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The $68,000 Fish

The future of salmon in the Pacific Northwest

By Patrick Symmes
ARCHIVE / 2019 / November

Just beyond the high pass into Stanley, Idaho, at the end of a very long day, I ran out of gas. It was 1997, and I still remember the sound of the engine on my father’s thirsty old Bronco, first sputtering, and then dying. But I was somewhere around seven thousand feet in the Sawtooth mountains and had gravity on my side. I managed to keep rolling downhill for miles, taking the long curves in silence, fast enough at first, then slower, then slow. It was already getting dark, and when I finally coasted to a stop on the gravel shoulder, I heard, rather than saw, the river.

It was called, like so many others, the Salmon River. All across the 260,000-square-mile Columbia River watershed, stretching across seven states and one Canadian province, tens of millions of salmon had once coursed upstream from the Pacific Ocean each year, completing a typical life cycle of two to four years by breeding in the same freshwater streams where they were born. But in the 1860s, gold mining and timbering had begun to silt up the high mountain spawning beds, covering and suffocating their eggs. And by the 1880s, massive canneries at the Columbia’s mouth in Astoria, Oregon, were tinning a million salmon a year. The Columbia salmon population began to plummet. Between 1938 and 1979, the construction of eight huge hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers deepened the collapse to extinction levels.

Continues below:

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/the-68000-fish-salmon-columbia-river/