Jun 15, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min · 18 segments
The story of the Hanford Nuclear Site | In 1942, the U.S. government chose a remote stretch of desert along the Columbia River in eastern Washington to build the reactors that would produce the…
For three or four years, they've been at sea, ranging across hundreds of miles of open Pacific, from the Oregon coast north to the Gulf of Alaska.
They left the Columbia where they were born as smolts, weighing about an ounce.
They return weighing around 30 pounds, after having fed on herring, squid, and small fish in the ocean.
Then, in late summer, something shifts.
Scientists still don't know exactly what triggers it, but the fish stop eating.
Their bodies begin to change, their silver skin darkens, and the males grow the distinctive hooked jaw that marks a salmon at the end of its life.
Then, they turn toward the river.
They enter the Columbia at its mouth near Astoria, Oregon, where cold Pacific swells meet the river's outflow in an estuary on the Oregon-Washington border.
Mariners have called this stretch the graveyard of the Pacific for two centuries.
More than 2,000 ships have been lost here, where massive Pacific waves collide with a river that has no delta to soften its force, just a single narrow channel blasting into the ocean.
The crossing is considered so treacherous that ocean captains hand over command of their vessels to a small corps of specialized Columbia River Bar pilots, maritime experts whose only job is to guide ships across this one stretch of water.
The salmon begin their long push east and they won't ever eat again.
Every mile from here runs on fat reserves.
The river passes the city of Portland, Oregon before turning east toward the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area where the river narrows and the walls of the Cascade Mountains close in on both sides.
At Bonneville Dam, the first of the concrete migration barriers, they find the fish ladders and climb.
Past the gorge, the mountains fall away and the landscape shifts.
Temperate rainforest gives way to sagebrush, bunchgrass, and pale sedimentary bluffs rising along the river's edge.
They're on the Columbia Plateau now, a high desert in central Washington that receives less than 10 inches of rain a year, sitting in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains.
The Sahaptin-speaking tribes of the Columbia, the Yakima, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, Umatilla, Wanapum, have called the river Nichiwana.
Each nation pronounces it slightly differently, but the meaning is the same across all of them.
The Big River.
At a place the Nez Perce called Nipeje, on the banks of the Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia, radiocarbon dating has documented human habitation in the basin going back at least 15,000 years.
Nakia Williamson-Cloud, the Nez Perce tribe's cultural resources director, has said the science confirms what tribal stories already tell.
The salmon have been coming back to this stretch of the Columbia for millions of years, swimming upriver from the Pacific by the tens of thousands.
For three or four years, they've been at sea, ranging across hundreds of miles of open Pacific, from the Oregon coast north to the Gulf of Alaska.
They left the Columbia where they were born as smolts, weighing about an ounce.
They return weighing around 30 pounds, after having fed on herring, squid, and small fish in the ocean.
Then, in late summer, something shifts.
Scientists still don't know exactly what triggers it, but the fish stop eating.
Their bodies begin to change, their silver skin darkens, and the males grow the distinctive hooked jaw that marks a salmon at the end of its life.
Then, they turn toward the river.
They enter the Columbia at its mouth near Astoria, Oregon, where cold Pacific swells meet the river's outflow in an estuary on the Oregon-Washington border.
Mariners have called this stretch the graveyard of the Pacific for two centuries.
More than 2,000 ships have been lost here, where massive Pacific waves collide with a river that has no delta to soften its force, just a single narrow channel blasting into the ocean.
The crossing is considered so treacherous that ocean captains hand over command of their vessels to a small corps of specialized Columbia River Bar pilots, maritime experts whose only job is to guide ships across this one stretch of water.
The salmon begin their long push east and they won't ever eat again.
Every mile from here runs on fat reserves.
The river passes the city of Portland, Oregon before turning east toward the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area where the river narrows and the walls of the Cascade Mountains close in on both sides.
At Bonneville Dam, the first of the concrete migration barriers, they find the fish ladders and climb.
Past the gorge, the mountains fall away and the landscape shifts.
Temperate rainforest gives way to sagebrush, bunchgrass, and pale sedimentary bluffs rising along the river's edge.
They're on the Columbia Plateau now, a high desert in central Washington that receives less than 10 inches of rain a year, sitting in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains.
The Sahaptin-speaking tribes of the Columbia, the Yakima, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, Umatilla, Wanapum, have called the river Nichiwana.
Each nation pronounces it slightly differently, but the meaning is the same across all of them.
The Big River.
At a place the Nez Perce called Nipeje, on the banks of the Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia, radiocarbon dating has documented human habitation in the basin going back at least 15,000 years.
Nakia Williamson-Cloud, the Nez Perce tribe's cultural resources director, has said the science confirms what tribal stories already tell.
The salmon have been coming back to this stretch of the Columbia for millions of years, swimming upriver from the Pacific by the tens of thousands.
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