Excerpt:
Four dams and three large reservoirs were removed from the Klamath River in a project that finished last year—and acres of native wildflowers are now in bloom along the river’s edge.
It’s been less than a year since the world’s largest dam removal project was completed along 420 miles of the Klamath River, near the border of Oregon and California. But if you look at the river now, you might not know that four dams had ever been in place. Instead of concrete walls and aritifical reservoirs, the river is now free-flowing – and parts of the former infrastructure have been replaced by wildflowers that are in bloom.
“It’s been an incredible transition,” says Ann Willis, California regional director at American Rivers, a nonprofit that supported native American tribes in a decades-long fight to take out the dams. “It’s really strange and wonderful to stand on the bridge that goes across the Klamath River and look upstream where the Iron Gate Dam used to be. I used to imagine a river above it, and now I see the river…”
