The Largest Dam Removal in History
Near Klamath Falls, Oregon
Just south of Klamath Falls, near the town of Keno, the Klamath River once ran through the J.C. Boyle Dam, one of four dams that for a century blocked salmon from more than four hundred miles of their old spawning waters.
The Klamath was once the third largest salmon river in the lower forty eight, but the dams, built between nineteen eighteen and nineteen sixty four, cut the fish off from the cold headwaters they needed. For decades the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath tribes fought to bring them down. In two thousand twenty four they won.
The reservoirs were drained beginning that January, the cofferdams were breached in late August, and on October second the last of the four dams was gone, completing the largest dam removal and river restoration project in United States history. The change was almost immediate. On the night of October third, two thousand twenty four, sonar recorded the first Chinook salmon swimming past the old dam sites for the first time in about a hundred years.
A river that people had spent a century arguing over was, at last, allowed to run free again, and the fish came home.
