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[ loud explosions ] PROFITA: The country's largest dam removal project took four dams off the Klamath River in southern Oregon and northern California.

[ people cheering ] For Indigenous tribes, it was a huge victory.

MAN: The salmon can now go home to the people who manage their home.

A reconnected river promises better habitat for struggling salmon runs that used to be among the largest on the West Coast.

MAN: Oh, there's one right here.

The fish returned to stretches of the river they hadn't seen in over a century.

MAN: Dams are coming out, fish are coming home.

But what are they coming home to?

[ birds cawing ] Above the former dam sites, the landscape was transformed for agriculture.

Now it suffers from chronic drought, with toxic algae blooms, dying birds, and fish on the brink of extinction.

PROTESTORS [ chanting ]: We want water!

We want water!

Here, painful water conflicts have dragged on for decades, with farmers, fish, and tribes all suffering.

Our town is dying, our community is dying, and our farms are dying.

We lost upwards of 70,000 adult Chinook.

The banks of the river were littered with dead fish.

ALL [ chanting ]: Un-dam the Klamath!

It is our livelihood, our culture, our heritage, our customs and our beliefs.

Now, the dams are out.

But on the Klamath, it's going to take a lot more than dam removal to piece this basin together again.

[ explosion booms ] Yeah, babies.

Here we go.

They're like, "It's cold."

[ chuckles ] There's a lot of hope pouring into this river in southern Oregon's Upper Klamath Basin.

Look how pretty green they turn here.

MAN: Trade you buckets.

WOMAN: They look like happy babies.

They're literally our babies.

We've cared for them in these past years, so to return them is just an awesome feeling.

And I do, I talk to the fish all the time.

Not just when I release them, when I'm caring for them too.

It's pretty cute.

[ chuckles ] They're hiding all around my feet and behind me.

Charlie Wright is a Klamath tribal member who helps raise hatchery fish.

This is her homeland, which hasn't seen adult salmon in over a hundred years.

My family's been here since time immemorial.

We view animals and even fish and plants as our relatives, and so we have to take care of our mother who sustains us all.

These fish are the very beginning of what could be the first run of spring Chinook to survive here since the early 1900s.

Salmon were blocked from reaching these waters in 1912, when construction began on a series of hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River.

The dams immediately wiped out the Klamath River salmon runs in Oregon.

In 2022, regulators decided that four dams would be removed.

All these fish are tagged with tracking devices so scientists can see where they go from here.

This is pretty unique in that it's been over a hundred years since we've had salmon up here.

And, you know, we're just trying to learn from them.

Trying to get a jump-start on it.

With dams out, they might just make it all the way to the ocean, where they'd spend several years before returning to spawn.

[ explosions boom ] That hope was growing as big changes to the river in 2024 cleared a path for them.

[ people cheering, laughing ] WOMAN: Wow.

MAN: Yeah!

MAN: Look at that.

Here we go.

J.C. Boyle was one of the four dams coming out to help salmon.

Tell your grandkids you were here when it happened.

Yep.

Pretty incredible.

[ singing in Klamath language ] Jeff Mitchell fought for this moment.

It took decades.

Listening to the water rushing out, you know, I could hear its song.

That water was the sound of joy and of hope.

And now I'm just going to cry.

[ chuckles ] Just cry it out for a while, you know?

My great uncle Joe, Joe Ball, he fished back home on our waterways for our c'iyaal's, our salmon, but then it stopped.

No one left alive remembers salmon up here, c'iyaal's, as we say.

So these dams have been in for over a hundred years.

It was my great grandfather's generation that opposed these dams going in.

Our 1864 treaty says that we're entitled to the fish, and our ancestors took thousands of pounds of salmon out until the dams cut those off.

The dams came out because the utility PacifiCorp had to find a way for salmon to swim past them.

And removal was the cheaper option.

Starting in January of 2024, the reservoirs behind the dams were drained... [ explosion booms ] ...and a lot of concrete came down.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ vehicle back-up warnings beeping ] [ ♪♪♪ ] These dams weren't used for irrigation or flood control, and they made less than 2 percent of the utility's electricity, which was easily replaced by existing power plants.

Dam removal was still controversial, because it meant losing the jobs, water controls, and recreational lakes that came along with the dams.

People in the Copco Lake community now live next to a river... with docks leading nowhere.

But salmon will now have cleaner, colder water and a free-flowing river downstream.

And upstream, the project will reopen hundreds of miles of habitat so salmon can finally return to the Klamath homelands in southern Oregon.

Dams are coming out, fish are coming home.

But I think about, what are they coming home to?

Jeff wonders how the salmon will survive on this landscape.

We have a beautiful homeland, but for 150 years, we've taken it the wrong direction.

Thousands of acres of lakes and wetlands in this area were drained for agriculture.

And two dams remain on this stretch of the river to divert water to farms.

But there's not enough water to go around.

So now wildlife refuges dry up in the summer, fueling outbreaks of a bacterial disease called botulism that's killed thousands of birds.

Upper Klamath Lake often turns green with toxic algae blooms.

We're on the edge of losing everything, like our C'waam and Koptu.

Two resident fish populations depend on that lake.

The Lost River and shortnose suckers, known to the Klamath people as C'waam and Koptu, have continued to decline.

Just a few thousand of each remain.

And most of their offspring die every year because of poor water quality and degraded habitat.

I'm hoping that we'll be able to make a home again for salmon, but right now we have a tremendous amount of work in front of us to do that.

[ weeder rumbling ] First, the river downstream needs restoration now that the dams are out.

The Karuk and Yurok tribes in northern California started this work years before dam removal, killing weeds and collecting native seeds.

WOMAN: We're working to keep all invasives out, and so just getting as much native seed as possible is the big idea.

The next step in the restoration process...

Almost there.

...is a bit sticky.

[ ♪♪♪ ] They have billions of seeds to spread across the mud of the empty dam reservoirs.

Oh!

Even filming this work was a struggle.

Oh!

Chemooch McCovey loads up some native grass seeds.

Oh, this-- I'm starting to sink right here.

They start early on frozen ground.

It started to soften up as soon as the sun hits it.

So there's like a...

There's not much time, really.

Their goal is to get as many native seeds onto the bare landscape as they can before spring.

They have a lot of ground to cover.

I mean, it's all worth it, though, you know?

The ancient song of the river is running through here once again.

You can hear it, and it hasn't been heard for over a hundred years.

It makes me really, really proud to be a part of this.

[ ♪♪♪ ] As spring turned to summer, native plants took root.

Stagnant reservoirs were transformed into a flowing river.

Salmon were free to swim upstream into areas they hadn't been able to reach for more than a century.

But now they're returning to a landscape dominated by farms and ranches.

Up here, water shortages that started long before dam removal have created a world of hurt.

Whoo!

[ chuckles ] I'm never quite prepared.

Every day, Amber and Kendra Worch see ominous signs of the ground sinking under their feet.

These roads don't get a ton of traffic, you know?

It's pretty quiet.

It's not from overuse.

The reason is rooted in history.

Starting in 1922, American veterans came to Tulelake, California, with the government's promise of farming with water in perpetuity.

In the 1900s, the Bureau of Reclamation redesigned this area for agriculture, draining lakes and building dams and canals to divert water across more than 200,000 acres of new farmland.

Now a lot of that water is going to fish instead of farms.

So downtown buildings sag and crumble as the soil dries up and farmers pump water from underground to supplement their irrigation water.

KENDRA: So this is another one of those spots where the ground's moved away from the building.

We don't use this room or this door anymore.

At Kendra's high school, doors and windows jam and break as the ground subsides.

This is all part of that new project that they did.

Mm-hmm.

You can look up at the top of the door jambs.

The ground shifted and raised the doors, so there was broken windows and it was kind of pinched together so you weren't able to close or open them.

And you'll see things like this all over the place.

So there's clearly something going on underneath what we're seeing to cause this to happen.

KENDRA: It's kind of scary, because I hope to come back to the basin to work here in agriculture and be a part of my family's homestead and farm.

So without water, there's not enough farming to keep this basin alive, which is scary for a lot of us.

Kendra spends a lot of her time working for third-generation farmer Scott Seus.

I don't think we get more aggressive with the teeth, do you?

Mm-mm.

Why don't you go to three.

Let's see if it is okay at three.

His grandfather was awarded a homestead here in 1946 as a World War II veteran.

It was part of a federal program that drained Tule Lake and converted the land to farms.

SEUS: The settlers here are all veterans of World War I or World War II, and they were brought here by the government that was trying to get food security and trying to develop areas with irrigated agriculture.

They put their name into that pickle jar.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: In 1946, this spinning pickle jar whirled the hopes and aspirations of 1,300 veterans of World War II.

The place is Klamath Falls, Oregon, where former servicemen and their families tensely wait as a drawing is held for the first public land grant since the war ended.

The first number is called.

My dad was a month old when he moved here and set up roots.

The lake bed that we're living on, this is 6 million years of duck manure and tules.

That's what we call home.

And it's home to some of the richest and most fertile land in the country and raises phenomenal potatoes, onions, horseradish, garlic.

That's our bread and butter.

PROFITA: For a while, it all seemed to work.

Water flowed from Upper Klamath Lake to farms and wildlife refuges through a massive irrigation system.

But fish on both ends of that system were hurting.

Suckerfish in Upper Klamath Lake were listed as endangered species in 1988.

Coho salmon in the Klamath River were listed as threatened in 1997.

The law demanded more water for those fish.

And farmers were stuck in the middle.

PROTESTORS [ chanting ]: We want water!

We want water!

REPORTER: Farmers have been seething since April, when the federal government denied water...

Conflicts over endangered species came to a head during a severe drought in 2001, when the federal government shut off irrigation water to farmers for the first time.

Hundreds gathered to protest.

REPORTER: Several dozen took the law into their own hands and cracked open the headgates that hold back lake water.

Oregon Senator Gordon Smith proposed exempting the Klamath Basin from the Endangered Species Act.

SEUS: A lot of the homesteaders were still here, the original families.

They viewed that as, "We did what you asked us to do.

We came and we settled, we built communities, and we provided the nation with food."

And now this slap across the face, that was shocking for them.

It's been shocking for us.

The next year, 2002, the government sent river water back to farmers for irrigation.

Downstream, Yurok tribal member Barry McCovey remembers painfully what happened next.

We had some of the lowest dam releases on record, so the river was really low here in the lower Klamath.

And then we had a pretty big fall salmon run predicted that year.

The water was too shallow and too warm for them.

And we lost upwards of 70,000 adult Chinook that fall.

The banks of the river were littered with dead fish.

All you would smell was rotting flesh of salmon.

Nothing like that had ever happened before.

WOMAN: It's our spiritual, our cultural well being, and we will not tolerate another fish kill.

McCOVEY: Some tribal members, they kind of look at their lives as their life before that fish kill and then their life after that fish kill.

ALL: Un-dam the Klamath!

We need the Klamath River fixed.

We need dams removed!

PROTESTORS: No more salmon genocide!

What do we want?

Justice!

Following that fish kill, tribes rallied for dam removal.

Tribes and farmers spent years negotiating an agreement to remove dams and guarantee water for farms.

But Congress never approved it.

After decades of activism, four dams finally came down.

That's good for salmon, but it doesn't change the amount of water going to farmers.

SEUS: The path that we've been going down is less and less water for agriculture, and our town is dying.

Our community is dying and our farms are dying and our kids are moving away from the farm, and they're not coming back because they don't see a future here.

REPORTER: Klamath tribes have filed a lawsuit against... For years, farmers and tribes have gone to court to fight for the water they were both promised.

Scott, this is Aaron.

But there weren't many wins for farmers, and fish populations continued to decline.

So this group of farmers is trying something different.

Tim?

Good to meet you guys.

They drove down from the Upper Klamath Basin to meet fisheries workers with the Karuk Tribe in northern California.

Their best hope now is for fish recovery so endangered species protections can be lifted and water can flow more freely to farms.

They want to know what they can do to help.

There they are.

So there's some fish out there.

Yeah, there is.

So the bigger one that's in there, is that a steelhead?

MAN: This is a steelhead.

MAN: Would've been my guess.

I view the salmon downriver, especially for the tribes, no different than my own crops.

So that's a Chinook.

That's a Chinook.

They're trying to catch their fish.

It's part of their heritage.

I want them to succeed as best as possible, because their success is my success.

If we can get the salmon to come back, maybe we can get a little bit of water security again, which would go a really long way.

Chinook, Coho, steelhead.

I'm gonna get that.

That's cool.

You can see the difference, I think.

Well, next time someone says the dam killed all the fish, I can say, "Nah, I saw some.

They made it."

I always key in to people's responses, and when you pull in a net full of fish and they're wriggling around in there and they're all shiny, you see people's eyes light up, and I saw that.

There's been this decades-long fight over water.

Honestly, I think people are just sick of fighting.

Until the dams came out, there was no chance of endangered salmon swimming around these farms in the Upper Klamath Basin.

But now, that's a real possibility.

Farmers are now rethinking how to manage their land and their irrigation canals.

Should they keep fish out or invite them in?

MAN: What does it mean to have salmon up here?

How can we prepare for this?

Going down there, seeing the salmon, I think you just start connecting dots, right?

Okay, these fish may be back up here in three years.

We want to make sure that they're giving them a good fighting chance to go spawn and make more salmon.

If the fish win, we all win.

When it comes to water, farmers come second, after endangered fish that are vital to Native American tribes.

MAN: 5.75.

So for farmers, the future is uncertain.

Scotty recently learned he'll be getting less than half of the water he needs to grow a crop he already planted.

That's not any way to run a business, and it's extraordinarily frustrating.

That's because of all the problems that are going on down here to protect fish like this.

I understand it's complicated, but it doesn't really work for anybody.

Now he's planning to idle about half of his farmland, and he's looking to join a growing number of farmers who are adding wetlands to their properties for fish and wildlife.

Oh, we're spitballing any way we can.

If it helps to make things better and in exchange we can get a little bit more guarantee for water, that's the only way to move forward.

And I just want to know what I can do so I know what employees I can keep, I know what I can invest in crops, and I know what I'm leaving for my son.

And I think that's what everybody wants, is just a little bit of security and a little bit of knowing that the things that you love are going to be there for you in the future.

MAN: The name of this mountain right here is a'uuyich.

It's the center of the world.

This happens to be our fishery right here.

What a beautiful place.

Karuk tribal member Ron Reed fought for dam removal to protect this ceremonial salmon fishery.

Now he's won that fight.

It's a very pivotal moment in the history of our people.

I mean, those dams depleted our culture.

We're in a revitalization mode.

The Karuk held on to this fishery below the dams, just barely, as fish populations declined.

We use 16-, 18-foot fir poles, oak limbs as our hoops.

And you watch, you're taught, but then it's about doing.

You learn by doing.

And that's where you need the proper connection to this place.

We've been living on this river since time immemorial.

We've been fishing here since time immemorial.

And we plan on fishing here forever.

Now, with four dams gone, these fish can swim much farther up the river, into Oregon.

That would be a second-best thing.

The fish I caught goes to ceremony.

The fish I missed, he goes up in the upper basin.

The salmon can now go home to the people who manage their home.

Not long after dam removal, some of those fall Chinook were spotted in a tributary of the Klamath River in southern Oregon, farther than they've been in a hundred years.

HEREFORD: The first one we saw a couple days ago was working its way through this reach right here.

Mark Hereford and his team were the first to spot them on a stream survey, much sooner than expected.

Oh, there's one right here.

We're about 230 miles from the ocean right now.

It's been a long journey for this guy.

What it had to get through through, you know, all the Ishi Pishi Falls and the Klamath River, hundreds of miles.

Like, we knew it was going to happen, but you still don't-- You don't know how to react to that, and it's, like, a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

It's amazing.

A lot of this area was underwater in the now-drained J.C. Boyle Dam reservoir.

It's been open to salmon for less than a month.

Mark and his team saw fall Chinook spawning here, starting a new run on their own.

We kind of knew it would be a really good habitat for Chinook.

It was just a matter of, "Are they going to find it?"

And they did, so it's, like, crazy.

We need to trust the fish.

They know what they're doing.

I'm going to catch a big fish with this one.

Charlie Wright is back at the same creek where we saw her releasing hatchery fish before dam removal.

She's hoping to see some of those salmon up here one day.

But for now, her family's fishing for rainbow trout.

Can you see it?

No.

So this is the only thing with having all the boys.

[ laughs ] You gotta unsnag them quite a bit.

You came untied, my love.

Dad taught me how to fish when I was little.

And I'm glad he did, 'cause, man, I didn't know I was gonna have all these boys.

We're all connected, and people just don't realize how much they live off the land when they live in the city.

I'm glad to be able to teach the boys that that's where it actually comes from.

Wish me luck.

Be brave, Maximus.

The fish that we released, some of them did make it all the way to the ocean, and that'd be crazy to see that some of them come back in the next few years.

That would be-- I don't know.

I could just burst with joy for that.

Look at the baby ducks and the mama duck over there.

Look.

Mom, see that baby one right there?

Aw!

WRIGHT: It would be awesome if my boys would be able to catch salmon on this creek one day.

That would be awesome.

But even with four dams removed, the path to this tributary is a tricky one.

It runs through two dams that weren't removed and that weren't built for adult salmon passage up a stretch of the river that's not free-flowing.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Here, the water again stagnates.

Lake water above the dams is often toxic.

If they could find their way, the creeks up here would offer great habitat for salmon near the headwaters of the Klamath River that bubble up from underground springs.

We're just praying they can make it past the Keno and Link River dam, 'cause to truly bring the salmon home, they need to be able to be in these watersheds up here.

Oh, there's some minnows.

There is some agricultural folks onboard.

People have reached out to the tribe and said, "Well, how can we help?"

And that is awesome to see that.

Because salmon could use their help in the Upper Klamath Basin, where environmental problems are killing fish and wildlife every year.

There's no future in not fixing it.

We have to fix it.

Be careful pulling them off-- you can hurt 'em.

We all know the pieces fit together, because we all watched it fall apart.

So we know it can be successful and healthy again, but we have to get it there, we have to do the work.

Restoring wetlands, controlling water pollution from farms and ranches, and improving fish passage at the remaining dams are just some of what's needed to help returning salmon.

And even after the country's largest dam removal project, in this basin, what comes next might be yet another fight to take down more dams.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... Additional support provided by... and the following... and contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.