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Restoring Oregon's Salmon Populations
from 1859 Oregon's Magazine + Special Insert: Destination Resorts Northwest | September/October 2024
Finding New Current
Across Oregon, salmon restoration projects home in on more than just habitat
written and photographed by Daniel O’Neil
Salmon and steelhead have lived in Oregon for long enough that no one can really say for how long. Millions of years—leave it at that. Today, scientists are looking instead at how much time remains before the consequences of the past two industrial centuries catch up and extinction sets the hook. Fortunately, salmon advocates are working statewide to restore habitat, species and human-benefitting ecosystems, as determinedly as a coho making its way upstream to spawn.
Logging, commercial fishing, dams, development, pollution and now climate change have contributed individually and collectively to the decline of salmon in Oregon, and they continue to do so. (“Salmon” here includes steelhead.) In the 1990s, wild salmon runs across Oregon and the West Coast landed on the federal Endangered Species Act list. Some salmon species have already disappeared from Oregon waters. Today, the great majority of salmon returning to Oregon rivers and streams are of hatchery origin—90 percent, for example, in the Willamette River basin—which makes wild fish restoration a priority.
Oregon’s salmon spend most of their lives in the Pacific Ocean, where climate-fueled warming creates an increasingly less hospitable environment for these fish. While the ocean proves challenging to fix, freshwater habitat provides abundant opportunities for humans to help wild salmon. The following four examples of salmon restoration projects offer a glimpse of what can, and must, be done to make sure future generations of Oregonians witness wild salmon spawning here as they have for countless millennia, the sign of a healthy state.
Tillamook County funnels a lot of rain off the Coast Range. No wonder, then, that the area is full of tunnel-like road culverts. Culverts, especially when undersized, make upstream and downstream migration difficult or impossible for salmon. Besides channeling streams away from important wetland areas, during storms they act as velocity barriers, and their outflow can dig into the earth to create artificial falls that even salmon can’t leap.
Replacing culverts, and other obstacles like tide gates, with bridges or large box-like cement culverts widens the stream bed and allows the waterway and surrounding habitat to function naturally. But that’s expensive. So, for the past ten years, the Salmon SuperHwy—a partnership between county, state and federal government agencies and local nonprofits—has worked as one to replace culverts and replant riparian zones along 130 miles of salmon habitat in the Tillamook and Nestucca watersheds.
These improvements don’t just benefit salmon. During heavy rain events, culverts can lead to flooding and washed-out roads. “We’re opening up those culverts, but we’re also improving the road system,” said Salmon SuperHwy program director Liz Ransom, who works for Trout Unlimited, a nonprofit. “A lot of these rural lifelines are at risk of failure with very old culverts. We’re trying to uplift the economy as well by bringing in dollars and making road improvements in places that wouldn’t otherwise be improved until there was an emergency.”
Tillamook County typically doesn’t have the budget to replace culverts until they’ve failed. Chris Laity, the county’s engineer and director of public works, appreciates the Salmon SuperHwy’s overlapping benefits. “It’s the interconnection of human and non-human, because the road is an overcrossing structure for the stream, which is a highway for the fish,” he said. “Where the two align, that’s where the biggest bang for the buck is—this is where the county needs it, and this is where the fish need it. Our partners compromise, and we compromise, to get the best for the community, including fish.”
As Salmon SuperHwy partners, Trout Unlimited manages most of Tillamook County’s fish passage projects. Other agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also step in to help with aspects like project design, permitting and grant writing, which requires fish biology expertise and familiarity with federal agency red tape. As with a good salmon run, strength comes in numbers.
“One of the reasons the Salmon SuperHwy effort got started was a combination of really great fish restoration potential, but also motivated partners at the local scale,” said Leah Tai, a hydrologist with the USFWS in Oregon. “Its success is a tribute to the trust and confidence that all these partners have developed working together for a decade. They can call each other up on a whim and say, hey, we’ve got this thing going on, or we got that funding, or we have this issue, and immediately start working together on it.”
Within weeks of finishing projects in late summer, salmon have been seen in the newly reopened habitat. As the Salmon SuperHwy nears its goal of restoring 180 miles of historical habitat, the partners are already sharing their knowledge and experience with other counties in Oregon, providing a road map for collaborative restoration that transcends boundaries and species.
At first glance, only the Holiday Farm Fire of 2020 seems to have affected Finn Rock Reach, about 40 miles east of Eugene. But as recently as 2023, the McKenzie River here rushed past a vast expanse it once roamed. In the last century, Finn Rock Reach had been converted from floodplain to a small side channel, some wooded uplands and a former gravel pit turned bass fishing pond—not an ideal home for salmon.
Intent on restoring salmon habitat, the McKenzie River Trust purchased Finn Rock Reach from a local timber company in 2017. The initial plan was to place some large woody debris in the side channel and replace invasive plants with native species. But scientists with the Willamette National Forest had already successfully applied a new approach, called “restoration to Stage Zero,” to nearby floodplains in the McKenzie River basin, and they wanted to help at Finn Rock Reach.
“The Forest Service steered us in a bigger direction,” said Eli Tome, director of conservation for the McKenzie River Trust. “They asked us to think outside of that channel and look at the whole floodplain, to think about what this area would have looked like 600 years ago.”
Restoration to a Stage Zero condition seeks to reconnect a river to its whole valley following centuries of disconnection through land and river management. “These are considered process-based restoration projects, so the ultimate goal is to reset connectivity across the valley and allow natural processes to play out,” said Kate Meyer, a fisheries biologist and the McKenzie River Partnership Restoration Specialist for the Willamette National Forest. “The idea is that the river is best at recreating habitat for the fish and wildlife that have evolved under those conditions. We’re just giving the river back to its valley.”
Using lidar technology to read the ground, project designers were able to identify former channels that hadn’t been connected to the river in decades. Excavators revitalized these channels and constructed log jams, and crews put nearly a quarter-million native plants in the soil. Levees were breached, and the McKenzie regained 150 acres of valuable floodplain, new high-quality habitat for ESA-listed spring chinook salmon, bull trout and northwestern pond turtles.
Benefits also extend to human communities. Before any restoration work began, wildfire, suppressed for over a century, revisited the area in 2020, burning over 173,000 acres. Now, the recently completed Finn Rock Reach project offers buffers against future fires by raising humidity levels, providing natural fire breaks and habitat refugia for wildlife and filtering post-fire sediment that enters the McKenzie River, Eugene’s sole source of drinking water.
As challenges like wildfire intensify, salmon restoration projects must follow suit. “If we’re going to ensure that the next generation has salmon, we need to be doing big, bold projects like at Finn Rock,” Tome said. “The salmon do come back, they do use it. And it has all these other benefits that we’re still learning about. We’re to the point now where salmon are declining, and the climate is changing, so fast that we can’t do tiny, Band-Aid projects anymore.”
If we’re going to ensure that the next generation has salmon, we need to be doing big, bold projects like at Finn Rock. The salmon do come back, they do use it. And it has all these other benefits that we’re still learning about. We’re to the point now where salmon are declining, and the climate is changing, so fast that we can’t do tiny, Band-Aid projects anymore.
The McKenzie River Trust, USFS and other partners have a goal of restoring more than 1,700 acres of the middle McKenzie Valley over the next ten years. These projects strengthen both human and non-human communities, but salmon remain the focus.
“Salmon are a keystone species within an ecosystem, and if we lose keystone species, we’re going to see a major shutdown of all these ecosystem services that humans depend on,” Meyer said. “Partners in the McKenzie feel so motivated to implement these projects because salmon will run out of time if we don’t do something big and make some drastic changes. But it’s not too late. They’re not extinct, and we have a responsibility to ensure that this doesn’t happen.”
Two centuries ago, and for millennia before, the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce Tribe camped beside Wallowa Lake to catch some of the 30,000 or so sockeye salmon that returned here each year. One century ago, dams and misguided hatchery programs condemned those fish to extinction. By the 1960s, other impacts, including the Lower Snake River dams, forced all Snake River basin, and therefore Wallowa County, coho out of existence. By the early 1990s, spring chinook on Wallowa rivers like the Imnaha and Lostine faced a similar fate.
Jim Harbeck recalls seeing the Lostine River dry as a gravel bar in summer as farmers and ranchers drew water for crops. Harbeck had just begun working in the Nez Perce Tribe’s Department of Fisheries Resources Management, where today he is supervisor of the department’s Joseph field office. He and the Nez Perce Tribe, and partners including nearby tribes and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, now work nonstop to save wild spring chinook from extinction across Wallowa County.
“With the Endangered Species Act listing of spring chinook here in 1992, there was momentum in society, like, ‘Hey, we need to do something,’” Harbeck said. The Nez Perce Tribe set up its Joseph field office the following year, motivated by more than pure science. The tribe’s origin stories tell of salmon’s self-sacrifice when humans first arrived on Earth, hence their commitment.
Soon, Harbeck and others were netting 500 chinook parr (juvenile salmon) each year in the Lostine, raising them in captivity, spawning them and releasing their offspring back into the river. “We did that for eight years, and slowly the numbers started to return to the Lostine,” Harbeck said. “It was a pretty drastic measure, not the preferred way of doing things, but we didn’t have any choice. There were not enough adults coming back for a conventional program.”
The effort boosted adult Lostine spring chinook numbers from a few dozen wild fish to a yearly average of about a thousand. Today, a collaborative, conventional hatchery supplementation program supports spring chinook on the Lostine and Imnaha rivers. In good years, tribal members 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.
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.”
With 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 groups—nonprofits, agencies and businesses—to form the Sandy River Basin Partners in 2006.
Since then, restoring floodplain connectivity has been a major focus of the coalition’s work. Floodplains benefit fish in many ways, from creating off-channel habitat for juvenile fish to moderating high winter flows and increasing nutrient cycling. Other efforts include placing large wood structures (log jams) throughout the watershed to replicate pre-disturbance conditions.
“It took us a long time to degrade the Sandy basin, and it’s going to take a lot of money and time to get that habitat back,” said Mark McCollister, habitat restoration director for The Freshwater Trust. “But we are certainly making significant progress. We’re consistently creating the desired habitat types, and the fish are responding very positively. We can directly show Sandy salmon and steelhead numbers increasing in response not only to the dams coming out, but also in response to the restoration work we’re doing.”
Between 2010 and 2021, ODFW recorded a threefold increase in adult coho returning to the Salmon River, a major tributary to the Sandy that the agency considers a wild fish sanctuary (no fishing allowed). Spring chinook and steelhead have more than doubled on the aptly named Salmon, and juveniles here and elsewhere in the watershed have multiplied as well.
Working in collaboration, the partners are able to leverage funding and expertise. State and federal taxpayer dollars, Portland General Electric ratepayer dollars and Oregon Lottery dollars have covered most of the $13 million price tag so far.
“We’re effectively spending the investments that the public is making in this work,” McCollister said. “This is not something that’s going to go on forever. With adequate funding, we can complete all the actions in the upper Sandy in the next ten years and encourage people to do this in other watersheds.”
Much of the Sandy River basin’s critical salmon habitat lies in the Mount Hood National Forest. The USFS has mandates to manage these lands and waters for habitat restoration, which it does with salmon at the forefront. For Matt DeAngelo, district fish biologist for the Zigzag Ranger District, the work done here for salmon extends far beyond any waterways, and so does the health status of these iconic fish.
“We’re not necessarily talking about restoring habitat just for fish,” DeAngelo said. “We’re talking about restoring river processes for things like having plenty of groundwater to feed our streams in the summer, spreading it out across the floodplains to reduce peak flows during winter flood events, having healthy riparian zones that can act as natural fire breaks and making sure that we have clean drinking water.
“Salmon are a really important indicator of a much broader system that needs a lot of help. It’s not just about saving a single species. That’s super important, but we all benefit from this work.”
