Klamath Basin

And what's super exciting about the Klamath is that that remarkable ability to explore these and recolonize these new habitats is, uh, playing out and across an entire watershed, and we're all there documenting what's going on.

So, you know, straying isn't simply a navigational error, you know? It's an important part of salmon resilience, and we're seeing that play out in real time here in the Klamath Basin.

You know, it's really striking.

A-as, as you were talking, I realized we, we've, I don't know, we've probably had literally dozens of conversations about salmon and other anadromous, you know, going from freshwater to saltwater to back to freshwater fish on this show over almost 20 years.

And so this is really a, a story about entire ecosystem response.

And what we're telling here is just the first story about Chinook salmon.

Well, but for this first story, for this impressive return of Chinook, what does it mean socially and culturally to have these fish back in so much of the Klamath Basin after 100 years?

Yeah, it's just such a, you know, important part of the culture of the Klamath Basin.

And many times it worked really well.

So with that background, I said, why don't we just do a wetland on the farm and treat our water in a wetland? And being the Klamath Basin, there was a lot of negativity about that.

Oh, that'll never work.

This is Klamath Basin.

Nothing works in the Klamath Basin, so that's not going to work.

But we were able to convince Oregon Department of Agriculture, look, we're going to try this.

We're going to try this thing.

And the next year was like April 29th.

And big things are happening.

So let me skip to the big things, because I think it's really exciting to share with you that after a decadal movement by tribal leaders in California, the largest river restoration project in American history in the Klamath River Basin.

Four dams, four defunct dams have been removed that's restoring over 400 miles of salmon habitat.

Critically important.

And that was that first covenant was the human said, yes, we will live in balance.

Yes, we will be the great beneficiaries of the... deep abundance of the Klamath Basin, but we have these duties and responsibilities to live in balance with it and make sure that even though we are dependent upon the salmon, for example, we won't interact with them.

We won't use them in a way that hurts them or harms them.

So there's that balance.

But the four dams were mid-Klamath and they were built without fish ladders between 1913 and 1964.

So imagine the genius of this, right? And I'm being facetious just in case people don't catch that in my voice, but...

Third largest salmon producing river in the continental U.S. You know, it's supporting tribal cultures up and down the entire Klamath Basin, which is a very large basin.

Those salmon runs were also supporting offshore commercial fisheries, you know, recreation, on and on and on.

And that was the case until, you know, probably 10 years ago.

And then there was a whole shuffling of priorities up in the Klamath Basin.

Endangered species were found in that system up there.

The tribal rights became another big issue, tribal rights to water.

And then agriculture.

Agriculture is big in the Klamath Basin, including on the refuges.

And all of a sudden, the priorities totem pole put...

the water for refuge is at the bottom.

In 25, when Chinook returned to the headwaters of the Klamath for the first time in more than a century, the number of them at the same site increased by 72% to 13,300.

That was about a fifth of the Chinook salmon in Klamath Basin in both years.

Coho salmon, steelhead trout, and Pacific lamprey, also important for indigenous substance fishing, migrated upstream too.

Researchers spotted Chinook essentially everywhere the salmon could spawn.

[laughs] Yeah.

And you still live in the Klamath River Basin.

Yeah, yeah.

So what is their relationship with the river like?