Yuba Watershed Experience

The Master Plan for the Yuba Watershed Experience Center envisions a world-class, immersive learning environment that invites the local community, students, and visitors to engage deeply with the ecology, history, and engineering of the Yuba River watershed. In collaboration with DLR Group and led by the Yuba Water Agency, ATLAS Lab developed a landscape-forward master plan that adopts a restorative approach, integrating the built environment seamlessly into the land’s fabric.

The plan carefully sites new buildings within a blue oak savannah, preserving mature oak groves and restoring eroded embankments. Through the reestablishment of native vegetation, improved stormwater quality, and enhanced biodiversity, the landscape becomes an educational tool, illustrating the region’s mining history, ecological systems, and the interdependence of water and land. The experience center offers a diverse program of amenities, including accessible trails, outdoor classrooms, a zipline, a treehouse, and an amphitheater, all set within the restored landscape. At its core, the site serves as a community gathering space, offering infrastructure for cultural events, educational programming, and passive recreation, thereby fulfilling the Water Agency’s vision of a trustworthy public resource. Visitors are invited to follow the flow of stormwater through the site—downhill to the Yuba River—via a network of interpretive pullouts, field stations, and interactive learning moments. These elements create a hands-on, experiential journey that guides people through the watershed, revealing the interconnected processes that sustain it. Throughout the site, visual and physical connections to the Yuba River are intentionally crafted and celebrated, building a reciprocal relationship between people, place, and the river that sustains them.

about the project

Hammon Grove Park is situated along the Yuba River, just east of Marysville and directly across from the historic Yuba Goldfields. This site occupies a pivotal point in the watershed, where the river transitions from the slopes of the Sierra foothills to the flatlands of the Sacramento Valley. The landscape bears the physical and ecological imprint of this transformation, shaped by a complex history of mining, erosion, and river redirection. Once a meandering river weaving through fertile bottomlands, the Yuba was profoundly altered by hydraulic mining during the California Gold Rush. Massive sediment deposits—some as deep as 30 meters—filled the river’s natural floodplain, turning it into the largest gold dredge field in California. Between 1904 and 1968, over one billion cubic yards of sediment were dredged, pushing the river’s course northward by more than half a mile and carving a deep, narrow channel along the southern edge of Hammon Grove Park.

The Master Plan for the Yuba Watershed Experience Center, situated within the park, seeks to restore ecological integrity to this disrupted landscape. Developed with a restorative framework, the plan protects mature oak groves, stabilizes eroding embankments, and re-establishes native vegetation. These interventions enhance stormwater quality, promote biodiversity, and create a didactic landscape—one that tells the complex story of mining history, hydrology, and ecological resilience. The site features a diverse set of educational and recreational amenities, including accessible trails, outdoor classrooms, an amphitheater, a zipline, and a treehouse, all carefully nestled within the iconic blue oak savannah. Designed to balance public access with educational programming, the master plan creates spaces for community events while also accommodating school field trips and research groups ranging from kindergarten to post-graduate levels.