With Dams Removed, Salmon Will Have the Run of a Western River

"When people and their livelihoods are given equal weight with environmental outcomes, are dam removals good or bad?

NOTE: this article was originally published to NYTimes.com on August 27, 2024. It was written by Soumya Karlamangla. Photographs by Loren Elliott. Soumya Karlamangla reported from Yreka, Calif., and spent two days touring dam sites along the Klamath River.

The Klamath River was once so flush with fish that local tribes ate salmon at every meal: flame-roasted filets on redwood skewers, stews flavored with fish tails, strips of smoky, dried salmon. In the language of the Yurok, who live on the river among California’s towering redwoods, the word for “salmon” translates to “that which we eat.”

But when hydropower dams were built on the Klamath, which wends from southern Oregon into far northwest California, the river’s ecosystem was upended and salmon were cut off from 420 miles of cooler tributaries and streams where they had once laid their eggs. For decades, there has been little salmon for the tribes to cook, sell or use in religious ceremonies. The Yurok’s 60th annual Salmon Festival this summer served none of its namesake fish.

But tribal members hope the situation is about to dramatically change.

Four giant dams on the Klamath are being razed as part of the largest dam removal project in U.S. history, a victory for the tribes who have led a decades-long campaign to restore the river. This week, as the final pieces are demolished, a 240-mile stretch of the Klamath will flow freely for the first time in more than a century — and salmon will get their best shot at long-term survival in the river.

“The salmon are going to their spawning grounds for the first time in 100 years,” said Ron Reed, 62, a member of the Karuk tribe who has been fighting for dam removal for half his life. “There’s a sense of pride. There’s a sense of health and wellness.” 

Salmon play an outsize role in nourishing and holding together ecosystems, scientists say, and their plight has fueled a growing trend of dam removals nationwide. Of the 150 removals on the West Coast in the past decade — double that of the previous decade, according to data from American Rivers, an environmentalist group — most have benefited salmon. Chinook salmon, or king salmon, in the Klamath are predicted to increase by as much as 80 percent within the next three decades.

The Klamath River begins at the foot of the Cascade Mountains in the deserts of southern Oregon and flows southwest into California through lush redwood forests before emptying into the Pacific Ocean. On a recent morning outside Yreka, a former California mining town near the Oregon border, a gray crane took flight from the banks of the river, which carved a wide path through a landscape of yellowed hills and desiccated shrubs.

The Hupa, Karuk, Klamath and other tribes who have lived for thousands of years along the 263-mile river were secluded enough to largely avoid the Spanish missionaries who pushed Bay Area and Southern California tribal members into forced labor. But outsiders flooded into the remote region decades later, in 1850, after the discovery of glittering flakes in the Klamath and its tributaries. The Gold Rush also brought a government-backed campaign to exterminate Native Americans that killed as many as two-thirds of some Klamath area tribes over 25 years, historians estimate. 

The dams were erected between 1918 and 1962 by the California Oregon Power Company to supply electricity to the growing rural region. By that point, the Klamath had already suffered from overfishing, logging, agricultural development and mining operations that spit sediment and chemicals into the river. The dams choked its flows, ruined water quality and fostered toxic algae blooms that often made the river unsafe for summer recreation.

Salmon hatch from eggs in stream beds and then migrate to the ocean, where they mature and feast on krill, squid and shrimp. Years later, the salmon return to their natal streams to reproduce and die.

Upstream of the Klamath dams, salmon completely disappeared because they were unable to return from the ocean. Below the dams, the salmon population dropped to less than 5 percent of what it had been, with some species fully extinct.

“My grandpa said that there were so many salmon when he was younger that you could walk across their backs to the other side,” said Brook Thompson, 28, who grew up on the Yurok reservation. “It’s just so hard to express to people who are so used to fishing for sport or fun that salmon is really everything for us. The health of the river is literally our health.”

Catalyzed by a huge salmon die-off in 2002, the Klamath area tribes kicked off an aggressive campaign to remove the dams, collaborating with scientists, environmental organizations and commercial fishermen, who together wrote letters, staged rallies and traveled as far away as Scotland to protest outside the headquarters of ScottishPower, which owned the dams at the time.

When salmon return from the ocean, they deliver enriching nutrients, such as carbon and nitrogen, to the Klamath ecosystem. Bears, raccoons, minks and other animals benefit from eating the salmon, and riverside vegetation grows in the soil where fish carcasses decompose. Studies have found that the bigger a salmon run, the more a nearby redwood tree grows that year. (Even the distinctive flavor of California wines may owe something to salmon.)

“We don’t view that as by accident. We view that as by design,” said Keith Parker, senior fisheries biologist for the Yurok Tribe, who said that Indigenous traditions had long reflected the essential role of migratory fish in the ecosystem. “They have this ripple effect, not just biologically — but for our people,” he said.

The Klamath region tribes have had to shut down their commercial salmon fisheries, leaving them among the most impoverished groups in California. And they have suffered high rates of diabetes and heart disease, which one scientific study blamed on the lack of access to fresh salmon — once 50 percent of their daily calories — and called “a clear violation of human rights.”

The local tribes call themselves “salmon people,” and their creation stories explain that their civilizations would disappear without the sacred fish. Tribal members connect that belief to an epidemic of suicides, opioid addiction and other mental health problems that has emerged in recent years.

After more than 20 years of advocacy from the tribes, federal regulators in 2022 approved an agreement to demolish four dams on the Klamath. The dams were providing less than 2 percent of the energy portfolio of their current owner, PacifiCorp — a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy — and the company would have had to pay more to upgrade them to modern-day standards than to take them down. The $500 million cost of the demolition project has been split between California taxpayers and surcharges paid by PacifiCorp customers in Oregon.

Two dams will remain farther upstream on the Klamath to collect and divert water to farmers in Oregon. Between the 1920s and 1940s, the federal government granted homesteads to veterans in the Klamath Basin, and the farmers’ battle for water with the tribes became one of the fiercest water wars in the West. The two remaining dams have fish ladders so that salmon can make it to the other side.

The Klamath dam removal project has long had naysayers, with more than three-quarters of voters in California’s Siskiyou County, home to the three Klamath dams in the state, opposed to removal in a 2010 advisory vote. Local residents were skeptical of large-scale changes to the landscape and reluctant to destroy a renewable energy source that could power 70,000 homes in the area.

And since the project began last year, many have raised concerns. Millions of tons of sediment that had collected behind the Klamath dams were released into the river as the barriers came down, temporarily transforming the river into a brown ribbon of mud. The initial poor water quality killed thousands of fish, and their bodies piled up on the river’s rocky shoreline. Deer were caught in the muddy footprint of the emptied reservoirs and died.

Dam removals also drained Copco Lake, a reservoir about 50 miles east of Yreka around which 100 people had built a community. Today, once lakeside properties in a quiet valley now sit on a grassy field. On a recent day, a boat rested hundreds of yards from the narrow river that replaced the reservoir.

“It’s devastating — it’s completely devastating,” said Chrissie Reynolds, a longtime Copco resident who said access to drinking water had become spotty in Copco because local wells were connected to the lake. The town’s residents, many of whom spent their retirement savings to settle there, were “paying the price for what happened to our Indigenous people before we were here,” she said.

The Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the entity overseeing the project, said that the fish that had died in the Klamath were largely nonnative and that the release of sediment had been timed so that salmon wouldn’t be in the river. Flushing out the sediment will ultimately help the river recover faster and function as it should, experts said.

“It’s sort of like a rip-the-Band-Aid-off moment,” said Shari Witmore, a fish biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

 No one knows how quickly salmon will rebound in the Klamath. After a dam removal on the Elwha River in Washington State’s Olympic National Park, every migratory fish species in the river swam upstream of the former dam site within three years. But even a decade later, some salmon populations remain critically low.

Mr. Parker, whose ancestors hail from the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk and Tolowa tribes of northwestern California, recently drove his truck along the desolate gravel roads beside the Klamath River until he reached what had once been a stagnant, algae-filled reservoir between two of the dams.

This time, he witnessed a river winding through fields of orange flowers — sprouted from seeds planted by a revegetation effort that was part of the dam demolition. Thousands of bees swarmed around the blooms. Deer tentatively waded into the rippling waters. Mr. Parker began to cry.

“Those birds and all the living things up there haven’t heard running water in over 100 years — it’s a completely different landscape,” Mr. Parker said. “The ecosystem is healing itself.”

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