FROM LEFT At the Imnaha River fish weir, ODFW and Nez Perce fisheries technicians work diligently to measure and document spring chinook salmon and return them to water quickly. Here, an Imnaha River spring chinook salmon heads for a tanker truck, to be sent either to the hatchery or back downriver for tribal members to possibly catch. Sarah Barnes, a research biologist with the Nez Perce Tribe, monitors food web and habitat conditions for sockeye restoration in Wallowa Lake, aboard a boat bearing the tribe’s word for sockeye. In Wallowa County, a “roughened channel” helps salmon migrate upstream while still providing water for an irrigation intake, unlike the barriers it replaced. Matt DeAngelo (center) and Ryan McQueen (left), both with the USFS Zigzag Ranger District, talk with Mark McCollister on a recently restored stretch of the Zigzag River on Mount Hood.
can once again catch and keep spring chinook, an important cultural tie. To prevent the Lostine from drying up again, Nez Perce Fisheries has worked with partners to re-engineer irrigation diversions that resemble a series of mini dams, to mimic salmon-friendly (and irrigation-friendly) river rapids instead. Nonprofits like Trout Unlimited contract with forward-thinking landowners like Woody Wolfe, a sixthgeneration Wallowa County farmer-rancher, to lease his farm’s water rights in late summer and keep that flow in the river. “The water lease makes sense because it’s at the time of year when it’s the most valuable to the fish, and it takes more of that water to create less of a return on my farm,” Wolfe said. “I think managing long-term for the health of your farm includes a perpetual environmental aspect to it. And if you don’t do that, I believe you’re failing to calculate the long-term cost of not.” In 2017, Nez Perce Fisheries and ODFW reintroduced coho to rivers in Wallowa County. The program proved successful enough that a similar effort is now underway for Wallowa Lake sockeye. Large-scale obstacles do lie in the sockeye’s way, including low, warm flows downstream on the Grande Ronde River, a fast-changing ocean environment and eight influential hydroelectric dams along the Snake and Columbia rivers, plus a smaller dam below Wallowa Lake. 72 1859 OREGON’S MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2024
But, like the revival of spring chinook, the successful reintroduction of coho to Wallowa County offers encouragement for the sockeye program. “We’re getting enough coho back that we’re comfortable with people going ahead and harvesting those fish, which is really good,” said Kyle Bratcher, district fish biologist at ODFW’s Enterprise office. “We’ve got to keep people connected to the fish. Otherwise they’re not going to care about them anymore, and it’s going to be a lot harder to get things done.”
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ith no dams between its chilly Mount Hood headwaters and the Pacific Ocean, and a national forest safeguarding the majority of its upper watershed, the Sandy River basin is clearly one of Oregon’s enduring salmon strongholds. Abundance of salmon here is on the rise, and it’s not rare to see a coho leaping or chinook spawning. But such success has required, and continues to demand, a sustained effort. After the felling of old-growth forest and the establishment of towns and Highway 26, and the engineered channelization following the floods of 1964, salmon hardly called the Sandy Basin home anymore. In 1998, salmon and steelhead here made the federal ESA list as threatened species. But around that same time, the removal of two dams in the Sandy River basin encouraged over a dozen
