Klamath Confluence
By John Driscoll, Eureka Times-Standard
May 22, 2006

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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