DAVID HERASIMTSCHUK / FRESHWATERS ILLUSTRATED “I really do consider this the capstone of an amazing career that started at Oregon State,” he said. Bransom became familiar with the Klamath River area in the 1980s, when he worked in Northern California as a soil scientist. “I always had a sense that I might make my way back to the Klamath at some point to make a professional contribution to restore balance.” Standing on a bluff above Iron Gate Dam in the summer of 2023 as workers below prepared for its demolition, Bransom acknowledged the project’s challenges. With so many groups involved, negotiations were sometimes complicated. But tackling this opened the way for positive developments, he said — in particular, restoration efforts that combine traditional ecological knowledge and Western thinking. Work to remove the dams started in 2023. About a year later, at the end of August, as Tribal partners watched and many embraced, excavators opened a passage through the remains of the Iron Gate Dam, and the river flowed freely along its historic path for the first time in a hundred years. (See facing page.) In all, the project involved moving about 1.3 million cubic yards of material. But it also includes a restoration effort focused primarily on the land once covered by reservoirs. Crews collected three million native seeds from the project area starting in 2019, according to Dave Meurer, director of community affairs for RES, which is overseeing the effort in partnership with the Yurok Tribe. Nurseries propagated the seeds until they numbered 20 billion. Mixtures of these were scattered by helicopter and hand to renew the uncovered lands. Yurok revegetation crews sowed more than 27,000 acorns; more than 72,000 live plants were planted. Soon, cracked sediment along the Klamath’s banks began to blush green. The work will continue for several years. “While it is the largest dam removal and environmental salmon restoration project in the world, I tend to think of it as a resiliency project,” Bransom said. “And a resiliency project not only for these amazing fish, but also for communities who rely on a balanced and healthy Klamath River.” T That idea of resiliency resonates with Jerri Bartholomew, a retired Oregon State microbiologist. She and her research team worked for more than 20 years to unravel how a single parasite became responsible for devastating losses of salmon on the Klamath River, as well as how the dams contributed to that. Bartholomew is also an artist, and her time spent on the Klamath led her to combine science and art in a project called “And the Dams Come Down.” It will be displayed starting this January at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton. The 6-foot-by-8-foot piece features an outline of the Klamath River in the background, lines marking the locations of the former dams, and 35 glass salmon — coho and Chinook — that she cast individually. (See a video about the work at bit.ly/Jerri-Bartholomew.) It’s a dynamic piece created to change as the river changes. Now that the dams are gone, she has switched their color in the piece from black to white, to symbolize ghost dams. A similar change will happen to the glass salmon. As time passes and salmon return to points upriver from where the dams once stood, Bartholomew will swap out the white ghost salmon and replace them with naturally colored ones. “The salmon are extremely resilient,” she said. “If they find that there’s a way to move further upriver now that it’s unblocked, they will do it.” B Back on the river, Tullos and her students navigated sections of Class 2 rapids in their kayaks. They spotted a deer drinking from shore, a turtle sunning itself on a rock and a pelican flying overhead. Vegetation on the canyon walls was already dry, and fire scars lined the walls just downriver. Every few minutes, the quiet was punctuated by a car passing on the highway. Though the water was thick and turbid, Tullos saw signs of change. She didn’t anticipate finding aquatic plants, but they persevered, forming large carpets in spots. Diving into the water, she found mussels scattered across the river bottom. As for the salmon, she doesn’t expect them to recover right away.The fish face too many obstacles, particularly around water quality and water management. These, Tullos said, require a “slow grind” — time — to work out. Still, she is hopeful. “To me, the source of hope is the strong sense of community and care for the river that exists in the Klamath basin,” she said. “I think there is something unique that is happening here.” As it turned out, the Klamath’s salmon were all too eager to play their part in the newest chapter of their story. Just weeks after the removal project was deemed officially complete, salmon were spotted in waters upriver from the former dams — swimming free toward habitat that has been inaccessible for more than a century. P.39 Chinook salmon navigating the waters of the Klamath.
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