Can A Three-Foot Fish, a Six-Foot Piano Teacher, and a Few Salmon Impersonators Topple 1.2 Billion Feet of Earth and Concrete?

The last of the sun is retreating up the walls of the granite canyon. The bugs are clamoring. The fish are moving. The rattlesnakes have gone in for the evening. At first, you might miss the four shadowy figures crawling upstream on their elbows and knees. They’re wearing dark dry suits, black neoprene hoods and gloves, snorkels and masks, and heavy leather boots.

Sometimes they raise their heads, spit the snorkels out, and call a number. "Six," they might say. Faces back in the water, they grab at roots and boulders to fight the current another few feet upstream.

No, they’re not Navy SEALS or backwoods survivalists on maneuvers deep in this Idaho canyon. They’re actually an assortment of college students and biologists counting fish for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. And they’re counting fish because there are so few to count. On this particular 50-foot stretch of the Rapid River, a narrow stream that rushes down fast and cold from the Sawtooth Range in the middle of the state, they’ve seen three Chinook salmon, three bull trout, and 35 steelhead – all endangered species. In a fishery that once held millions, that’s not nearly enough.

A Three Foot Fish

Distances are large in Idaho, but something like a fish count in a remote granite canyon can have repercussions that wash across the entire region. The snorkel surveys have enormous consequences, for instance, in Lewiston, Idaho, 200 miles northwest of the Rapid River and far from Idaho’s best fishing rivers. Lewiston is an acrid-smelling paper town that enjoys the less than spectacular distinction of being "Idaho’s only seaport." This may sound a bit weird, since 465 miles and two states lie between Lewiston and the sea. But Americans, particularly Westerners, have never let logic and geography stand in the way of their economic pursuits. Thanks to a series of earthen dams and locks plugging up the Snake River, a whole armada of barges plies the waters between Lewiston and the mouth of the Columbia River, bringing wood chips and grain to the Pacific Coast.

In recent years, however, the barges have been carrying a more sensitive load. Ships heading down the Snake and Columbia basin are filled to the gills with yearling salmon and steelhead – "long run" fish that swim 600 or so miles upstream from the ocean to spawn in the waters of the Sawtooth Range. Not dead salmon and steelhead, mind you, but live, wriggling smolts collected at the Lower Granite dam, just below Lewiston, and placed in high-tech floating tanks filled with recirculating river water for the trip to the ocean. In a peculiarly ironic transaction, the barges have been enlisted to save the fish, which are being killed by the very dams that allow the barges to run the river. The cost to the federal government is somewhere in the vicinity of $400 million a year.

You see, the Snake's dammed reservoirs make it an incredibly arduous feat for the young fish to travel from the spawning grounds to their food supply in the ocean. The smaller the fish, the more difficult it is to swim; the slower the water, the more hazardous the trip. Where it once took a salmon 10 to 12 days to ride the spring runoff to the ocean, the journey, through more than 400 miles of warm, stagnant reservoirs, now takes weeks. Once 95 percent of the salmon successfully floated to the ocean. Now only 60 percent survive the trip downstream. Even fewer make it back up. In 1805, the explorer William Clark described a Snake River "crouded with salmon" – somewhere in the vicinity of two million made the journey back to their spawning grounds every year. In 1998, 8,426 spring and summer chinook, 306 fall chinook, and 2 sockeye survived the round trip. While other factors, such as ocean conditions, overfishing and habitat deterioration, may have also caused the salmon’s decline, the dams make matters much worse.

The federal government has constructed smooth concrete behemoths three quarters of a mile wide that are visible from space. It has turned canyons into lakes; it has built switchbacking fish ladders to help the fish upstream; it has devised mobile swimming pools to help the fish downstream. But it hasn’t yet figured out how to get the salmon to survive in numbers high enough to sustain the species. And under the Endangered Species Act, federal officials must take heroic measures to save the threatened fish.

That’s why some Idaho fish lovers have come up with a radical idea. Get rid of the dams – at least the four on the Lower Snake that kill the most salmon. Knock them down. And here’s the thing: it just might happen.

A Six Foot Piano Teacher

Reed Burkholder seems an unlikely Don Quixote to lead the charge against the Snake’s concrete monsters. He’s a piano teacher. He’s a member of exactly zero environmental groups. He has three kids, and attends church every Sunday. He’s 53 years old, wears glasses and a squarish haircut, and can’t do anything after three o’clock, when school lets out and piano lessons start.

But he is also the person who, nearly single-handedly, persuaded the federal government to consider breaching the dams. Burkholder, a Boise native, had returned to Idaho in the late 1980s after 20 years living out of state. In 1991, he was camping with his family on the South Fork of the Salmon River when he came across some Fish and Game employees tagging salmon. They explained the fish were nearly extinct. "When I left Idaho in 1965, we had a general salmon season," Burkholder says, remembering the days when his father would haul in three-foot Chinook after three-foot Chinook. What had happened to the salmon? The Fish and Game crew he met that day could only say that there was some sort of problem "downstream."

Burkholder went home and started reading. He learned that the dams were killing the fish. "And then I got angry," he says. So he made some phone calls. First he contacted the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for the construction and upkeep of the dams, to ask how much they spent per year trying to keep the salmon alive. Then he called the Port of Lewiston to ask how many grain and wood products traveled down the Snake each year. He called rail and trucking companies to see how much it would cost to ship Lewiston’s wares. He phoned utility companies in the region to ask what portion of the electricity they sold came from the four Lower Snake dams.

What he discovered was that it cost more to keep the dams than it does to get rid of them. For instance, the dams generate four percent of the region’s power, much of it surplus electricity that is easy to replace. The reservoirs irrigate 35,000 acres of farmland – 13 farms – along one stretch of the river, and farmers could retrofit their pumps to draw from a lower river. The Port of Lewiston floats four million tons a year to Portland on the 140-mile stretch between Lewiston and Pasco. Sending them by rail or truck would cost an additional 1 to 27 cents per bushel. At 15 cents a bushel, farmers would pay an extra $20 million.

On the other hand, the government had already spent $3 billion on dubious fish mitigation measures since 1981 and was currently spending $400 million per year to keep the fish going. Taxpayers subsidize the maintenance of the dams and the waterway to the tune of $1 to 8 million per year. If the salmon returned, so would 25,000 commercial fishing jobs, and Idaho could expect $152 million in sport fishing and tourism revenues. And if the salmon fishery fails, the government may have to pay the Columbia Basin Indian tribes an estimated $13 billion for reneging on 19th century treaties guaranteeing Indian salmon harvests. Not to mention the factors Burkholder couldn’t quantify: "the beauty of the salmon runs, and the magnificence of fish that are three feet long swimming in our streams."

Burkholder first presented his findings at a federal hearing in Boise in 1992. "It was a full room, and I was the lone voice," he remembers. The environmentalists, at that point, supported a "draw-down" proposal, allowing the river to run free during the salmon out-migration. So Burkholder kept testifying at every federal hearing in Boise from 1992 on, and slowly, his list of supporters grew. "It was up to somewhere around five people," when, in 1995, the Army Corps of Engineers held a hearing presenting a list of options to prevent the extinction of the salmon. "They came to town with a big easel detailing all the recovery options. And breaching was on it." The myriad federal agencies responsible for finding a solution to the fish problem were given a 1999 deadline to complete studies on all the recovery options.

Still, nobody really believed a dam-breaching could actually happen until 1998, when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt stood on the Kennebec River in Maine and announced the government planned to breach Edwards Dam in July 1999. After 150 years of putting dams up, the federal government would, for the first time, help to take one down. "This is not a call to remove all, most, or even many dams," Babbitt said, "but this is a challenge to dam owners and operators…to demonstrate by hard facts, not by sentiment or myth, that the continued operation of a dam is in the public interest, economically and environmentally."

With breaching on the table, remembers Dan Skinner of Idaho Rivers United, a Boise-based environmental group, fish advocates came to a startling realization, "Wait . . . we’re trying to save dams, not fish." A few years ago, the idea of taking down a dam was as absurd as it must have once seemed to build such an enormous structure in the first place. Now the federal government itself was in the dam-breaching business. And if they did it on the Kennebec, why not on the Snake?

In December 1999, the federal agencies released reports assessing the options and began holding hearings, moving toward a final decision on the dams sometime this year. And one passionate fish lover started attending every public forum in a salmon suit, reminding officials what was at stake.

In 1995, a group of activists headed up to Redfish Lake, the spawning grounds for the nearly extinct Idaho Sockeye salmon. They climbed into wet suits and dry suits and threw on some fins. Then they waded into the lake, climbed onto boogie boards, and started floating, like juvenile salmon, down the Salmon River towards the Snake and the Columbia, and, eventually, the Pacific.

They boogie boarded 400 icy miles of Class III and IV whitewater at a rate of about 25 miles a day. And then they hit Lewiston and started swimming. It had taken them 20 days to travel the first 420 miles of the trip; it took them five days to swim the last 32 miles of slack water above Lower Granite Dam. When they hit the dam, they floated through the locks, climbed out, and held a press conference. The Sockeye, unfortunately, don't have that luxury.

Four years later, I decide to see the river from the salmon’s point of view. Fortunately, it’s too late in the season to ride 400 miles of runoff. Instead I follow Carl Evenson, the blondest and lankiest of the Idaho Fish and Game snorkeling team, to a fish survey spot on the South Fork of the Salmon River, not far from where Reed Burkholder first had his epiphany. It’s spawning time, and the carcasses of mature Chinook Reds are splayed all over the river, belly up on the banks or flopped over rocks and logs, decomposing in the elongated Idaho sunlight, looking and smelling like huge, moldy tube socks. Some live salmon still shimmy in the current, kicking pebbles on their gravel nests. Two hundred years ago, this whole river would have been filled with lusty fish and rotting carcasses, spawning and dying and leaving their bodies behind as nutrients for the next generation.

Dressed in warm clothing and a Fish & Game dry suit, I follow Carl into the river, absorb the first icy wallop, and start fighting the current from rock to rock. It’s a muted underwater world – gray rocks, white sand, green-black lichen. We move stealthily up the river so we don’t scare the fish. In a deep pool ahead of us, we see two Chinook carcasses bobbing in the current. Some trout and shimmering whitefish shoot through the dappled shadows. Then Carl points to a school of Chinook fry at the head of the pool – little things, no bigger than minnows.

This is what Carl does all summer. Snorkel really beautiful rivers, count really small fish, and get really, really cold in the name of biological diversity. For eight months he lives out of a trailer in a state park outside of McCall, Idaho; not a double-wide or even a single-wide, but a petite little wood-paneled camper. It sits in a dusty yard scattered with dry boxes, bottles, wet suits, dry suits, spare tires, canoes, bikes, and dilapidated grills. All this for eight dollars an hour – and the unrequited love of a big, red fish. Carl and his colleagues have been known, over a few beers, to discuss the lengths they would go to bring back the fish. Would they sacrifice body parts? Carl said he would amputate his pinky finger. Chris, one of the supervisors, said he would lop off his hand.

The men and women on the snorkeling crew, of course, are too young to remember a time when you could just go to Idaho and fight a three-foot fish to the bank, and they’re way too young to have seen the Nez Perce stand at the top of a waterfall as fish after fish literally jumped up and into their nets. But they believe, along with Reed Burkholder, environmentalists, a lot of scientists, a few economists, the Columbia Basin Indian tribes, and various fishing advocates, that breaching the dams would restore the salmon, and that a return of the salmon would mean more to Idaho than the dams ever have.

1.2 Billion Feet of Earth and Concrete

Well, some of Idaho, anyway. If the dams come down, the big loser in the equation will be Lewiston. Plunked in a valley at the convergence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, Lewiston is a squat, industrial town, a curving grid of factories and fast food joints and mini-malls squeezed between the gold-brown hills of Idaho and Washington. From every point, you can see the smokestacks of the Potlatch Corporation, a large timber products company, spewing black smoke, and feel that sour, nostril-puckering paper-town vapor deep in the back of your throat. You don’t go to Lewiston to commune with nature. You go there to get things done – to ship your grain, to sell your lumber.

I met Joe Stegner at the Port of Lewiston’s low-slung headquarters. He is a Republican State Senator, a consultant for the Port and a former owner of a large grain company. We drove high up on a bluff to see the splendors of Lewiston – grain elevators, timber piles, barging facilities, and an enormous compost heap. Stegner is a fierce defender of the dams and the livelihood they make possible, and he’s nowhere near ready to accept the notion that breaching the dams is the only way to help the fish. He believes that improved barging can save both the fish and the dams, and that the government lacks the political backbone to do what is really necessary to safeguard the fish: Stop the harvest of Columbia Basin salmon altogether. "The irony," he says, "is that they’re still harvesting endangered species. They haven’t even considered a moratorium on fishing."

It’s hard to blame Lewiston’s businesses for defending themselves. The Port of Lewiston provides, depending on who you ask, between 70 and 500 jobs related to waterway transportation, but Lewiston officials estimate far greater job losses if the dams go down. Even the loss of 500 jobs, in a town of 50,000 people, would be devastating. And as Arvid Lyon, the tall, soft-spoken manager of a Lewiston grain elevator sees it, there’s simply not enough credible evidence that destroying Lewiston’s economy will save the fish. "The studies say that in 50 years, there is a 60 percent chance the fish will return. So maybe my grandchildren will have fish in the river. Maybe. But it’s a sure thing that if they take down the dams, Lewiston’s economy will go down the drain."

Still, much of the science suggests that breaching offers a far better chance at recovery than any other options. The question is if it’s worth it. Should we sacrifice Lewiston’s prosperity to gamble on the survival of a few thousand fish? "Is it worth it for a maybe?" Arvid Lyon had asked me. Perhaps it is to the rest of the country, but not to Lewiston.

The people of Lewiston have some idea of what their stretch of river would look like if the dams came down. In 1992, the Army Corps permitted an experimental month-long draw-down to let the river flow for the spring out-migration. Water stopped pouring through the enormous turbines at Lower Granite Dam, and the river dropped. In Lewiston, the barges stopped, the grain piled up, mud flats formed along the river, dust blew up the canyon with teeth-coating ferocity, and it smelled, for a month, like the tide was out. That’s what happens, at first, when a river returns to its natural state.

If the dams come down, we have some idea of what will occur. It happened in Maine, last summer, when a Caterpillar 345 backhoe swung its two-and-half-yard bucket into the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River. The concrete crumbled, the roiling currents consumed the still water below, and the river raged, frothed, ran. Now imagine the four Lower Snake dams, each nearly a mile wide and a dozen stories tall, releasing a river that has traveled nearly 500 miles and 7,000 feet down from the mountains. Imagine the first blow, the earthen barrier melting in the brown torrent, and then the reservoirs dissolving, water and silt and salmon rushing through the breach in one great surge, until at last the Snake, freed from its concrete bonds, slithers unfettered toward the ocean.

END