Salmon make historic trek past recently removed Klamath River dams

Crystal Robinson remembers the call from her team reporting an adult spawning chinook salmon spotted in a creek leading to the Klamath River, which was the subject of the recent removal of four controversial hydro-electric dams in Siskiyou County in Northern California. 

“I cried. To be honest, I cried,” said Robinson, the Klamath watershed program supervisor. “And every day my staff came in and told me more fish in the new tributary, and it was a few weeks of tears of happiness.”  

Since the last dam came down at the beginning of October, the cold, free-flowing water of the Klamath has carried plenty of tears of joy. A steady caravan of adult salmon have begun traversing the waters above where the dams stood — the first returning fish to visit the newly liberated waters in more than a century. 

On a river that runs from Oregon to California’s North Coast, the four dams blocked salmon from 400 miles of upper Klamath River and its tributaries, leading to a devastating decline in fish populations long prized by indigenous tribes and the state’s fishing industry. 

But even when the dams first came down, no one was sure when, or if, the fish would return. 

“We all hoped that we were going to see adults returning this year after the dam was removed, but we knew there was a real slim chance of it,” said Eric Jones, senior environmental scientist supervisor with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). “So to actually see the first ones returning was incredible.” 

Since the dams’ removal, Copco Reservoir, which sat behind the imposing earthen Iron Gate dam, has contracted into a winding stretch of the Klamath River, snaking through the ruddy valley. On the small tributary of Jenny Creek just off the main trunk of the Klamath, scientists from the state erected a barrier of metal panels, funneling the creek through a small opening where they mounted a video camera to record the passage of fish. 

“Within days there were fish being documented through the counting station here on Jenny Creek,” said Morgan Knechtle, a senior environmental scientist with CDFW.  

Last week, Knechtle and fellow scientist Domenic Giudice walked the muddy banks of Jenny Creek, pointing out female chinook salmon hovering over sandy nests filled with newly laid eggs. Along the banks the pair spotted numerous carcasses of spawned out salmon which had already completed their final life acts of laying eggs in the coarse creek bottom. Between the last dam coming down and the end of October, the counting station had documented 245 fall run chinook salmon. 

“To be standing on the bank of Jenny Creek and actually see spawning fish without having to go out and search very hard is exciting,” said Knechtle. “We’re seeing a redistribution of fish right now as the fish are occupying this new habitat.”

The return of salmon — and with such immediacy after the dam removal — has been a happy surprise for staff like Robinson who’ve worked on the project for decades. Salmon are known for imprinting, the biological pull to return to the place of their birth. But many of the returning fish were reared in hatcheries at or below the now-removed Iron Gate dam, so their sojourn above the former dams put them in uncharted territory. 

“They imprint on their native streams,” Jones said. “Maybe smelled the salmon we were raising up here already or just the colder water from Fall Creek, I just don’t know.” 

Robinson offered some additional theories on how the fish had ventured back to portions of the river their kin hadn’t visited in decades. 

“Those main stem fish are receiving all the water from the upper basin. That has been imprinting them,” Robinson said. “So as soon as the barriers were gone, they’ve been trying to go back to that water they’ve been imprinting on the last 100 years.” 

Last week at the new Fall Creek fish hatchery, which replaced the former Iron Gate hatchery seven miles down river, scientists were busily corralling returning adult chinook salmon into tanks. The team milked the females of their eggs and used the semen of the males to fertilize them. The eggs will be incubated and the hatching fish released into the river later on. 

As the operation collected eggs last week, hatchery managers were thrilled at the first return of seven endangered coho salmon. Two of the fish were hatchery raised, but the others were wild, meaning they found their way up the river without any biological cues. The coho were placed in plastic tubes and submerged in tanks — to be later sent to a laboratory for DNA testing – to help make sure their breeding pairs are genetically diverse. 

“It’s the first coho salmon to return above Iron Gate dam in over 100 years,” Jones said. 

In another part of the hatchery,  CDFW crews opened up long raceways filled with hundreds of thousands of year-old salmon smolts and pumped the tiny ocean-bound fish into Fall Creek, which flowed to the Klamath. In all, the hatchery released 270,000 fish last week. 

“So we put them back in and they’re going to make their migratory way out,” said CDFW technician Robert Cook. “We’ll see them in three to four years.” 

The hope is the river’s salmon population will eventually rebound to its pre-dam populations, which indigenous tribes like the Yurok on the Northern California coast said were teeming with fish before the dams. The salmon are a traditional cornerstone of the tribe’s culture with an annual salmon festival to celebrate the harvest. This year’s celebration went on without salmon as the state’s salmon fishing season remained closed due to impacts from the recent drought. 

California fishery managers hope a newly resilient salmon population on the Klamath will take up the slack when other rivers in the state experience lower populations, allowing commercial and recreational fishing to go on.

On the banks of Jenny Creek, Knechtle marveled at a pair of salmon lingering in the stream and their somewhat miraculous return to the rivers of long ago generations. 

“These fish are a portion of the population that always stray to new areas,” Knechtle said. “They’re colonizing animals to take advantage of new habitat and we’re seeing them do that now.”