When the last of the four dams blocking the flow of California’s Klamath River fell in the fall of 2024, members of the Yurok Tribe wept tears of joy. It was a moment that had been decades in the making.
The dams, built between 1918 and 1962, had had a catastrophic effect on the salmon population, which the Yuroks and other tribes living along the 263-mile river historically have relied on for food for thousands of years.
“Salmon is an inextricable part of the Yurok identity,” says Yurok Fisheries Department Director Barry McCovey. “Since time immemorial, the river and fish have been interwoven into our culture and ceremonies. That’s why so many of our people have dedicated their lives to bringing the river back into balance.”
The tribe had campaigned for the dams to be removed since the 1990s, and intensified the pressure after a large-scale fish die-off in 2002. What was once a beautiful, healthy river had turned into a toxic soup, where little wildlife could survive and even humans were warned against entering the water. A 2013 study found that the numbers of two species of salmon – fall chinook and spring chinook – had fallen more than 90% since the dams were erected. The situation became so dire that the Yurok tribe imported Alaskan salmon for their annual festival, traditionally held to celebrate the first return of fall chinook salmon to the river.
Today, the stunning success of what the Yuroks – working with other tribes in the Klamath watershed, as well as environmentalists and policymakers – has achieved cannot be overstated. Removing all four hydroelectric dams became the largest project of its kind in U.S. history. Within just 10 days of the deconstruction, 6,000 salmon were seen migrating upstream into their historic habitat. “It took a village,” says McCovey. “Whether it was through science or restoration or prayer, every member of our tribe contributed in some way to make this happen.”
The dam removal has been described as the largest river restoration project the country has ever seen, made equally more impressive by the fact it was a tribal-led initiative. “To be honest, working with tribes is not always the easiest,” says Brook Thompson, a Yurok and Karuk native, and an environmental engineer and educator who was heavily involved in the project, “but it is always worth it in the long run.” Hundreds of people in Indigenous communities along the river exerted “sustained leadership and unwavering pressure,” she says, without which “dam removal would not have been as successful.”
The first dam (Copco 2, the smallest) was removed in October 2023, with the three remaining dams (Iron Gate, Copco 1, and J.C. Boyle) fully demolished a year later, at a cost of $500 million. The dismantling is igniting a wave of river restoration projects across the country, with engineers looking to the Klamath River as a blueprint of success.
Now, after 18 months of free-flowing waters, the river has exceeded all hopes and made an astounding comeback. This past March, Chinook salmon naturally hatched, for the first time in 100 years.
“The salmon spawning in reaches of water soon after dam removal gives me hope for the future and reassures me that the right choice was made,” Thompson says. “Salmon returning to the ancestral homewaters from which they were forcefully separated for over a century makes me feel the same joy I get when I hear my favorite relative is expecting a new baby. And I think salmon are as happy as I am about their ability to reach historic areas of the river.”
The return of the salmon is more than just a conservation success story and impressive infrastructure project. The Yuroks are known as the Salmon People, and the fish provide not just food but also vital income. Some 63% of children on the Yurok reservation live below the federal poverty line. By 2061, estimates predict that the chinook salmon population will have recovered by an average of 81%.
It’s not just the river that has been restored, either. The dams had flooded 2,200 acres of land that is now above water for the first time since 1922. An ambitious effort to replant native seeds along the river banks began in 2018, when tribal elders joined collection crews to hand-harvest native seeds from the area. Thompson herself collected acorns in the painstaking task. “I hope one day a great grandchild of mine who may never meet me in person, can sit under a fully shady oak tree on the upper Klamath looking at the free flowing river, never having lived in a time with dams on it,” she says. “I hope they can sit there knowing that the love and fight my communities and I put into the undamming can be felt through those trees that were once seeds I picked.”
About 2,000 pounds of seeds were collected and sent to nurseries, which propagated more than 66,000 pounds – 18 billion seeds – to help heal the landscape. The first seeds were planted straight after the first reservoir was drained, and in the first year bees, birds and butterflies flocked to the newly exposed land.
“Over the last two springs, we have seen an amazing wildflower show along the now free-flowing segment of the Klamath,” says McCovey. “What’s equally exciting are the thousands of ‘volunteer’ willows [non-planted trees that grow on their own] that popped up along the river and are now 6 feet tall.”
There is still a long way to go, however, until there is a fishable population of salmon. “It feels amazing and we are off to a great start, but it’s going to take time, more work and good water management for fish runs to recover,” says McCovey. He estimates that fish populations won’t follow a linear trajectory, and numbers might drop again over the next decade before they bounce back – due to other variables, such as ocean conditions and snowpack.
McCovey, and the Yurok tribe, are hopeful for a brighter future for the river, the salmon and the people who live along it. “I hope my children inherit a river that is full of clean water and fish,” he says. “In addition to salmon, I want to see Pacific lamprey, steelhead and sturgeon recover, too. These species are just as important to us and the interconnected ecosystem that extends from the Cascades to the deep ocean.”
