Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  Rene preferred to believe that change didn’t require one generation replacing the next, though after a decade in the salmon-restoration business he was still an unlikely face in the crowd. Now he gripped John McMillan by the shoulder and they exchanged a silent, collegial moment of understanding. No longer did McMillan have to convince anyone of the rightness of freeing the Elwha River—that battle was over. Even so, the euphoria surrounding the largest dam removal in U.S. history had long since worn off as well, leaving the biologist saddled with the collateral damage that came with a hard-fought victory. The truth was, McMillan heard this sort of thing all the time: jabs at pointy-headed scientists and cavils about eco-worship. There was no point in arguing. What did it matter to this guy in his blinkered mirror sunglasses that chinook salmon and steelhead were, in fact, already up here, recolonizing the seventy miles of spawning grounds that had been blocked for a hundred years? He would just complain about the temporary ban on fishing. Or the merchantable timber locked up in the park. Or the price tag for dam removal, which ended up at $325 million, nearly three times more than originally budgeted. People are set in their ways. Changing their minds is one of the great myths of politics. But sometimes, on rare occasions, it happens.

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  ALREADY, A THICK, UNRULY MASS of willows and alders covered the outer rim of the former reservoir, a carpet of green that would close in on the river like jungle reclaiming a long-lost temple. While the novelty of dam removal was the stuff of headline news, nothing compared to actually seeing the results firsthand. Rene absorbed the view in silence. The speed at which nature could repair itself was simultaneously hard to fathom and awe-inspiring. He had made the trip from California to see a handful of such restoration efforts, though none of the others could compare with the Elwha in scope. To the south, on a headwater tributary of Oregon’s Deschutes River, he had spent the previous day visiting upland-prairie and meadow restorations that would one day benefit wild steelhead. Though the steelhead weren’t there yet, the work anticipated their arrival, as damaged watersheds were rehabilitated in advance of the sea-run trout’s return.

  Rene called these visits a form of cross-pollination. “It’s so easy to be in your own bubble all the time,” he said. Getting out of his office—getting out of California—gave him the opportunity to see new ideas at work in the field and to meet with colleagues. The meeting-with-colleagues part was especially vital. Over the years he’d made bonds with other scientists working on salmon issues who shared his sense of optimism; it was important to check in occasionally to keep the flame burning. Recently he’d seen himself quoted in a paper called “Salmon 2100,” which collected the anonymous thoughts of a number of scientists across disciplines in the salmon-restoration universe; many of them were likely people that he admired and respected, perhaps even former teachers and mentors, who’d responded to the question, “Where will salmon be in the year 2100?” Rene was dismayed by the pessimism in the final printed version. “I was shocked to find that my response was the only one that said they’d be doing better,” he told me. “How have we allowed ourselves to get to a place where the people working on this are so jaded that they don’t believe it’s possible?” For him, the Elwha was a dramatic case in point. “Look at it,” he said. “Nature recovers. Give it some help and it recovers.”

  John McMillan understood as well as anyone that nature could recover. The Elwha was his backyard, after all. He lived just a few miles away. And his love of salmon went well beyond the professional—it was in his blood. His father, Bill, was well known to steelhead fishermen and conservationists. Back in 1974, Bill had taken his son to the very courtroom where Judge George Boldt famously awarded the treaty tribes of Washington and Oregon half the salmon catch. Some kids might remember seeing a historic concert or sporting event with their parents; McMillan was witness to the Boldt decision. Life wasn’t easy growing up with a wild-salmon advocate. Besides suffering fiscal privation—conservationists being more poorly paid than even teachers—John had to learn to defend himself at school in Washougal, a tight-knit community on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, where the parents of his classmates worked in the commercial or recreational salmon fishery and anyone opposed to hatcheries was at best a traitor. Using a fly to catch steelhead was considered suspicious too. One of his best friends was Native American—strike three, and another reason to learn how to use his fists. Bill and his son had come to see the massive hatchery infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest as one of the main obstacles facing salmon and steelhead. “I hate talking about the hatchery issue,” he said now. “It’s like peeing in the wind.”

  McMillan was referring to the tribal salmon hatchery on the Elwha. As part of the dam-removal deal, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe got a brand-new hatchery. Scientists like McMillan, who viewed the unshackling of the river as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—on par with the eruption of Mount St. Helens from a research perspective—would have to be satisfied with making observations that were influenced by hatchery stocks. I could remember my own reaction when I first heard this news, before the last hunk of cement had even been removed from the dams. Outrage. A grand experiment in restoring wild salmon to an environment as perfect as you’ll find in the Lower 48 was about to be scuttled by short-term need. But Rene wasn’t so worried. Though he would have preferred the absence of a hatchery, part of the challenge of dam removal, he argued, was selling it to the public. The hatchery made the sale easier, especially to the tribe, a key constituent that depended on salmon. As usual, he was factoring in the political dimension, something that many scientists found distasteful or even inappropriate. For Rene, coalition building, with its inherent need for compromise, had become a large part of his job description, of his success even.

  “That’s why we all love Rene,” John conceded.

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  AT 321 SQUARE MILES in size, the Elwha drainage is not write-home-about big by Northwest terms, but it looms large in the regional consciousness. More than 80 percent of it lies within Olympic National Park, where its timbered slopes have never been cut. Even so, the great old-growth firs and cedars topple in windstorms on occasion, and those trees that are swept downstream in spring runoff create massive logjams of the sort that impressed and frustrated the first Euro-American explorers and are now mostly absent from rivers up and down the West Coast. The logjams force the river into contortionist knots that make for perilous navigation and ideal salmon habitat. Narrow canyons and fierce rapids add to the complexity. Over eons the river selected for strong fish that could make the journey, including some of the heftiest chinook salmon anywhere, with legendary hundred-pounders reported from time to time prior to damming. All five species of Pacific salmon, plus steelhead, cutthroat, and bull trout, once spawned in the Elwha.

  Such storied abundance and diversity didn’t safeguard the fish. Thomas Aldwell, a local pioneer, started constructing the first of the two Elwha dams in 1910, just five miles from the mouth, and after some mishaps completed the 108-foot plug three years later. Contrary to state law, the dam was built without fish passage and blocked more than 90 percent of the river’s spawning habitat. To mitigate the loss (and mollify authorities), Aldwell also built a hatchery, and so began a recurring cycle of ineffectual, even harmful so-called mitigation hatcheries being used as work-arounds for illegal fish-blocking dams, a strategy that would see its apotheosis in the Columbia Basin. The power generated by the dam fueled the economic development of the frontier town of Port Angeles, specifically its lumber mill. The environmental legacy of all this was the usual unraveling of an ecosystem and the fall off of salmon runs to about one percent of their historical size.

  For a long time the Elwha River seemed just out of reach for conservationists, an untouchable holy grail that powered—symbolically if not in reality—a waning logging industry in a once-prosperous and now-struggling rural community. In actuality, the dams only provided nineteen megawatts of power to a single paper mill, albeit one with well-
paid jobs, and when it came time for relicensing, the cost of making necessary upgrades outweighed the benefits. Suddenly dam opponents had an opening, and in 1992 the U.S. Congress, in a surprising bit of deft politics on the part of river advocates, authorized removal. It took another two decades and plenty of maneuvering on both sides before the first chunk of concrete fell, on September 27, 2011.

  When I first heard that the dams were truly coming down, I decided to take a trip into the Elwha backcountry. I wanted to see the river in its straitjacketed posture one last time, as a form of remembrance, so I drove to Whiskey Bend and backpacked fifteen miles up the Elwha Trail in Olympic National Park: through intermittent rains, down into a cool wet ravine where the Lillian River joins the Elwha, past Elkhorn Camp and the Lost River, one of the largest tributaries, and finally to the junction of the Hayes River, where I pitched my base camp in a grove of towering fir and hemlock. One of these trees had recently fallen across the trail and was subsequently notched by the park service, just enough to afford passage. I stepped through the gap and paused for a moment on the threshold. The recumbent trunk stood taller than me, its smooth red grain smelling intensely of resin. Someone had taken the time to count back the tree rings, noting in black Magic Marker the year 1492 near the center.

  The next day I left camp early and hiked another dozen miles upriver, hoping to get a glimpse of the headwater glaciers where the river begins its life. Clouds moved in again and fog shrouded the Olympic peaks. Every now and then I caught a peekaboo sight of snow in the higher elevations through lofty trees and mist. Near the Low Divide, which separates the Elwha Basin from the Quinault, I veered away from the main trail on a climber’s spur that followed the river. Now it was raining hard, and the muddy goat path petered out altogether somewhere past a rough shelter used by backcountry alpinists. It was there, off-trail in the middle of the Olympic wilderness, trying to spot the Elwha Snow Finger—the river’s source, lying in a crevice between Mount Queets and Mount Barnes—that I first heard the voices.

  Moments later a group of three backpackers in rain-spattered ponchos came bursting through the brush. They were soaked and tired, and I could see them choosing their steps gingerly as they tried to avoid slick rocks and logs. When they noticed me, they all emitted audible gasps of relief. “You don’t know how glad we are to see you,” one of them called out. “Are we near the trail?” I led them a quarter mile back to the shelter, which they’d been searching for. They dropped their heavy packs and began peeling off wet layers. One of them lit a stove, and they all huddled around it to warm their hands before boiling water for tea.

  “We’ve been lost for two days,” the trip leader explained. They had been following the Bailey Traverse, a little-traveled high route across the Olympics. In the rain and fog, with prominent landmarks and peaks obstructed, they’d made errors in their route-finding and wound up spending a week rather than four days in the backcountry. They were still twenty-five miles from the trailhead. “If you see a ranger,” a woman with an Australian accent said before I left, “please tell them we’re okay. No need for a search party!”

  On my way out, I took care to study the river and its ways. The Elwha up here in the park looked perfect. It had all the characteristics of a functioning river. Except that all this beautiful habitat was devoid of salmon.

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  IT TOOK NEARLY THREE YEARS to physically remove both dams, a process that was undertaken in stages to limit the amount of sediment flow and to give the river’s remnant populations of wild fish a fighting chance. McMillan figured that about 90 percent of the young salmon in the main stem perished in the first couple of years. “My best guess is they starved to death,” he told me. Some parts of the lower river saw a 95 percent reduction in macroinvertebrates—the insects, crustaceans, mollusks, and so forth that make up the primary diet of juvenile salmon. “The main stem went through hell and back.” Waves of sediment locked behind the dams for a hundred years pushed through the unshackled river with each storm, smothering just about every living thing in the way. Only the tributaries provided refuge to the surviving wild fish that would be the founding population of future salmon runs. A similar scenario took place after Mount St. Helens blew its top and sent a boiling torrent of mud and debris down its flanks, with salmon runs rebounding sooner than expected. McMillan himself documented the first wild fish discovered above the lower-dam site, a thirty-five-inch male steelhead, in May 2012. The local wildlife found the new food source too. Studies revealed that in the first year after dam removal, 80 percent of the carcasses of spawned-out salmon lined the stream bank; a year later the percentage was closer to ten, the rest being carried into the woods to nourish plants and animals for the first time in a century, the way nature had intended. The same study reported a tripling of the dipper population; the small gray bird with an ebullient song is also called a water ouzel, and it spends its life along watercourses, sometimes even swimming underwater to glean insects from the rocks or steal salmon eggs from a nest.

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  IT WAS TIME TO put on the wetsuits. Ever since Rene and I swam with salmon in the Yuba River, I had been waiting for an opportunity to get back in the water with the big resilient fish. McMillan took us to the Gauge Hole, three miles above the lower Elwha dam site and just upstream of a U.S. Geological Survey gauge that measures the river’s flow. Following a trail beaten into the brush, we scrambled down a bank covered in salal and salmonberry. Downstream at the next bend, a family played in the river, the high-pitched squeals of the children carrying across the water. “You never used to see that,” McMillan said. People are attracted to a free-flowing river, especially on a hot afternoon like this one, with fall just around the corner. A group of young men sat on a rock ledge above a deep pool with their dogs, drinking tallboys and trading wild, windmilling leaps into the water. I was worried all this activity might spook the salmon. “You’d be surprised,” McMillan reassured me. “These fish can put up with a lot.”

  Rene and I walked to the head of the riffle and plunged in. The current swept me immediately into the pool, where a chinook with a scar on its dorsal shot out from beneath me and made for darker water. I took a breath through my snorkel and went down. A sinewy lone steelhead moved snakelike along the sandy bottom. I knew it was a steelhead because McMillan had explained the different swimming strokes. Chinook use just their tails to propel them forward, while steelhead move their whole bodies. At the tailout, two rambunctious dogs paddled over to us while the boys on the rocks hooted and called them. It was a late-summer day for the ages.

  Grabbing cobbles in the streambed with my gloved hands, I pulled myself back upstream through the shallows, against the current. Scores of fingerlings of some sort, two to three inches in length, darted among the rocks. They had parr marks and faint red lateral lines. I surfaced and shouted across the pool to McMillan, who sat on the rock ledge, basking in the sun. Today was his day off, and he’d been doing enough snorkel surveys as it was. “O. mykiss,” he called back. Rainbow trout. He’d seen plenty in his surveys. Before dam removal, the upper Elwha was a favorite haunt of the backcountry angler. I too in years past had backpacked into the park to fly-fish for the river’s wily rainbows, which were likely descended from steelhead that couldn’t reach the sea after the first dam was built. The rainbows of the Elwha were hard to catch, rewarding the crepuscular angler who woke before dawn or fished long after the dinner bell sounded. It was hoped that these fish would seed the comeback of a once-sizable steelhead population. So far McMillan was pleased. The river was full of wild O. mykiss fry, and he figured many of them would head for the salt when the time came.

  Farther downstream, Rene and I floated past a small school of pink salmon and a few dozen dark chinook. Maybe, during their three or four years at sea, these same kings had schooled with the Yuba chinook I had met two years earlier, somewhere out there in the deep blue pastures of the North Pacific. One species, many different stocks—or, as Rene liked to say, cultures. They
followed the great Alaskan gyre, growing bigger, some of them tangling in the nets and never seen again, others struggling against the odds to make it back to their spawning gravels.

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  WHEN WE PICTURE A RIVER, we tend to think of glamorous white-water rapids, high in the watershed. But in many ways it is the languid estuaries in the lower riparian tidal zones that are even more crucial in the salmon life cycle. The river’s mouth is where the juveniles have to be ready for the next phase of life: the ocean. They turn silver for protection and undergo the physiological changes necessary to survive in salt water. Moreover, the young salmon must find an eelgrass bed, oyster bar, or some other nook in which to hide until they can grow strong enough to make for open sea. Estuaries, if they’re healthy, offer plenty of food and protection.