This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Bringing Salmon Home: The Story of the World’s Largest Dam Removal Project, first released on November 5, 2024. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

[MUSIC]

GRABER: Okay, big reveal.

TWILLEY: Here we go.

GRABER: Oh, wow. That’s a river.

REN BROWNELL: You guys kind of get a first look at a completely removed Copco number one.

GRABER: And the river’s just flowing.

[LOUD, RUSHING RIVER SOUNDS]

BROWNELL: This is an area where there was not river sounds for over a hundred years.

TWILLEY: This week, we are telling a super exciting story: about a river, but actually about fish!

GRABER: And in terms of fish it’s actually about one particular fish, about salmon. But it’s really about something that’s incredibly exciting that will help salmon—it’s about the world’s largest dam removal project ever!

TWILLEY: That’s right, this episode, we’re going to the Klamath River on the California-Oregon border. It was once one of the world’s great salmon rivers. We wanted to see what happens when you take a river away from salmon—and how to go about giving it back.

GRABER: This is a story of the more than two decade fight to return the river to the salmon, and the importance of that win for the Indigenous communities that live along the river, plus commercial fishermen, and of course the entire ecosystem that depends on the river and the fish.

TWILLEY: It’s an incredible story and a rare and significant win. This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

MATTHEW MAIS: I’m taking you down here because I want to show you the mouth of the Klamath River, one of the largest natural river mouths on the west coast.

[WALKING AND WATER]

MAIS: Right now there’s salmon rolling, there’s seals and sea lions chasing the salmon. Soon we’ll see migratory waterfowl showing up, there’s bald and golden eagles.

GRABER: Matthew Mais is the public relations director for the Yurok Tribe, and when we went out to the mouth of the Klamath with him, we couldn’t actually see any salmon. But we could see a huge group of sea lions playing in the waves, plenty of pelicans.

MAIS: There’s a harbor seal.

GRABER: That’s what—I was wondering what that was.

GRABER: I can just see its head popping out.

GRABER: Think it’s looking for salmon?

MAIS: Yeah, definitely.

TWILLEY: The harbor seal was on the hunt, because early fall is when lots of king salmon, also known as Chinook—that’s when they gather at the mouth of the Klamath.

BARRY MCCOVEY: Yeah. So the Klamath River was the third largest salmon producing river on the, on the West Coast of the United States. So I guess in the entire United States, except for Alaska.

GRABER: Barry McCovey Jr. is the director of the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department and a tribal member.

MCCOVEY: The Klamath had a really large run. If you put all the salmon together, it was probably in the millions of fish.

DAVID BITTS: It’s one of those, you used to be able to walk across the river on their back stories.

TWILLEY: David Bitts is a commercial salmon fisherman, based out of a marina just a few miles south of the Klamath. And he said walking across the river on the backs of salmon sounds like an exaggeration, but when there are lots and lots of them all crammed together, they really do form kind of a solid mass. That said, but he’s only seen it once in his life, in a much smaller stream.

GRABER: The Klamath used to be home not just to huge amounts of salmon, but to more than one kind of salmon. There was the king salmon, the Chinook, also coho salmon. And there were lots of other types of fish there, too: steelhead trout, and eels, and sturgeon, and another important food fish called suckerfish, which I had never heard of before. It’s a bottom-feeder like a catfish.

TWILLEY: In short, there were lots of fish, all year round, and so fish—and especially salmon—became the staple of all the different peoples who lived along the Klamath, it was their primary food.

MCCOVEY: We’re the Yurok here, on the coast. And as we move upstream, there’s a number of different tribes. Near the headwaters, there’s the Klamath tribes. And in between there’s the Karuk and the Shasta. The Modoc people, the Hoopa Valley tribe, the Wintun.

GRABER: They all relied on salmon. Barry says the Yurok tribe was built on salmon.

MCCOVEY: Historically it was our main source of protein was salmon. And what a blessing to be able to go, you know, steps away from your house and harvest probably one of the finest sources of protein in the world. Like, salmon’s probably one of the healthiest fish you can eat. And they were in abundance, so there was no shortage of salmon. Historically, it was easy for people to catch them. And we ate a lot of salmon. We dried it, we used it to trade. So it was really important in that aspect.

TWILLEY: The same was true of the other tribes along the river.

CRAIG TUCKER: Salmon are really central to the Karuk cultural identity. Salmon is how they feed each other. There’s religious ceremonies that celebrate the annual returns of salmon.

GRABER: We visited with a lot of people when we traveled to the Klamath, Craig Tucker is another person we talked to, he’s a natural resources policy advocate for the Karuk tribe. They live a bit upriver from the Yurok.

TUCKER: And it’s really sort of a cornerstone of the culture of Karuk and really the other tribes of this region.

GRABER: Craig and some colleagues did a study to try to understand how important salmon had been to the Karuk in the past, when salmon were super plentiful there.

TUCKER: And historically, the average Karuk was eating about four pounds of salmon per person per day.

GRABER: A portion in a restaurant is like a quarter of a pound, this is 16 of those per day!

TUCKER: And that’s really tapered off to just a few pounds per person per year.

TWILLEY: We’re going to be coming back to why it’s tapered off so much, but first, it’s important to understand why the Klamath *was* such a great salmon river and such a great food source in general. Part of it is simply that it’s pretty big.

GRABER: The Klamath itself is a really long river, it’s one of the most important rivers on the west coast, and it stretches out even further because it has all sorts of other smaller rivers and streams, they’re tributaries of the Klamath, and they join up with it.

TWILLEY: But as with everything, size is not the only thing that matters. The Klamath is also complex.

MCCOVEY: That can make a river really strong for salmon, because salmon thrive in diversity. So you have fish spawning, say, in a very cold stream. Crystal clear mountain stream, you have salmon spawning in that.

TWILLEY: But elsewhere they might have taken a turn up another tributary and be spawning in a marshy area, which couldn’t be more different.

MCCOVEY: And then you have everything in between. And so what that leads to is this genetic diversity that builds strength.

GRABER: To understand why all these different salmon spawning grounds and all the complexity of the Klamath, why all that matters, we have to talk about the life cycle of the salmon.

MCCOVEY: Right now out in front of us here in the Klamath river, there’s adult fall Chinook salmon swimming by. And they just left the Pacific ocean. They stopped eating. So they don’t eat when they’re going upstream. Their only focus is the spawn or to reproduce. And so they’ll go upstream, depending on where they were born at. Generally, they’ll return to that place that they were born in.

TWILLEY: They’re famous for traveling miles all around the big blue ocean and then somehow ending up in exactly the same tiny tributary of the same river that they were born in, to give birth themselves.

MCCOVEY: They can smell it. they smell the, the chemical makeup of that particular stream. Every stream has its own various chemical components that make it up and they can smell that. And so they can smell it out in the ocean. They have an incredible sense of smell.

GRABER: That’s pretty amazing. But then, even when they get to their birth river, they’re going against the flow, which is already hard, but salmon may have some additional obstacles on their path to their spawning grounds that make it even harder.

MCCOVEY: They have to go up a lot of rapids and sometimes they have to, they’ve evolved to be able to go up, you know, pretty steep rapids and waterfalls. And they can jump, you know, everyone’s seen the video of them jumping in Alaska and, and the bears catching them in their mouth.

GRABER: If they make it past rapids and bears, then the female salmon finds her birthplace, and she picks a spot. It’ll have a lot of water flowing for oxygen for the eggs and also to whisk away any predators. And she wiggles her tail around to make a kind of hole for a nest in the gravel there.

MCCOVEY: And then she lays her eggs and then the male salmon will fertilize them and then they, she kind of buries them with her tail. And so they’re buried in this gravel. And so the water is getting to the eggs but they’re not floating away because they’re protected by the gravel.

TWILLEY: A few months later, these eggs hatch, and lots of little baby salmons are born! At this point, a baby salmon doesn’t look like anything you’d eat for dinner: it’s a little tiny translucent tadpole type thing with its orange egg sac still attached. That serves as a handy dandy food reserve at first, and then these baby salmons start to forage for themselves.

MCCOVEY: This is when habitat becomes really important.

GRABER: And that complexity in the habitat. Salmon need the quick-flowing water for their nests, but then the baby salmon need little areas along a river where the flow is broken, maybe with trees and branches.

MCCOVEY: They’re protected there from predators, but they’re also protected from velocity. And they can go over there and take a break and feed and grow. And then they, they slowly kind of make their way downstream. Eventually they’ll make it out to the ocean. And by then they’re probably about three inches long.

TWILLEY: Just in case you weren’t already thinking, wow, salmon are cool, with their ability to sniff out their home river—they also have another super power: a semi miraculous ability to turn from freshwater fish into saltwater fish. Which is kind of a big deal. Normally when you put a freshwater fish into saltwater, it dies. But salmon can make it work.

GRABER: It involves a huge change in how the salmon’s body functions. The issue is that there’s an important balance of salt in our fluids and in our cells. If the ratio of salt to water inside a cell doesn’t match the amount outside, a cell would literally just collapse.

TWILLEY: So when the young salmon swim down to the mouth of the freshwater Klamath and out into the salty Pacific, they switch on this special machinery in their cells that can manage those salt levels. And they change from a rusty brownish spotted kind of color to bright shiny silver.

GRABER: Brown and spotted helps protect them from predators in the river, but shiny and silver looks more similar to light in the waves and helps protect them in the ocean. All of this, the changes and the journey upriver and back to the ocean, these are all to give salmon an evolutionary advantage—to give them a niche.

MCCOVEY: They can’t spawn in the ocean. They’re just not, there’s no habitat for them to spawn at in the ocean. And so they, they need to spawn in freshwater. But I think that the evolutionary advantage of going to the ocean is getting big. The food is in the ocean. I think it makes sense—it made sense for them, you know, the bigger they were, the more successful they were.

TWILLEY: They spend a few years, exactly how many varies, but it’s typically something like three or four, eating as much as they can in the ocean and getting really big. The longest salmon ever caught was nearly five foot long, although two and a half is more normal.

GRABER: Then they use that amazing sense of smell to head back upriver again. They’re well fed, so they start out super plump, but they stop eating entirely and lose most of their weight by the time they make a nest.

MCCOVEY: By the time they get to the spawning grounds, their bodies are like, breaking down. They’re starting to fall apart. They’re like zombies. But then they spawn and then they die and then their bodies decompose and the little babies eat them. And everything else too. It’s just, it’s just this massive transfer of energy from the ocean. And then it’s deposited in the basin.

TWILLEY: Insects, other fish, little mammals and big ones like bears and elk, little birds and big ones like eagles and osprey—they all dine on the returning salmon, either as it makes its way upstream or as it’s decomposing. And it’s not just animals dining at the salmon buffet.

TUCKER: You can look in these ancient redwood trees that remain out here on the coast. And there’s marine nutrients in these trees, and they were brought here by salmon.

GRABER: The redwood trees—they’re the biggest trees on earth, we have some photos on our website of us marveling at them and even driving through one. On purpose, I promise. redwoods wouldn’t be as big as they are without salmon, without those nutrients.

TWILLEY: Everyone and everything—birds, bears, trees, humans—they’re all eating salmon. But even though the Indigenous people of the Klamath historically ate a literal ton of salmon, they were very careful not to eat it all.

MCCOVEY: We understood that we needed salmon to be Yurok. And so we were- we had very strict management protocols. It wasn’t like, a free-for-all. We understood harvest management and we knew how to, how to ensure that fish would always return. So.

GRABER: Barry said even their religious ceremonies revolved not just around celebrating salmon but also around protecting the salmon.

MCCOVEY: I know there, there’s like first salmon ceremony stuff where we, we wouldn’t fish until someone from a neighboring tribe up river caught a fish or saw a fish. So that would ensure that the fish, a lot of fish had already made it by us.

TWILLEY: Of course the tribes that lived along the Klamath didn’t only eat salmon. There were other fish in the river, and they hunted elk and gathered acorns. But the richness of the salmon—well, it was what made them rich.

TUCKER: You know, the early anthropologists who came here described this as one of the wealthiest places in North America because, having such easy access to food gives you that opportunity to create, you know, culture and art and politics and currency. There was a very sophisticated culture here that was afforded by the fact that food was pretty darn easy to come by.

GRABER: And they were able to hold onto their abundant food and their rich culture for far longer than a lot of other Indigenous tribes were in North America, because the Klamath was, and is, really tough to get to. As Nicky and I can attest from our very long drive and lack of cellphone reception.

TUCKER: So this place is really remote and difficult to get to today. So, you know, the first contact was probably Russian seafarers looking for beaver pelt. But this is one of the last places in the continental United States that were colonized.

TWILLEY: But it was eventually colonized. And, as you might have guessed, the Klamath is not the third biggest salmon river in America anymore. Those salmon that were so plentiful you could walk across the river on their backs? Not so much these days. So what happened? That story, after a quick word from our sponsors.

[BREAK]

GRABER: So as usual, the big problem was when people from elsewhere showed up and decided there were resources near and along the Klamath that *they* wanted. First was when gold was discovered in the area in about the 1850s.

TUCKER: So when gold mining got going, hydraulic gold mining was really devastating to the area. They washed entire mountainsides into the rivers, buried spawning beds.

TWILLEY: Gold in California ran out pretty quickly, but the folks who had arrived to look for gold switched up their game plan and started exploiting some other resources instead.

GRABER: At the upper part of the river, where it’s nice and flat and there was a huge lovely environmentally-critical wetland, some cattle farmers decided to drain some of those wetlands for ranches. This was in 1864, right after the Indigenous tribe, the Klamath, they were removed to a reservation.

TWILLEY: And remember those gigantic and awe-inspiring redwoods, with all their marine nutrients? Those were very tempting targets for the timber industry, which quickly moved into the region and started chopping everything down.

GRABER: Both of those industries were really harmful to salmon. Draining the wetlands diverted important water that would usually flow for the salmon. And the timber industry left the banks vulnerable to erosion and washing into the river, which was bad. Also, there weren’t as many random trees falling to create those lovely nooks for salmon babies to hide and feed in.

TWILLEY: And on top of all of that, white people wanted to catch and eat and trade the salmon themselves.

MCCOVEY: There was huge commercial fishing operations right here in front of us in the estuary. There was canneries here. And that took a toll also on, on fish runs. And that was… 18, 19, late 1800s into the early 1900s.

TUCKER: And then finally came hydropower. So, hydropower dams were built between about 1908 and 1962 in the Klamath.

GRABER: All of this was going on at the same time. Timber got really big in the area after the first dam was built, and agriculture grew in the Klamath basin as well at the same time, but the dams really were the final blow to the salmon.

TWILLEY: The first dam to be built was called Copco, short for the California Oregon Power Company. It was more than a hundred foot high, and it was used for power generation.

GRABER: Three more dams followed Copco. First was Copco 2, then one called J.C. Boyle, he was the guy who was chief engineer of that California Oregon Power Company. The final one, called Iron Gate, was built in 1962. All of these were for hydropower, for electricity generation.

TWILLEY: When you dam a river to get power, you get some power. But the river itself is not the same afterwards, and that affects everything that lives in it and on it, including the salmon and the Indigenous people.

MCCOVEY: I think if they would have reached out to tribes and said, hey, do you think building these dams on the river and blocking them in perpetuity is a good idea? I think that tribal people would have said, no, you’re going to cause an ecological disaster here. But they didn’t, no— [LAUGH] nobody asked. And, and that’s been a sore point for tribal people for generations. Because we didn’t have a say in any of that, but we suffered the consequences. And the people who built the dams and the people who benefited from the dams prospered.

GRABER: And just as Barry would have expected, if he had been back there with his ancestors 100 years ago, the dams were in fact an ecological disaster for the river and for the salmon.

BROWNELL: The dams and reservoirs impacted salmon in two ways, right? And one is very cut and dry, and very visible, in terms of that they blocked about 400 miles of historic spawning habitat. The fish could not get above Iron Gate for the last 70 years, or past the Copco dams for over a hundred years.

GRABER: Ren Brownell grew up along the Klamath, and she’s the public information officer for the Klamath River Renewal Corporation—they’re overseeing the removal of the four lower Klamath hydroelectric dams.

TWILLEY: You would expect salmon numbers to suffer when you cut off some of the best spawning habitat that they’d previously relied on. That’s not a surprise. But the dams aren’t just a roadblock. They also change the water temperature and quality and the river shape in ways that make it actively unfriendly to salmon.

GRABER: The reservoirs that sit filled with water behind the dams aren’t flowing, and they heat up in the hot desert sun. So instead of being a cool, spring-fed rushing river, there are hot, still lakes that turn bright green, because the population of a particular toxic algae just explodes.

BOB PAGLIUCO: If a dog drinks that water, they’ll likely be dead in, you know, an hour or less. It’s very toxic. It’s very toxic to fish and to humans as well.

TWILLEY: This is Bob Pagliuco, he’s part of the team working on the Klamath. He’s a Marine Habitat Resource Specialist at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And he told us that things are super toxic above the dams, and some of that then flows downriver and makes the rest of the river toxic too.

GRABER: The salmon aren’t in the reservoirs, they can’t get past the dams, but they do have to deal with some of that algae. Plus there’s less water being released and it’s warmer than salmon like. Another problem is that there’s a worm that lives on gravel and it’s usually washed away by flowing water. When the water doesn’t flow, the worms thrive.

PAGLIUCO: So you have disease hotspots.

BROWNELL: And all of those things coalesce to create a condition that is really bad, for fish health,

GRABER: We don’t have precise information on how many salmon lived in the river pre-contact, or even before the first dam, so it’s impossible to know just how bad things were right off the bat, after Copco 1 was built.

MCCOVEY: I think probably over the, the next year,the next few years after the first dam was built, there had to be a massive decline in fish. Because fish could no longer access the upper Klamath basin, hundreds of miles of habitat. But there were still so many fish. Because there’s all these other areas that they’re spawning in and, you know, there were still healthy parts of the basin.

TWILLEY: But then more dams were built and conditions got worse, and agriculture in the upper basin scaled up and the timber industry scaled up and water from some of the Klamath’s biggest tributaries was diverted to feed the booming ag industry in California’s Central Valley—and it all got to be kind of a lot.

TUCKER: It’s a place where there’s always been droughts. A place, there’s always been floods. A place where there’s always been landslides. So these fish actually do pretty well. But what you can’t do is throw it all at them at one time. And that’s kind of been the story of the 20th century for these fish. And why their numbers have really plummeted.

GRABER: By the 1960s, things were bad enough that dam operators had to do something to try to keep salmon from dying out in the river all together. So they built a salmon fish hatchery at Iron Gate Dam, the last dam that was built, the one closest to the ocean.

TWILLEY: The idea was well, we’ve cut off and messed up all these spawning grounds, so we’ll build a baby salmon producing factory, and dump five or six million little baby salmon in the river, below the dam, each year, to make up for all the salmon that aren’t going to be able to spawn naturally.

GRABER: That sounds nice, there are more fish in the river with a hatchery, but there were a few problems.

MCCOVEY: Mass producing fish in place of hundreds of miles of spawning grounds. I don’t think that’s the— the ideal situation. Hatcheries can—they, they take away that diversity that I had talked about earlier.

TWILLEY: And that diversity is the key to salmon survival. It’s what makes wild salmon so resilient.

GRABER: On top of that, even though there are all those fish coming out of the hatchery, they don’t all make it to the sea, not enough come back to spawn, and there just aren’t enough that make it overall. And so the commercial salmon fishery is kind of gone.

BITTS: This year, this state is completely closed. There was some very limited opportunity in Oregon this year. Which I’m kind of doubtful whether there should have been, but there was. But we don’t get to fish here much. Hardly at all.

TWILLEY: David told us this year he was not allowed to catch a single salmon. He relied on the crab harvest instead. But even more shockingly, there are so few salmon left in the Klamath that even the tribes, which have a special right to a subsistence fishery—they’re being cut off.

MCCOVEY: Unfortunately the runs are really depleted now. Last year we didn’t have, the Yurok tribe didn’t have a subsistence fishery last year. That means tribal members weren’t allowed to fish for salmon, and it’s a conservation measure that the tribe decided to take. Kind of a self-imposed conservation measure, because the run size was predicted to be so small that we were worried that if we took subsistence fish that it would jeopardize the ability of of salmon to to keep that cycle going and to produce enough fish for, for future generations.

GRABER: Barry told us this year there were a few more fish, and so they were able to take out just a few thousand for subsistence use, but it worked out to less than one fish per tribal member, when salmon used to be the cornerstone of their diet. And their culture.

TUCKER: Well, I think there’s a… a consequence to stripping culture from people. I think it leaves people kind of lost and without purpose. I mean if, if you’re from a family that’s been a family of fishermen for millennia, and all of a sudden you can’t go and fulfill these obligations that you inherited, of catching fish and distributing to the elders of the tribe. Well, you can’t do that anymore because there’s no fish around? That gives rise to depression and mental health issues.

TWILLEY: Long and super depressing story short, since the day the dams were built, the tribes along the river wanted to get them taken down. But they had to play a very long game to get what they wanted. It wasn’t till a few decades ago that they spotted an opportunity.

TUCKER: So folks knew even in the ‘90s, that the license to operate Klamath dams would expire around 2004.

TWILLEY: Dams are infrastructure and they have a lifespan. They’re licensed by the federal government, and a license typically lasts decades, as much as 50 years, but eventually a dam has to be inspected, and updated and repaired if necessary, before its license to operate can be renewed.

TUCKER: And there were tribal leaders who saw this coming and started preparing in the 90s.

GRABER: They thought the dam’s license expiring could give them an opening to talk about all the harm the dam was causing, and demonstrate that renewing it would cause more harm, and taking the dams down could solve some of the problems the dams had caused. But then something else happened in 2002.

NPR HOST: From Oregon Public Broadcasting, Jeff Brady reports.

REPORTER: Walking toward the river, you smell the dead fish before you see them. Near a campground on the river, front end loaders shovel fish and dump them into a large trailer. The stench here is overwhelming. The carcasses are headed for a fertilizer plant. That’s a sad waste for fishermen who prize fall Chinook salmon.

TWILLEY: What happened was that there wasn’t enough water for both fish and agriculture that year, and the farmers up at the top of the river—they got priority. And so the fish died.

MCCOVEY: There wasn’t enough water coming out of the dams. Nowhere near the amount of water that should have been in the river at that time.

TUCKER: And tens of thousands of adult salmon died before spawning in the lower Klamath river. And it felt, it felt… apocalyptic to people.

MCCOVEY: And, it was the largest die off of adult salmon in the history of the United States. And that happened right here in front of us. And I think…a lot of people—not just in the tribal communities, but in the community at large who care about rivers, and care about the Klamath River, I think they said, we can’t let this happen again. Tribal people, especially: we can, we can never let this happen again. What can we do to make sure that this never happens again? And one of the ideas was, well, let’s get those dams out of here. Mostly got laughed at because people were like, are you insane? That—we don’t remove dams in the United States, we build them.

GRABER: But they didn’t care what people said, the tribes formed a coalition with local environmentalists and community leaders and commercial fishermen, all of them cared about the health of the salmon and the river.

TUCKER: We started talking, and started doing some homework. And we realized that the dams are owned by PacifiCorp, which is headquartered in Portland. But PacifiCorp in turn was owned by a company called Scottish Power, headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland. So, we decided to take about 30 folks from the area, tribal members from the area, and crash the shareholders meeting of Scottish Power, I think in 2004, in Scotland. And that sort of launched this whole Bring the Salmon Home campaign.

GRABER: This was a huge step and an amazing attempt to get attention for their cause. Some of the people who traveled to Scotland had never left the Klamath area before. And it seemed like they were really winning people to their side. Craig said it seemed like this whole dam removal fight might succeed.

TUCKER: And I felt like we’re going to win this thing right here with the share—like, one of these little blue haired Scottish ladies is going to introduce a shareholder resolution to remove the dams and it’s going to be done. And I, and I was starting to believe that. But the response from Scottish Power was to sell PacifiCorp.

TWILLEY: So smart, now the dams were someone else’s problem. Specifically Warren Buffet, and his company Berkshire Hathaway, which had bought PacifiCorp.

TUCKER: And I remember I got the news, and I pulled over, I was driving, and. I pulled over and I called my boss, Leif Hillman. Leif was vice chairman of Karuk at the time, I think. And I said, Leif, I got really bad news. Scottish Power sold Pacificor to Warren Buffett. And there’s this minute of silence and Leif’s like, so where does that guy live? And, and, so it was—it was like, better book our flights to Omaha cause that’s where we’re going next.

GRABER: That’s what the coalition did, they went to Omaha, they protested at the shareholders meeting-

PROTESTOR MAN: You know, in my world view, it doesn’t matter if you’re the poorest man in the world or the richest man in the world. If you’re killing our fish, we’re going to tell you about it.

PROTESTOR WOMAN: We had to come here to show the stockholders and show Warren Buffet that, that we will go to the ends of the earth to protect the river, to protect the salmon, to protect our people.

TWILLEY: But it wasn’t all protests. The coalition was also working behind the scenes, to gather the scientific evidence necessary to put legal pressure on PacifiCorp. One big step forward was when fisheries scientists like Barry managed to convince federal agencies like NOAA and US Fish and Wildlife to issue a ruling saying that the dams couldn’t be relicensed unless PacifiCorp paid for fish ladders, which would theoretically help the salmon to swim up and over the dams.

TUCKER: And they sued, Pacificorps sued and said, well, fish would never live upstream of the dams. And so there was a trial-type hearing where tribal biologists had to demonstrate to a court that, indeed, there’s good salmon habitat upstream of the dams, and the water is the right temperature

GRABER: PacifiCorps knew that installing new fish ladders would be super expensive, around $250 million dollars. So they came up with what must have seemed like a brilliant suggestion: they’d just truck fish around the dam. Awesome. But no, the judge agreed with scientists that that was totally ridiculous.

TWILLEY: Faced with the prohibitive cost of fish ladders and all the bad publicity, PacifiCorp finally came to the table and started negotiating.

GRABER: But of course this whole struggle still wasn’t over. Neither the company nor the government had agreed that the dams should come down. So the tribes had to do a lot more studies.

MCCOVEY: During that time I was working for the fisheries department as a technician and a biologist. And so, worked on a lot of studies, gathered a lot of data, looking at fish health and diseases. And how dams are impacting water quality in the river. There’s all these, you know, mountains and mountains of paperwork. Like you could fill this room with it. All of the reports and all of the findings and. Just an insane amount of work went into that.

TUCKER: When we had to out-lawyer PacifiCorp, we out-lawyered them. When we had to out-science them, we out-scienced them. And certainly when we had to outperform them in the media, we did that as well.

TWILLEY: Because all the while the negotiations were happening and the science was being done, the protests and demonstrations continued.

MCCOVEY: It was Portland, it was Klamath Falls, it was Sacramento. Over and over again. It was small community meetings in Orleans, and in Eureka, and in Redding. It was people getting out and blocking traffic and putting up signs.

GRABER: But it wasn’t like everyone who lived along the river was taking part in these protests. Some people thought removing the dams would cause flooding—that wasn’t true, they weren’t put in place for flood control. Some people were concerned about their lake access because the dams created huge lakes behind them. But remember, those lakes were frequently so toxic that you couldn’t even touch the water safely. And farmers wanted access to that water for irrigation.

TWILLEY: Still, somehow, the coalition managed to hammer out an agreement that more or less everyone was on board with. The farmers upstream were on board, the governors of California and Oregon were on board, all the environmental groups, the federal regulatory agencies, the tribes, everyone signed it and it went to Congress to get approved.

TUCKER: And we thought that was a victory moment, only to have a Republican led Congress refuse to pass the bill that would make it all happen.

GRABER: Even the Republicans who represented the Klamath-area farmers, who had negotiated in good faith and agreed to this bill! This might sound weird, but this was at the time that the Republicans were led by Mitch McConnell, and he had pledged that Obama wouldn’t get a single win.

RACHEL MADDOW: The Republicans are cracking the whip to keep all their members in strict party formation. We are the party of… Zippo. Zero votes.

TUCKER: Congressman LaMalfa and Congressman Walden were so afraid of being connected to a restoration project—something that environmentalists might like, something tribes might like. They would, they would rather take everyone down with the ship than to do something that lifted all boats with a rising tide.

TWILLEY: Yay Republicans. This was 2010, at this point in the story. And the bill didn’t pass that year, or the next year, or the year after that, and eventually it expired. Which was heartbreaking for everyone who had worked so hard and sacrificed so much and had such high hopes.

GRABER: But we know now that the dams did eventually come down. So what did this scrappy and incredibly resourceful coalition do next? That’s coming up, after the break.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: The trick to making the world’s largest dam removal project a reality turns out to be bypassing Congress.

TUCKER: We split off dam removal from the rest of the package so that we would not need legislation.

TWILLEY: That made dam removal something the federal agencies could authorize on their own.

GRABER: But there was another problem. The federal agencies were like, sure, that’s cool, the project looks great, but PacifiCorps can’t just walk away without any responsibility to help pay for taking the dams down, which is what was basically in the original agreement that had been part of the legislation. The government agencies said that PacifiCorps had to be involved in the dam’s removal.

TUCKER: We thought Pacificorps was going to walk. And organically— [LAUGH] without us doing anything, people all over the country started protesting Warren Buffett’s offices and Pacificorps offices. It was like this, like, I think so many people were so proud of this, this win, and so happy for us to have this win, when it looked like the company was going to back out… people weren’t going to allow it to happen.

TWILLEY: And so everyone eventually came back to the table and in 2020 they finally came up with an agreement that the federal regulatory agencies approved, and it was official: the dams were coming down.

BITTS: I don’t think I actually threw my fist in the air and said, Yippee, but it was close to that.

TWILLEY: I mean, I would have leapt in the air and danced in a circle and hugged anyone within range and then cracked some champagne!

GRABER: This is all truly amazing, but still, it wasn’t like yay, they won, and demolition started the next day. There was a huge amount of studying and planning and orchestrating.

TWILLEY: Part of the delay is that before you can demolish a dam, you have to let out all the water that’s backed up in the reservoir behind it—and that’s something you have to do very slowly and carefully and also very thoughtfully in terms of timing so that you don’t have a big flush of warm, sediment filled water rushing down the river when the salmon are trying to get up it.

GRABER: The team timed the water drawdown to not harm the Chinook’s migration, but the coho were already in the river, and so they literally moved the fish, they relocated them to a safe place temporarily.

TWILLEY: After lots of this kind of shenanigans, finally, starting in 2023, the dams themselves were blasted to smithereens with dynamite.

[THREE HORN BLASTS]

MAN: Fire in the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole.

[EXPLOSION]

[WATER RUSHING THROUGH THE DAM]

[CAR DOOR CLOSING]

BROWNELL: Short walk.

TWILLEY: We visited the river just as the very last pieces of dam were being scooped up by bulldozers and hauled away by truck. Ren Brownell took to us an overlook so we could appreciate the transformation.

BROWNELL: So we’re standing above where Iron Gate once stood. And so the dam expanded the whole width of the river. It had two gate towers, a large concrete spillway, and then fish hatchery and power infrastructure down below. And it is a huge contrast visually, standing here now versus if you were here this time last year. You would have been looking over—well, Iron Gate dam, and then an electric green reservoir.

GRABER: What we were looking at was absolutely nothing like that. It shocked me to think about a bright green reservoir filled with toxic algae stretching for miles. Because what we saw was a vast canyon that dropped down to a rushing river far below us. Iron Gate was named after the iron in the rock, most of the rock in the area is red. But the riverbed and up the side of the canyon, it looked kind of weirdly grey.

BROWNELL: But so what you see now, actually, that kind of gray material, it’s very distinctive amongst the red rocks of the landscape, right? That’s all dead algae.

TWILLEY: It was like a gigantic bathtub ring on the landscape, stretching into the distance, with the actual river and a few little yellow trucks far below. It was so strange and powerful to be able to see the ghost outlines of the reservoir and then the wild river flowing through it, in its original bed. And for the folks who’ve committed years, in some cases decades, to making this happen, seeing the dams come down was a really emotional moment.

PAGLIUCO: Tears were falling down and I was just watching. And, and what really kind of surprised me is, that, the river remembers, you know, its pathway. And just to be a small part of this process and watch it unfold, um, is just really special.

GRABER: Barry says throughout all those years of struggle, it was never a sure bet, and that’s part of why the win is so incredibly meaningful.

MCCOVEY: Yeah, no, there, there, it’s been an up and down battle, for sure. There’s been plenty of times when we didn’t think this was going to happen, when it fell apart. It was hard for me to believe that it was a reality until I was there and saw them, the machinery removing the dam. I said, okay, this is really happening.

TWILLEY: So in the movie version, this would probably be the grand finale. The dams are down, the river is free! Cue the music, right? But real life is not the movies.

TUCKER: Yeah. In some ways, dam removal is a beginning as much as it is an end. So we have miles of river canyon that was underwater. That we need to put back together.

GRABER: And in real life, there actually hadn’t been money allocated for putting that river canyon back together, for recreating an entire ecosystem that had been gone for up to a century. One that would help the salmon and all the other creatures in the area thrive.

TUCKER: But when the Biden administration signed the bipartisan infrastructure law in, And then the Inflation Reduction Act. Both of those laws provided a lot of funding for infrastructure and fisheries restoration.

GRABER: Without Biden’s infrastructure bill and the inflation reduction act, this huge and essential restoration project wouldn’t have been possible.

TWILLEY: It’s a funny thing: the process of getting the dam removed took decades and so much work, and the process of restoring the river will do the same. It almost makes the actual dam removal—even the world’s largest—look kind of straightforward.

GRABER: To find out how to restore an entire ecosystem, we visited Dave Coffman. Dave works for a company called Resource Environmental Solutions, or RES, he’s the director of operations for the Klamath Project.

DAVE COFFMAN: We’re standing pretty darn close to the banks of the Klamath River, about a mile downstream from what we can now call the former Iron Gate dam. Which is real cool to be able to say.

TWILLEY: RES is responsible for making the Klamath River restoration an ecological success. The river, its banks, its tributaries, the former reservoir lake beds—fixing all of it is RES’s mandate. And it’s all in service of bringing the salmon back. It’s a huge job, and planning it out in advance before the dams were demolished was pretty challenging.

COFFMAN: That site’s under up to 100 feet of water. You’re now responsible for going and doing it, and getting to success, on a site that you won’t see until you’ve already committed to doing the thing. We watched the landscape change in front of our eyes as those reservoirs drew down and we adapted the restoration approach to the site conditions.

GRABER: And the site conditions weren’t…well, they weren’t ideal.

COFFMAN: It looked like a wet moon, is what it looked like out there. It was dark sediment that had this, this… water slick on top of it. And it was just a barren surface. And we all looked at that and said man, we need to get some seeds on that real quick. So that plants can begin growing.

TWILLEY: Salmon are in water and plants are on land. But actually, the vegetation is really important for the fish, because they rely on shade from trees to keep the water cool, and plant roots stop soil from washing into the water and making it muddy, which salmon hate.

GRABER: But the team needed to make sure that it was the right plants that began growing

MCCOVEY: So that, you know, as soon as those reservoirs opened up, we don’t just have all these invasive species that aren’t from the area, exotic species jump in and just take over.

GRABER: Fortunately they were prepared with a lot of seeds. RES had been working with local tribes since 2018 to collect seeds from native plants that grow in the area around the reservoirs—

COFFMAN: Sending them off to nurseries up and down the west coast. To grow what ended up being about 3 million seeds that were hand collected. Into close to 19 billion seeds that are currently being incorporated into our final seed mixes to be spread out on the reservoir footprint again this fall. So we already used some of them, in this past spring. We’re going to put some more down in the fall.

TWILLEY: And the tribes didn’t just help with collecting, they also got out there and sowed the seed.

GRABER: They still have a lot of reseeding to do, but the first efforts this spring really worked.

COFFMAN: Well, we had the right conditions out here for what sure looked like a super bloom of California poppy in the areas we were able to hand seed. And then a little bit further down slope, we had some yellow lupine that really popped and, and were looking real pretty. The number of native pollinators that we’ve seen back in those reservoir footprints has been mind-blowing, as we focused on restoring a diverse pollinator habitat.

TWILLEY: The other thing that’s going on in these former reservoir bottoms is that the tributaries that used to join up to the river, and then for decades just flowed into the reservoirs—these are prime salmon spawning habitat, but they need to be reconnected to the Klamath again. You might think that would just happen naturally, but actually there was a ton of sediment on the drained reservoir bottom that was blocking them and cutting off salmon. So RES had to get in there with bulldozers.

GRABER: And there’s more for RES to do to help make the river salmon-friendly again. Remember, salmon don’t just want a free-flowing, easy river that offers them a fast lane to what looks like success. They like things complicated.

COFFMAN: Fast water, slow water, holding cover, moving cover, jumps, trees. And so, kind of the mantra that we talk about in river restoration for salmon is, make it messy.

TWILLEY: One of the keys to messiness is woody debris. Ren took us to see one of these tributaries that RES was working on reconnecting, and it was flowing through a big pile of root balls and logs and branches that RES had dropped from helicopters.

COFFMAN: Those things, the goal was, the messier the better. So it looks like pick up sticks. Sitting in those streams.

GRABER: RES is committed to working at the site for the next five years, and Dave doesn’t expect that everything will be totally done and restored at that point.

COFFMAN: Restoration is a little bit of a misnomer. Right? Because restoration as a, as a term… kind of insinuates a return to something previous.

TWILLEY: No one is trying to restore the Klamath to what it was pre-contact. They just want the salmon back.

COFFMAN: We’re restoring ecological function to a place where it didn’t used to be.

TWILLEY: And already, as the vegetation starts to come back, and the tributaries return to the river, and the river gets messy, that’s starting to happen.

COFFMAN: We’re seeing a lot of quail. Well, what comes along with rabbits and quails is bald and golden eagles perching up on the old telephone and transmission lines that we’ve kept for bird perches.

GRABER: Poppies, pollinators, rabbits, quails, and eagles are all lovely and exciting, but what we really wanted to know was: what about salmon? How soon would they be coming back? To find out, we had to hang out with the team that’s watching and waiting for that very first salmon.

[RIVER RUNNING]

TECH: He’s up there.

DENTON: Ask him what the pitch is.

TECH: What’s the pitch?

TECH: 4.1.

DENTON: 4.1?

TWILLEY: Picture a guy in waders standing on a stepladder in the middle of the Klamath river, and another guy on the bank with a laptop sitting in a big black plastic chest, and a cable running between them. And another important detail: on that stepladder, which is really just a very basic Home Depot style stepladder, is a very sophisticated piece of equipment that cost 100 grand.

DAMON GOODMAN: We’re installing a mount for a sonar camera, which is basically a fancy fish finder, and allows us to look through water, even turbid water like this to see fish swimming upstream or downstream.

GRABER: Damon Goodman is regional director for Caltrout, it’s an environmental nonprofit that played a key role in the campaign to take down the dams. And they’re now playing a key role in this salmon monitoring project.

TWILLEY: To see whether, when, and how many salmon actually swim above the old dam site, they’re using this fancy sonar camera mounted on the stepladder in the river. One of the guys doing the set up was Keith Denton—he actually ran the sonar camera monitoring on the Elwha river up in Washington that *was* the largest dam removal project in US history, till the Klamath came along.

DENTON: The sonar is basically an acoustic flashlight. So it just sits on the side of the river, mounted on the ladder. And it shines a pyramid of sound across the river, that creates movie-like imagery of anything swimming by. It basically has like black and white imagery recording 24/7.

GRABER: We looked over Keith’s shoulder as he looked at the computer screen in the black plastic box. We could see white lumps that were rocks on the river bed. And Keith helped the team fiddle with the camera mount to make sure they got just the right angle to capture as much of the river as possible.

TECH: Do we need any adjustments on angles out there? Is it looking pretty good?

DENTON: It looks pretty good. We can maybe come up like a little bit just to see.

TWILLEY: There was a lot of twiddling to calibrate it, but the idea is that the sonar is sending data to the laptop 24/7. And that data is going to be reviewed by Yurok technicians to see whether there are any fish swimming by.

DENTON: And then it’s kind of one fish, two fish, you get a rough measure of length. But it doesn’t—they don’t go by with a big label on it that says Chinook, or a big label that says coho.

GRABER: No, there isn’t yet any automated way for a computer to be able to count the fish for them, they really do still have to do it by hand. And they have to ID the fish by hand, too.

GOODMAN: So what we’re doing is we’re collecting other pieces of information to tell us what species are going by, including some netting. And so we’ll actually be capturing fish with our hands and identifying them using nets. And then those fish that we capture, we’ll be attaching tags to them that will send out a radio signal every five seconds. You know: ping, ping, ping. So we’re having fixed radio receivers that will detect those pings as they go up. So we’re going to be able to track their, these fish migration, where are they going? How long does it take them?

TWILLEY: Damon and his colleagues from the tribal fisheries programs and NOAA, they’re trying to figure out how many fish come back to spawn above the dams, what species of salmon they are, when they come, where they end up, all of that.

GOODMAN: Those simple questions are actually really complicated to answer. And we have a whole team of different agencies, two different states, other non-profits, universities, experts from other dam removals, all coming together to help us with that. Those simple questions.

GRABER: And this isn’t even the only way the Klamath is being monitored to see what happens post dam removal and what’s going on with the salmon there, some people are studying samples of water to find fish DNA, some people are looking at little bones in fish ears that have chemical signatures that can tell us about where they were born.

GOODMAN: This is like, a laboratory like the world’s never experienced. And we’re trying to set up the tools and have the right people behind us, to help us learn from that story. Without doing monitoring like this, without doing science to actually evaluate what’s happening, we wouldn’t be able to tell that story. And so we’re trying to provide the science to be able to document this monumental, the benefits of this monumental restoration project.

TWILLEY: But wait a minute. This all sounds fabulous, but if you remember, salmon are famous for returning to where they were born to give birth themselves. And no salmon have been born above the Iron Gate dam for decades.

GRABER: Well, that’s not exactly true, because there was that hatchery above the Iron Gate that released millions of baby salmon every year. Some of those fish swimming up the Klamath will be hatchery fish. But some will be what scientists call strays.

GOODMAN: There’s also wandering genes there. You know, there, there’s, you know, there’s… a, innate sense of, you know, checking out new places. For example, if salmon only came back to where they were born, you know, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska was covered in a glacier. And so like that would be devoid of salmon because it was covered by a, you know, sheet of ice. They’re wanderers, they’re explorers. The only reason they’ve been stopping at this point was because they were banging their head against the dam.

TWILLEY: This tendency to stray is all part of the secrets of salmon survival. Recently, scientists have figured out that between 5 and 10 percent of salmon stray from their birth river. And those strays will hopefully help recolonize the Klamath and its tributaries too.

GRABER: Keith told us it’s been slow on the Elwha—those dams came down about a decade ago—but wild coho have been finding their way to recolonize up above the dam sites. So there’s good reason to think it’ll happen here, too.

TWILLEY: And just like the Klamath folks are learning from the dam removals on the Elwha, they’re hoping that what they learn can help bring down even more dams in the future.

GOODMAN: I see dam removal as one of the most successful tools we have in our toolbox for restoring salmon fisheries. There have been a handful of major dam removals applied on the West Coast to date. But there’s a lot more that are coming. And so what we’re learning here will help drive momentum for those projects on the Eel River, in the Sacramento on Battle Creek elsewhere around California.

TWILLEY: No one thinks all the dams in the West are going to come down, but in the case of the Klamath, these old dams generated so little power that it was easily replaced by renewables, so it made a ton of sense. And there are a bunch of other rivers where that’s the case.

GRABER: When it comes to the fish themselves, nobody expects that the dams have come down, and poof, there’s going to be a huge run of salmon swimming up the river. This is going to take time—but Barry says the Yurok and the other tribes have been fighting this fight for generations, they can wait.

MCCOVEY: I’m confident that we’ll see salmon runs increase over time. And I’m confident that we’ll see coho do better. It’s, it’s just a matter of doing the work and, and being comfortable with the timeline. And we are. We’re doing the work and we’re, we’re fine with however long it takes. Don’t get me wrong. This is incredible. Took so much work to get here. Like I said, the largest single step we can take to restoring the Klamath basin. But we’re not done yet. The job’s not done

TWILLEY: The dams are down, the restoration is underway, but huge challenges remain for the Klamath salmon. There’s still logging, there’s still farming and development, increasingly there’s climate change, and above all there’s just a lot of competition for a very scarce resource in the West: water.

PAGLIUCO: There’s only so much water to go around, right? The farmers need water, the birds need water in wetlands, and the fish need it. So I think probably the biggest challenge, uh, to restoring, um, you know, the, the true function of what the Klamath could be, the full potential is, you know, kind of dealing with, with the water.

GRABER: That’s a battle for another day, but in the meantime, everyone’s celebrating their win. And we celebrated with them by going to a salmon cookout with Sammy Gensaw, he’s a Yurok who grew up near the mouth of the river and was part of this whole campaign.

SAMMY GENSAW: So these are like traditional redwood skewers. And, we’re going to be using these to cook up the salmon today. These are all hand-carved. Who carved these, Jokowi?

JOKOWI GENSAW: My grandpa.

SAMMY GENSAW: Yeah, my dad, his grandpa, carved these redwood sticks. These are all old growth redwood sticks right here.

TWILLEY: Sammy and his brothers had caught this fish at the mouth of the Klamath the night before, and they’d filleted it and cut it into portions that Sammy was threading onto the redwood sticks.

SAMMY GENSAW: So basically what you want to do is you want to get the stick right between the skin and the meat of the fish right here like this. And we’re going to get about two, three pieces of fish per stick.

TWILLEY: Meanwhile, his little brother, Jon Luke, was working on the fire pit.

JON LUKE GENSAW: Yeah, so basically I just got done digging the traditional fire pit, and now I’m just splitting up some redwoods to get a fire going. And… [STICKS CRACKLING] going to get an alder fire going and get it going nice and hot. So you can cook it down just until you get coals and that’s how you want to cook your fish.

GRABER: Sammy and his brother jammed the sticks vertically into the earth around the fire pit, so all the salmon filets on the redwood sticks stood in a row like a fence around the fire pit. Sammy turned them a couple of times and they slowly cooked. It took like 45 minutes.

SAMMY GENSAW: And I’ll just crisp up that skin on that side and cook that fish from the back side forward. And then we’ll turn it and crisp it up and so you’ll have like a perfectly cooked piece of fish.

TWILLEY: And then the moment arrived: we got to taste the salmon everyone had been talking about and fighting for.

TWILLEY: This is my first piece of this year’s fall Chinook salmon, cooked over a pit. …Oooh.

GRABER: Oh my god. Mmm.

TWILLEY: That’s ridiculous.

GRABER: Oh my god.

TWILLEY: What have you done? This is incredible.

GRABER: Mmm. It’s juicy. It’s smoky. It’s delicious. It’s so good.

TWILLEY: It’s perfect. It’s so, I know moist is a bad word, but it’s, it is.

GRABER: Moist is not a bad word. It’s great.

TWILLEY: Part of it was the setting and the story, I know, but truly that was the most delicious piece of salmon I have eaten in my entire life.

GRABER: Sammy loves eating the salmon too, but the taste of it isn’t why he’s spent years fighting for the dams to come down.

SAMMY GENSAW: Because if you look right past those trees, there’s a river. And I’m willing to fight to the death over that river, tooth and nail. You know what I mean? Last drop of blood. Because look at these little guys.

TWILLEY: Sammy pointed to a couple of little kids playing in the grass with their mom.

SAMMY GENSAW: That’s my sister. My niece and nephew. And they’re not even going to have memories of fishing on a dammed river. That’s why we do it. You know what I mean? We’re planting trees that we’re never going to see the shade of.

GRABER: We finished eating, and we left the Klamath region, and while we were thrilled to have tasted some salmon, we hadn’t actually seen a single salmon in the river, and certainly we didn’t see any getting past where the iron gate dam had been. But just one month after we got back home, there was some great news.

GOODMAN: That’s definitely going upstream

MAN: That is a fish.

GOODMAN: 2206. Ten o’clock last night

[LAUGHTER]

MAN: YES! [HAND SLAP]

TWILLEY: Damon, Bob, and the monitoring team spotted their first salmon above the old dam site, using the sonar camera.

MAN: Show me where it is, Damon.

GOODMAN: Here we are, right here, look at that, look at that!

MAN: Alright. Heading upstream! Woo-hoo!

GOODMAN: All right, here we go!

MAN: Yeah, baby!

GOODMAN: This is the beginning, let’s go!

[MUSIC]

GRABER: Thanks so much to Barry McCovey Jr., Craig Tucker, Matt Mais, Ren Brownell, Bob Pagliuco, Damon Goodman, Keith Denton, David Bitts, Sammy and Jon Luke Gensaw, Dave Coffman, and everyone else we met on our trip. We have links to all their organizations on our website, gastropod.com.

TWILLEY: We also want to thank Shane Anderson of Swiftwater Films, he’s a filmmaker who’s been filming the whole process, and he generously shared his audio of the team spotting that first fish.

GRABER: Thanks as always to our fabulous producer Claudia Geib, who helped us plan our interviews and travel for this story. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode, ‘til then!