Lower Snake Dams in the Spotlight. Special Snake River Dam Issue
My first encounter with the reality of declining Columbia and Snake river salmon came in the early 1990s. Scientists Willa Nehlsen, Jack Williams and Jim Lichatowich (one of The Osprey’s current scientific advisors) had just published their seminal paper “Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads: Stocks at Risk From California, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington” in the March 1991 issue of Fisheries Magazine, warning of the looming extinction threat facing wild salmon and steelhead from the cumulative impacts of human activities.
While there were a few advocates trying to highlight the plight of wild fish on the Columbia and Snake rivers, particularly resulting from the dams, at that time the media and most of the major conservation organizations gave the issue scant, if any, attention.
I was associate editor of Trout Magazine, the publication of Trout Unlimited, and my boss and editor Tom Pero decided that we should take a closer look at the situation. This included reprinting “Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads” in Trout Magazine to help spread the word to a non-scientific audience and a trip to Boise to interview and photograph then Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus, a fierce advocate for wild Snake River salmon and steelhead. Tom also arranged for us to ride along on one of the US Army Corps of Engineers barges that transported salmon and steelhead smolts around the lower Snake River dams.
Barging salmon and steelhead smolts was first tried on the Columbia River in 1955, where hatchery smolts from the Klickitat Fish Hatchery were barged and release below Bonneville Dam. Barging on the Snake River began in the mid-1960s and by the 1970s, tens of thousands of salmon and steelhead were being barged around the dams and released below Bonneville Dam — the lowermost dam on the Columbia. The idea of barging the smolts was to reduce mortality that occurred when the small fish went over or though the dams and were chopped up in the turbines used to produce electricity, speed their downstream progress and protect them from predation. By the 1980s, up to 90 percent of Snake River salmon and steelhead smolts were being barged by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
• LOWER SNAKE RIVER DAMS IN THE SPOTLIGHT. LAST CHANCE TO SAVE THE SNAKE’S WILD FISH RUNS?
• SPECIAL SNAKE RIVER SECTION
• WILD FISH ADVOCATES FRANK AND JEANNE MOORE
• BRITISH COLUMBIA SALMON PRODUCTIVITY
• THE NORTH UMPQUA
Our trip began on the uppermost of the four lower Snake River dams, Lower Granite Dam, and we would ride the barge down to and through the lock of the next dam, Little Goose Dam. Well, it wasn’t exactly a Rogue River jet boat ride, but interesting enough in its own way. The transportation package was made up of a barge that contained the smolts, and behind, a tugboat herding the barge downstream, the pilot high above. A “barge rider,” a young woman on this run, attended to various tasks aboard the barge, and kept a close eye on the welfare of the fish in particular.
It was a lazy day-long ride down the river. Tom and I talked to barge rider, asked her about her work, occasionally climbed the ladder up to the pilot’s perch and watched other barges and tugboats pass by, downstream carrying grain and other agricultural produce, or upstream to pick up another shipment to deliver.
This old memory came back to me when the now-defunct Simpson plan for removing the lower Snake River dams was publicly presented, and outlined in detail in the May 2021 issue of The Osprey by Mitch Cutter of the Idaho Conservation League, along with an update on a new effort to jump-start dam removal by Save Our wild Salmon’s Joseph Bogaard in this issue.
This will almost certainly involve more controversy and negotiations to finally make removing the four lower Snake River dams a reality. But one thing is certain — time is running out for the long-term survival of wild Snake River salmon and steelhead.