Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Kep'el, CA

Kep'el is an unincorporated community and census-designated place within the Yurok Indian Reservation in Humboldt County, on the lower Klamath River in northwestern California.

Kep'el occupies the site of one of the principal historic Yurok villages on the Klamath River, in a homeland where Yurok people have lived alongside the river's salmon runs for thousands of years.

In traditional times, Yurok people from villages up and down the river gathered at Kep'el each year to build the great Kepel fish dam, a weir across the Klamath that took ten days to build and was deliberately torn down after ten days of fishing so salmon could continue upriver.

The Kepel fish dam was so significant in Yurok culture that anthropologists T. T. Waterman and A. L. Kroeber devoted a well-known 1938 ethnographic study, 'The Kepel Fish Dam,' to it.

Kep'el first appeared as a census-designated place in the 2020 U.S. census, which counted a population of 76.

Nearly three-quarters of Kep'el's residents - 56 of its 76 people - were Native American at the 2020 census, reflecting the community's Yurok identity.

Kep'el's 76 residents are spread across about 3.6 square miles of forested river country at an elevation of 866 feet, a density of only about 21 people per square mile.

In 2021 the Yurok Tribe partnered with The Trust for Public Land to protect more than 2,000 acres of forestland and prairie surrounding Ke'pel Creek, a tributary of the Klamath River near the community, for hunting, gathering and ceremonial use.