For the first time in more than a century, salmon will soon have free passage along the Klamath River and its tributaries, a key watershed near the California-Oregon border, as the largest dam removal project in American history is nearing completion.
This week, crews will use excavators to breach rock dams holding water upstream from two dams which had already been almost completely removed, Iron Gate and Copco No. 1. The work will allow the river to flow freely through its historic bed again, providing salmon with a pathway to important habitat, just in time for the fall Chinook, or king salmon, spawning season.
“The fact that the river has been restored to its original course and that the dam is gone bodes well for our future,” said Leaf Hillman, ceremonial leader of the Karuk Tribe, which has been fighting for at least 25 years to remove the Klamath dams. Salmon is culturally and spiritually important for the tribetogether with others in the region.
The demolition comes about a month before the removal of four towering dams on the Klamath is scheduled to be completed as part of a national movement to allow rivers to return to their natural course and restore ecosystems for fish and other wildlife.
More than 2,000 dams had been removed in the U.S. as of February, most of them in the past 25 years, according to the advocacy group American Rivers. They included dams on the Elwha River in Washington state, which flows from Olympic National Park into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia.
“Now the recovery can really begin, to the extent that the river can restore itself,” said Joshua Chenoweth, senior riparian ecologist for the Yurok Tribe, which has been fighting for decades to remove the dams and restore the river. “There’s a lot that people can do to help, but what we’ve learned with Elwha and Condit and other dams is that all you really have to do is remove the dams, and then rivers are really good at returning to a natural state.”
The Klamath was once known as the third-largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast. But after energy company PacifiCorp built the dams to generate electricity between 1918 and 1962, the structures stopped the river’s natural flow and disrupted the life cycle of the region’s salmon, which spend most of their lives in the Pacific Ocean but return to their natal rivers to spawn.
Fish populations plummeted. In 2002, a bacterial outbreak caused by low water and warm temperatures killed more than 34,000 fish, mostly Chinook salmon. That set off decades of advocacy by tribes and environmental groups, culminating in a 2022 decision by federal regulators a plan approved to remove the dams.
Since then, the smallest of the four dams, known as Copco No. 2, has been removed. Crews have also drained the reservoirs of the other three dams and began removing those structures in March.
Along the Klamath, removing the dams won’t have a major impact on energy supplies. At full capacity, they produced less than 2 percent of PacifiCorp’s energy — enough to power about 70,000 homes. Hydropower from dams is considered a clean, renewable energy source, but much larger dams in the western U.S. have become a target for environmental groups and tribes for the damage they cause to fish and river ecosystems.
The project is expected to cost about $500 million, paid for by taxpayers and PacifiCorps taxpayers.
But it’s unclear how quickly the salmon will return to their historic ranges and the river will heal. There have already been reports of salmon at the mouth of the river, beginning their river journey. Michael Belchik, senior water policy analyst for the Yurok Tribe, said he hopes they can get past the Iron Gate Dam soon.
“I think we’re going to have some early success,” he said. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to see some fish above the dam. If not this year, then definitely next year.”
Further upstream are two other dams in Klamath, but they are smaller and allow salmon to pass through fishways: a series of pools that fish can jump through to get past the dam.
Mark Bransom, executive director of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the nonprofit created to oversee the project, noted that it took about a decade for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to resume fishing after the Elwha dams were removed.
“I don’t know if anyone knows for sure what it means for fish to come back,” he said. “It’s going to take time. You can’t undo 100 years of damage and impacts to a river system overnight.”