Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The death of a river

The first damn dam was built in 1908...this is and was a remote mountainous area...there was no reliable fuel for steam plants, at that time hydro was the only way to go. In succeeding years, more dams were built as the population increased...it was all working well, the salmon were returning in astonishing numbers in spite of the dams (I saw this with my own eyes as did thousands of motorists because Highway 99 ran on the north bank of the Klamath for 5 miles, the river was black with fish in late summer). The last dam and hatchery, Irongate was completed in 1964, it was a success by any measure, the magnificent runs continued for another 40 years or more (13 or 14 generations of the Chinook's 3 year life cycle) so we know the hatchery was not hurting the population.
Then the runs began to decline. The finger pointing began. Whatever the reasons, the fish were declining...and the finger pointing stopped on the Klamath dams. No credence was given to international overfishing, domestic overfishing, drought and resultant higher water temps in the river which causes disease, protection of pinnipeds, protection of fish eating birds, the meltdown of a reactor in Japan which elevated radiation markedly across the Pacific on the same current path that the salmon ride in their life cycle. But it's a done deal, and how I wish I am wrong.

Whatever happens, these actions are irrevocable. If it turns out to be a catastrophe, I hope there are legal paths to hold those responsible, including high politicians.

Deerstalker - Would that have been in the Willoughby river in Orleans county Vermont?

Funny you should mention civil liability...The Karuk and Yurok tribes have been pushing the dam removal from the very beginning, loudly. If the dam removals are successful and salmon runs are restored...everybody wins.
If on the other hand, it turns out to be a boondoggle, and the tribes sue Pacificorp, the removal corporation ie: Klamath River Restoration Corp, Pacific Federation of Fishermens Assoc., Kiewit Const., Knight-Piesold Engineering, and possibly Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who OK'd the whole thing....we are going to see a very very large pie split among 9,000 enrolled tribal members. Unfortunately, I fail to see where a huge wealth transfer will do the river any good.

One point that needs to be made about big runs....hatcheries worked just fine. But the "conservation biology" idiots (a spinoff of Earth First ideology, I have the paper trail) wormed themselves into agencies with the idea that only natural fish doing natural things were acceptable in the grand scheme of things. Hatchery fish were somehow inferior and evil.

Okay, maybe a hatchery fish isn't optimal, isn't as cool as a grumpy old hog fish. But, it's a fish. And when it comes to inferior, I think that ANY salmon that makes it to saltwater and then claws its way back upriver has earned its right to reproduce.

And by the way, I've never seen any research on the topic, but hatchery salmon imprint on the smell of home and literally will swim up the pipe if given the chance, they do swim into holding pens for recovery. So here's my question for you geniuses.

What if salmon could be started in a hatchery, meaning fertilized and viable and then planted in a streambed, which might, if necessary, be prepared to have the right conditions? Bull trout imprint on their home redd. But can you imagine a targeted program of capture, milk, fertilize and release to wild redds, or is that the real problem here? Nobody in "biology" has tried it, I've never heard of it. But given the success of hatcheries before they became politically incorrect, this could work really well at a reasonable cost.

No, don't gripe to me about habitat quite yet.

Aces and Eights and Valsdad, I think you guys make some strong arguments for recovery and optimism...and here's one more arrow for your quiver, unique to Siskiyou County and the Sacramento system and it's tributaries. The salmon and steelhead populations did survive and adapt...with a history of hydraulic gold mining from 1849 to 1884. We literally turned mountains to mud and flushed them down every major river on the Sierra. The salmon survived.

Friggin horses haven’t hit a lick of the damage done by dumbass twits with all the hollering and bulls hit they bring up!!

Dave, It's all way over my head...but I think the Feds, maybe NOAA, have something like that going to restore the San Joaquin River.

It will be a wasteland for quite some time, and will never be the same.

I've seen and lived some dead rivers. The passaic. The saddle. They come back. But bank on the fact that they are ruined in terms of ever being in their "natural" state, as was the plan.

Utter disaster.

J, cripes.

I've read your posts before, you know better than this. HS biology.

Well said

Newsome will provide. He's Godlike, don'cha know.

Interesting to see there were still some flooded trees standing after all those years.

I bet the fishermen with sonar knew they were there.

This is off the top of my head, so corrections by more worthy may be in order:

First, salmon will return to their natal river, wild fish or "tame" (hatchery).. I believe the smolts/fry at a certain stage in their life can be introduced to non-hatchery rivers and they will return to that introdutory river, rather than their hatchery. The Kasilof River locally has a king hatchery on it, which produces fishable runs. The hatchery fish have clipped adiposes - you can keep them. Any intact adipose fish is consider "native to the river" and must be released without removing from the water. It's a certainty (to me), that un-caught hatchery fish are now contributing offspring to the "natural, fish, but it is all the same river water.

There are some salmon runs in Alaska (Pebble Mine area) that spawn in Glacial streams with high turbidity. They just do it after the glacer silt goes way down in mid-winter, after the glaciers quit melting. This may not apply to the question, however. Just that fish are adaptable, over time, to varying conditions..

They, like other animals, can also expand home ranges naturally, albeit slowly. Native fishermen wanting to get rich, or go MAGA on their dog and winter food stocks, many years ago entirely corked off the mouth of the Cosna River (my cabin site) , over several consecutive years, completely destroying the coho run that had been there. A few years ago, one of my upstream neighbors spotted a pair of spawners above my place, tho that is the only sighting I am aware of.

Red Dog Mine, north of Kotzebue is a huge zinc and heavy metal mine. Before that was in place, there were no fish living in RD Creek. Since they have been doing mitigation to keep leakage - mined and natural leaching - out of the creek and fish have established themselves without any help. I don't know if it is just residence, or if successful spawning is occuring. I still wouldn't eat them tho.

Pebble Mine Prospect (copper, gold, heavy metals) is a world class catastophe in the making, if it ever proceeds. The potential to decimate (at the very least) the largest salmon-producing watershed in the world is a near certainty to happen. Just one of the clues is a proposed huge toxic tailing lake behind the biggest earth-fill (I think) dam ever constructed (Aswan bigger? ) that has to last virtually forever, on pourus substrate, earthquake zone. The mine itself , by foreign owners, will be played out in 75 years. And the owners will be gone, gone, gone.

There are thousand (or more) year old Roman mining sites in Britain that, every high water, still produce fish kills downstream from "flushing"effect , I am told. I wouldn't eat those fish either- meaning live ones in those streams.

It sounds lije that dam removal was a deliberat clusterf'k, and damn the potential consequences. The river will recover, somewhat at least.

Eventually- who knows how long.

Probably.

Water is the ultimate solvent.
Almost everything in nature is water soluble given time. Look at stalagmites.

What doesn’t dissolve, can be eroded by what’s suspended in the flowing water.

Little difference between something dissolved or particles so small they stay in suspension with little agitatiion.



The Conowingo dam on the Susquehanna is so silted in as to almost not exist. They considered dredging, then realized it is best to not stir up what has washed in from half of Pa, and some of NY rivers for over half a century.

The West Coast salmon fishery has been in decline for a long time. The Eel River and it's tributaries are classic examples, and there are others.

Update...I suspect you guys are tired of the Klamath dam removal topic.
I'll keep it brief...Fall Creek hatchery/rearing ponds in the area adjacent to the removed dams released 830,000 juvenile salmon into the river last week. In a news announcement, Calif Dept of Fish and Wildlife sadly announced that all 830,000 fish have died. The very brief report goes on to say, turbid silt laden water was not the cause, it was gas bubble disease caused from pressure variation while the fish were transiting the lower dam tunnel.
What was not explained was why the hatchery release hasn't been a problem in previous years...the hatchery and ponds were built in 1919, and used on and off since then.

The cause of gas bubble disease is typically nitrogen super-saturation of the water. Super saturation is caused when water and air are put together under high pressure, like in a tunnel, pipe, or aquifer. If the inlet of the tunnel is far enough under water that no water is entrained with the water going down, then there will not be any super saturation. If water sucks in air on the way down, like when the inlet is just barely underwater but a whirlpool sucks in air, then the water can super saturate.

Also, if the receiving water is very deep, super saturation can have little or even absolutely zero effect (deep water holds more nitrogen, so it takes MUCH more nitrogen to be super saturated).

The water level at the intake and/or the outflow could be different (I have no local knowledge) after they breached the dams. Even something like a slower flow rate through the tunnel could be the difference between their eyes popping out, or not.

As Dutch points out, there are a lot of variables.

A simple test run with a few hundred or a thousand of those fry, a few days ahead of the scheduled release and monitored below the dam, would likely have provided a clue as to what the results would be.