The Path of the Klamath The Klamath River runs more than 250 miles along the OregonCalifornia border, through desert, rainforest and redwoods, to reach the Pacific Ocean.The removal of the four dams (shown here), completed in October, restored almost 400 miles of salmon spawning grounds. As part of the process, water from three reservoirs once used for recreation was drained; the 2,500 acres of formerly submerged lands are the focus of a massive native revegetation project. Klamath Yreka Happy Camp Hoopa Ashland COPCO No. 1 IRON GATE COPCO No. 2 J.C. BOYLE CALIFORNIA O R E G O N OREGON CALIFORNIA Klamath Falls P.33 “Without the salmon, we aren’t Yurok. And that’s why it’s everything.” guide river restoration and dam removal projects to come. But it wasn’t a given that the dam removal and restoration project would happen at all. It took decades of starts and stops because the people involved — lakefront property owners, whitewater rafters, farmers, Tribes, the utility company that managed the dams, state and federal regulators — often had vested interests in the river that didn’t align. Once the third-largest salmon producing river in the country, the Klamath’s salmon counts dropped more than 90% over the past century. The dams cut this keystone species off from cool tributaries where the fish used to lay their eggs, creating stagnant zones and allowing fish diseases to thrive. Over the past two years, salmon fishing has been banned in California because of poor river and ocean conditions. Brook Thompson, a Yurok and Karuk Native American and doctoral student at UC Santa Cruz who is working with Tullos, has had a closeup view of those changes. “For us, salmon is culture. Salmon is our food source. Salmon is our exercise,” she said, sitting on an island in the river after kayaking with the team. “You just can’t separate our culture from the salmon… without the salmon, we aren’t Yurok. And that’s why it’s everything.” Thompson is proud of the Tribes’ leadership in the campaign to restore the river. For decades, local Tribes and others found that their interests often clashed with those of people wanting water for farmlands or wetlands. But calls for the dams’ removal gained urgency after a 2002 decision to limit water released downriver from the Upper Klamath Lake resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Klamath Basin fish, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. It was the largest ever salmon die-off recorded on the West Coast.Thompson witnessed it at 7 years old. “People who were actually organizing protests and rallies and actions and conversations and meetings, they were told initially that [the dam removal] would never happen, and that this was a pipe dream,” she said. “And yet to see this thing we were told was never going to happen, actually be done, is so inspiring to me when it comes to all these other climate change issues.” A After a night at the Tree of Heaven campground in the summer of 2024, Tullos and the two students set out at 7:30 a.m. and drove a few miles along Highway 96 to a put-in spot. They were making their first kayak trip of the season to scout sites where they can get a better picMAP ILLUSTRATION BY ELSA JENNA
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