Redfish Lake: The Sockeye That Should Not Exist

Every year, sockeye salmon leave the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon and begin swimming upstream. They swim the Columbia, turn up the Snake River, pass through a canyon the Army Corps of Engineers dammed eight separate times, and continue into Idaho. The fish that make it this far have already traveled more than five hundred miles. Then they turn up the Salmon River, which the Niimíipuu called the River of No Return for its ferocity in flood season, and continue into the Sawtooth Mountains. The fish that reach Redfish Lake, in the shadow of the Sawtooth peaks at an elevation of sixty-six hundred feet, have traveled more than nine hundred miles from the ocean. They are the highest-elevation anadromous fish run in North America.

For most of the twentieth century, eight hydroelectric dams on the lower Snake and Columbia reduced the sockeye run to a shadow of its historical size. In nineteen ninety-two, biologists counted exactly four sockeye salmon that completed the journey to Redfish Lake. Four fish, in a lake that had turned red with salmon within living memory, so dense with fish that the water itself changed color.

Recovery efforts, including hatchery programs, modified dam operations, and habitat restoration, have brought the population back from that near-extinction point. In recent years, hundreds rather than four have been making the journey. The dams remain. The fish that get through are doing something that, by the logic of the engineering that surrounds them, should not be possible.

The lake's name comes from those fish. The water ran red with them not so very long ago.