Excerpt:
Removing dams from the Klamath River in Northern California seems like a clear win for fish and rivers. Why do some locals hate it?
It’s a blustery day in the autumn of 2023, and I’m standing in a roadside pullout in Northern California, looking at the past and future of the Klamath River.
Immediately upstream I see Iron Gate Dam—17 stories tall, nearly four times as wide— completely blocking its red-rock canyon. There are four such dams, with Iron Gate as the first and largest, in 60 kilometers of river rising to the northeast. It’s a stretch sometimes called Reservoir Reach, and it has shut salmon out of hundreds of kilometers of potential habitat in the Upper Klamath Basin for more than a century.
The dams are the river’s past.
Looking downstream, I see the free-running Klamath River beginning a 300-kilometer undammed westward journey through California’s coastal mountains to the Pacific Ocean south of Crescent City.
The river makes a fine companion this morning, a tumbling, green-eyed waterway that you can throw a stone across if you have a reasonable arm for it.
Salmon and trout fishers launch colorful dories into the riffles and go a-rocking and a-bobbing downstream.
That’s the future.
By October of 2024, the four dams in Reservoir Reach will be gone.
The river will be finding its old channel, while restoration crews bring the once blocked and flooded land back to life…
Additional Reading:
the San Francisco Chronicle:
First salmon swims all the way to Oregon after historic California dam removal
The massive dam-removal project on the Klamath River began living up to its lofty goal of improving fish passage this week when at least one salmon was observed swimming upriver past the sites of four former dams that had long blocked fish.
the Guardian:
Klamath River dam removal: before and after images show dramatic change
Dam removal concluded a decades long fight on 2 October, which also saw Chinook salmon return to the waters…
the New York Times:
With Dams Removed, Salmon Will Have the Run of a Western River
The nation’s largest dam removal project is nearly complete after a lengthy campaign by Native tribes to restore the river at the California-Oregon border…
