planning a summer on the lower Russian River, from the Dry Creek mouth south of Healdsburg to the sea at Jenner, the rules underlying the fight aren’t all that complicated.
A state appeals court ruled in 1976 that the Russian River is a public river — navigable is the legal word for it. That case, Hitchings v. Del Rio Woods, is the backbone of the public’s rights here.
On a public river in California, nobody owns the water itself. And nobody owns the land below the high-water line — that’s how high the river reaches when it’s running full.
A house along the river? On paper, the owner’s property line might run all the way out to the middle of the river. In the area where the ocean tide pushes in, the state of California may actually own the ground beneath the water.
Below the high-water line, you have a right to be there. The only thing that changes is who might come yelling at you.
But neither of those things cancels what you can do. You can float past in a boat. You can fish. You can swim. You can drag your kayak around a shallow, rocky spot. You can stand on the shore, as long as you stay below the high-water line.
For somebody in a kayak, what that adds up to on the ground is the same in both cases. Below the high-water line, you have a right to be there. The only thing that changes is who might come yelling at you.
None of that means you can cross somebody’s yard to get to the water. You still have to come in by boat, from a public park or road, or down an old public right-of-way. On the Russian River, some of those old rights-of-way are a fight of their own.
But once you’re on the river, the public’s right does not stop at the water’s edge.
“It’s pretty cut and dry,” Dave Steindorf of American Whitewater, a national paddlers’ group, said in a recent interview. “People can float rivers. They can portage around them. They can use the beaches. That’s not ambiguous from our perspective.”
The high-water line isn’t a line on a map. It’s something you can see on the bank — the place where moving water has scoured the ground clean, where bare gravel gives way to grass and willow, where winter trash hangs in branches or piles up along the shore.
Steindorf’s rule of thumb: if it got wet this year, you’re almost certainly inside it.
Where the friction starts
It’s not the only test river people use. Don McEnhill, deputy director and former executive director of Russian Riverkeeper, has described a version for low, gently sloping beaches: on a flat beach, the first several dozen feet up from the waterline are usually within the part the public can use. Steindorf has also said that on a river, ground close to the water with no plants growing on it is a strong sign the area gets washed over — because plants don’t survive being scrubbed every winter.
The legal boundary is more technical than any of that. State Lands can pin down the high-water line through surveys, agreements with neighbors and court cases. But when you have someone who knows their California constitutional rights to use the river, and a fed-up homeowner who just wants to have privacy and peace and quiet, that’s where the friction starts.
Steindorf’s read is that on rivers like the Russian, the real problem isn’t usually the law. It’s information, behavior, and the absence of any local body set up to get landowners, river users and law enforcement in the same room.
On the South Fork of the American River, he said, a similar set of fights decades ago gave way over time to patrols, parking, bathrooms and paid river staff. The corridor is now a point of regional pride and a working piece of the rural economy.
The Russian isn’t there yet.
But the comment window is the first time in years the agency with authority over California’s rivers has formally asked the public what its priorities should be. The current plan calls public access and good stewardship core duties. Whether the next one treats them as something the state goes out and does, or only as something it deals with when somebody complains, is being decided right now.
“People need to understand both sides of it,” Steindorf said. “You have a right to use the river. You also have a responsibility to use it well.”
Jeff Venturino, an organizer with the same group, put it more bluntly.
“You’re allowed to use the river. It’s your right as a Californian,” Venturino said. “You need to treat it with respect. And all the rest of the state’s laws are still in force while you’re there.”
Summer crowds on the way
Two things are worth carrying into summer.
Below the high-water line, the public’s rights are real — especially in the tidal lower river — even where the getting-in spots and exact boundaries are still being argued. If somebody asks you to leave wet sand or gravel that’s plainly inside that zone, you might be within your rights to say no. But no version of a Russian River summer gets better with a run-in with a security guard or a confrontational neighbor.
And there’s a way to push for change.
The public comment window is open through May 31. Anybody who has stood on a Russian River beach with a security guard walking toward them has something to tell the people writing the next plan.
The summer crowds will be here soon. The questions are not yet answered.