[env-trinity] Klamath confluence: The mouth of the Klamath River is a scene frozen in time.

[Josh Allen]

Klamath confluence



John Driscoll The Times-Standard 

Article Launched: 05/22/2006 04:30:26 AM PDT 

The mouth of the Klamath River is a scene frozen in time.  

Low clouds drape over greenest hills. A few Yurok fishermen watch the
surf, trying to hook Pacific lamprey with sticks and flip them on shore.
Whales blow just off the beach. A 6-foot green sturgeon lies in the
bottom of a boat. 

The river, heavy with snowmelt, is wide. The place is eerily quiet, and
it's likely to stay that way. 

This year, the tribe's allocation of fall chinook salmon is below what
it considers its subsistence level. Commercial fishermen along 700 miles
of coast will not have a salmon season. The ocean sport fishing season
is crimped up and down the coast. River anglers cannot keep any adult
fall chinook on the Klamath or Trinity river after September, a
devastating blow to campgrounds and shops and guides who count on
fishermen. 

These groups have long pointed fingers at each other. River fishermen
sometimes grouse about Indian gillnets, Indians sometimes gripe about
ocean commercial fisheries, and so on. Many in these groups have come to
a sort of truce, based on an acknowledgment that the river that once
produced the third largest salmon runs on the West Coast no longer puts
out enough fish to go around. 

In the past five years, the river has become the centerpiece of a
desperate environmental and economic struggle. Farms upstream and
hydropower dams need water that salmon need, too. Fish diseases that
hammer young salmon are more prevalent than once realized. Toxic algae
has been found brewing in the river's reservoirs and downstream and may
pose a risk to swimmers, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency. 

Faced with a total fishing closure this year, fisheries managers hedged
their bets that ocean and tribal fishing wouldn't cut too deep into the
number of naturally spawning chinook salmon predicted to return to the
river. They enacted an emergency rule, dropping the projected number of
these fish that will be allowed upstream from 35,000 to 21,000. 

The Yurok allocation for this fall is 8,000 fish, most of which are
expected to be hatchery fish. That's less than two fish per tribal
member this year, and it's not enough to support a commercial fishery
that some of them earn income from. 

But if the water crisis of 2001 in the Upper Klamath Basin -- when the
federal government shut off water to most of its irrigators to free up
water for salmon -- and the fish kill of 2002 did anything, they steeled
the resolve of many to fix the river. Perhaps more than ever, there is
reason for hope. 

"I may not see it, my dad may not see it," said Yurok fisherman Tommy
Willson. "Hopefully it will help out my son further down the road." 

A flowing together 

Indeed, so many events are coming together at once that it seems almost
guaranteed that there will be major changes on the river soon. Some are
already in swing. 

The Klamath's main tributary, the Trinity River, is seeing major
restoration work, some of which depends on big flows that are being seen
this year. The Hoopa Valley Tribe recently won its 20-year battle
against Central Valley irrigators to get more water in the river. 

The Yurok Tribe has put aside its pitched public fight with Upper
Klamath Basin irrigators, vowing to work together for a solution. 

The license for four hydropower dams on the main stem of the Klamath has
run out. Relicensing them has been a process that is revealing a lot
about their effects on the river. Their owner, PacifiCorp, was recently
bought by Warren Buffett's MidAmerican Energy Holdings. A change of
guard at PacifiCorp has the Yurok Tribe encouraged that the company may
take a different approach to settlement talks that, while confidential,
are reportedly yielding results. 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries
Service have demanded that PacifiCorp install fish ladders on its dams
to pass salmon into areas where they once spawned. The company disagrees
with the approach -- which would almost certainly cost more than $100
million -- and has appealed the matter. It wants to trap fish and haul
them over the dam. Under the 2005 Energy Act, PacifiCorp will take its
case to an administrative law judge at one of the agencies. There is no
precedent. 

"No project has gone through this process yet," said David Diamond, an
analyst with the U.S. Department of the Interior. "A lot of it depends
on how the judges interpret their mandate." 

The hearing is expected to take place in August, after which the
agencies will file revised provisions. 

PacifiCorp has also loosened up about allowing the California Coastal
Conservancy access to test sediment trapped behind its dams for toxins,
key for considering their possible removal. 

Willson is convinced that taking out the dams will improve conditions
for salmon, and change the face of salmon fisheries on the West Coast. 

Urgent care 

And while all of these political, financial and regulatory machinations
are taking place, there are on-the-ground approaches being taken. 

At McGarvey Creek just upstream from the mouth, the Yurok Tribe is
counting and tagging fish. 

This year is a good year -- relatively speaking -- for chinook salmon.
That is, there were six spawning adults that swam upstream. 

"They're in a sad state, no question about it," said Ben Laukka with the
tribal fisheries department. 

Steelhead and cutthroat trout appear to be faring better. From a trap on
the creek, Andrew Antonetti pulls a bucket full of steelhead and coho
smolts, and a pair of chinook fry. Scott Gibson anaesthetizes a fish,
measures it, clips a fin so it can be identified as caught, and
surgically implants a tag that marks the individual fish and allows it
to be tracked. 

Also in the bucket is a brook lamprey, which as adults only get to be
about 8 inches long, and two juvenile Pacific lamprey. These spend seven
years in the Klamath watershed's gravels before migrating to sea. They
return and some are caught by tribal members, but the runs have appeared
weak lately. 

Tribal Councilman Raymond Mattz suspects low water in the river may doom
the young lamprey. Another once-important fish, the candlefish, has
virtually vanished. 

"When you see something disappear off the face of the Earth, it's pretty
shocking," Mattz said. 

Laukka is under no illusion that studying the fish, and performing
restoration like removing barriers to fish and decommissioning
sediment-bleeding logging roads, will produce immediate results. These
are long-term solutions to the river's many woes, he said. 

Those deep-rooted problems have at least earned one of the greatest
rivers in the West the wide attention it warrants at precisely the time
that so many critical decisions need to be made. 

 

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