Klamath National Forest: The Salmon River Still Runs Cold

There is a river in this forest that has never been dammed.

The Salmon River rises in the Trinity Alps and runs roughly forty miles before it meets the Klamath. It is one of the last free-flowing cold-water rivers in California, a distinction that becomes more remarkable as the century progresses and the water it holds grows scarcer. The Salmon is cold because it runs off high snowpack through shaded canyon country that has never been cleared for agriculture or reservoir storage. Cold water holds dissolved oxygen. Dissolved oxygen keeps salmon alive.

The Klamath River, which the Salmon joins, had four dams on it for more than a century. The consequences were exactly what the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, and Klamath Tribes had been describing since the dams went in: salmon runs that had once numbered in the hundreds of thousands collapsed, and a river system that had sustained Indigenous food cultures for millennia went quiet. By October of twenty twenty-four, all four dams were out, and the river was free-flowing from near the Oregon border to the Pacific. It is the largest dam removal in United States history.

But the Salmon River's contribution to this story is the baseline it preserved. Fisheries biologists and tribal monitors have used the Salmon River as a comparison point for documenting what the Klamath system could look like with cold water and unimpeded salmon passage. Within weeks of the last dam's removal, tribal fisheries programs were documenting salmon in previously blocked spawning grounds. The Salmon River gave those fish somewhere to come home to.

The forest around you is the upper watershed of that river. The trees that shade these canyon walls are part of why the water stays cold enough for salmon to survive. This is not metaphor. It is hydrology.