The dams on the Snake River were built to generate power, store water, control flooding and transport grain.

But the dams have had many unintended consequences.

Where millions of salmon once spawned, They are now facing a mass extinction.

Many are trying to save the system from the brink of disaster.

You can't bring it back... something that's been extinct.

The Living Peace Foundation is honored to provide funding support for Wild Rivers with Tillie supporting people and projects that creatively and courageously advance collaboration, compassion and living peace.

This series shares the passion that the Living Peace Foundation has for the health and connectedness of our planet and all who inhabit it.

I am veteran river guide and conservationist Tillie Walton.

Join me as I lead different groups down the great rivers of the American West.

Wow!

Oh, it█s like so narrow.

We█re driving a houseboat.

The Snake River runs through six states and provides 41% of the water to the Columbia River.

And this is a life way for fish, for agriculture, and for many communities along the river.

On the Snake River, there's been a proposal to remove four dams.

And if this is to happen, this could set an entirely different trajectory for rivers around the United States and the world.

The Snake River is on the brink of disaster.

Four dams are blocking its flows and many people are racing against time to try to save what's left of the system.

We begin our journey on Lake Wallowa in northeastern Oregon.

Heading up to the dam and this is where the the tribes the Nez Perce Umatilla State of Oregon are talking about reintroducing sockeye to the lake.

Wallowa Lake historically was a nursery lake for sockeye salmon.

This is where the young were reared.

So when the adults return to Wallowa Lake, they swim through the lake and then up to the headwaters and spawn.

And when those fry would emerge out of the gravel, they drift down into those lake, and then they rear for approximately two years before they would head out to the ocean.

So this is a very important spot, especially for sockeye salmon.

Obviously, if this is blocking the sockeye, if they were to reintroduce sockeye into the lake, they would have to they would naturally be coming up through a series of falls into the lake.

They built the dam.

It's basically blockaded all the sockeye from coming up here.

So the idea is to be able to restore sockeye.

They've got to have the passage.

very similar to what's going on with the Snake River.

I mean, you think of those dams that are down there.

They're affecting the passage.

They█re re affecting the habitat.

In this case, this thing is just simply blocking the sockeye from coming up.

Yeah.

There's no way to get past gigantic concrete...

Barrier on the other side.

On the other side, it's just a sheer drop.

And then there's a water slew that goes through.

So there's no way for the fish to get around.

The sockeye were the wealth of the Nez Perce Tribe.

It was a huge productive system.

20 to 30000 sockeye up here.

The tribe's leading the way in the pursuit for restoring the river, removing the dams.

It's not an easy solution because, you know, you have people's livelihoods that are built on the hydroelectric system.

But you know what?

I understand is the Bonneville Power is not not selling as much electricity from those.

So the four lower snake dams.

They only account for like 1% of like the total of where we're at in this particular area.

The salmon are in a very critical part of their life history.

The data is real clear.

You can't bring it back.

Man can't bring something that's been extinct.

You know, it's just impossible.

Dams on the Snake River were built to generate power, Store water control flooding and transport grain.

By blocking the flow of the river, they have had many unintended consequences.

Once teeming with life and millions of salmon, these keystones species are now facing potential extinction.

The reservoirs have inundated sacred Native American sites, and the stagnant waters have created dangerously poor water quality conditions.

You think of those dams that are down there.

Many are trying to save the Snake River from the brink of disaster by restoring a free flowing river and keeping what's left intact.

Salmon are a keystone species.

They are born in the river, live their life in the ocean, and then return to the place they were born to lay their eggs.

So the ecosystems of rivers and oceans depend on these fish as do our economic and food supply chains.

The salmon are critically important to many cultures.

We're in the sister towns of Lewiston, Idaho and Clarkston, Washington.

The end of the line for the shipping from the Columbia River.

Historically, there was all kinds of commodities that used to be shipped down the Clearwater and then down the snake into the Columbia.

Over time and over the last 15 years, almost all of that traffic has has dissipated.

So the only thing that's really being shipped out of Lewiston anymore is grain from from northern Idaho.

And it's it's a very important highway, shipping highway right now for grains.

It's pretty heavily subsidized.

You know, the lumber used to be shipped down via via barge.

We used to have petroleum was shipped down via barge.

Now, all that's really shipped via barges is the grain.

So one of the misconceptions about the Snake River dams is they're actually they provide flood control.

But these don't provide anything They don't.

Yeah, they do have some irrigation in central Idaho around the Tri-Cities area to about 32,000 acres in central Washington.

When they were initially built and completed in the seventies, you know, part of the promise that they were going to provide to this this region is economic prosperity and they're going to be an economic generator.

And really, this this area, economic is expanding at a much lower rate than anywhere else in the state.

So this promise of prosperity, the promise of coexistence, of dams and fish, it's all been a failed line of broken promises.

Speaking of dams and fish being able to co-exist, we're at the point where we've spent more than $17 billion in federal money for fish recovery, and our fish haven't recovered at all.

In fact, they're much closer now to extinction than they ever used to be.

The amount of Chinook that were produced in Idaho was greater than any river system.

Any system in Alaska, any system up and down the entire West Coast.

So this this really was the hub of Chinook salmon and salmon fishing and salmon ecology in North America.

What does that look like numbers wise?

Well, historically, it was well into the millions.

You know, Lewis and Clark, when they came down, I mean, they talked about, you know, seeing fish thick enough that you could run across a stream and, you know, never really having to watch out for fish.

We're starting to even see quasi extinction in some of the tributaries to the salmon in the Snake River.

And in the next five years, we're going to have significant quasi extinction.

So quasi extinction itself means that functionally, that salmon run is so deficient that it can't really be recovered.

And why does that matter?

Because salmon are kind of unique.

Well.

They're ubiquitous to the Pacific Northwest.

I mean, we were all very dependent upon salmon and it was part of everybody's ideology since time immemorial.

We have towns named Salmon, Idaho, fly into the Boise Airport.

We have murals and statues of salmon all over.

It's part of our identity.

Beyond that, too, what's so unique about Idaho salmon is we're the only string of salmon and steelhead that are buffered from the effects of climate change.

So these are the only fish that spawn at high enough altitude.

So you get up to 6500 or 7000 feet near Stanley.

That's the highest that salmon spawn anywhere in the world.

And so these fish are vitally important in the face of climate change.

They may be the the fish strains that we use to repopulate other places, so even Alaska, with.

When you think of cold water, it doesn't have the refugia that Idaho actually offers.

Well, it's almost like the seed bank of the ocean in some ways.

It really is.

It really is.

And you know, the great thing about salmon, they're a very adaptive species.

They're a very resilient species.

So they've gone through, you know, climate changes.

They've gone through changing ocean conditions.

They've gone through all of this other stuff.

It's just the only thing that they've not been able to adapt to is the dammed upriver where they don't have a free flowing corridor to the ocean.

For the Native American tribes associated with the Snake River.

Salmon are an intricate and deeply ingrained part of life, and they understand the value and importance of this keystone species far beyond the science.

This part of the river is the free flowing part of the Snake.

All the way up, there's a continuum of our people who lived here for thousands and thousands of years, and these village sites are still here.

Down, if you go to the lower part of the river, there's dams and they've inundated our village sites.

So the connection to the river, connection to the land has been severed.

But also those dams are affecting our salmon.

The salmon that came right to our front doorstep of our village provided all of our food throughout the whole year.

And so part of the work that we're doing is to restore salmon to this river and the tribe of Nez Perce, Umatilla, Walla Walla.

Many of our tribes have been working on this and we're trying to restore a free flowing river again.

We're a lower granite dam, which is the first dam that you find outside of Lewiston coming down river.

So the first of four on the lower Snake River, and then you have the four large dams on the main stream, Columbia, out to the ocean.

And so this is one of the four dams that is being proposed to be removed.

Yeah, this is one of the four dams that the science is empirically demonstrated over the past 30 years as being the biggest inhibitors to salmon and steelhead recovery, you know, killing off over 50% of the smolts just from the dams themselves.

People will talk about, you know, these have great fish passage and, you know, each dam has a 95% success rate of fish passage.

Fish ladders only work for adult fish.

They don't do anything for the smolts on their way down to the ocean.

The other thing that we haven't talked about that is a huge killer of salmon and steelhead is the water temperatures that these dams create.

And especially in a year like this where we have very unseasonably hot temperatures, we've had them prolonged for so long.

We get a situation where salmon and steelhead are an even more precarious situation.

So the water temperature here at Lower Granite Dam is actually the coolest of the four pools on the lower Snake River.

And currently it's at 68 degrees.

And 68 degrees is the lethal temperature for salmon and steelhead.

Because the salmon are in so much danger.

The Nez Perce tribe has fish hatcheries which help ensure the survival of the species.

Here we are at the Nez Perce Fish Hatchery and essentially they are ensuring the survival of the species because the system is so altered.

We have to manually recreate all all that would naturally occur in nature.

And so here they are catching the fish and scientifically tracking them.

790 They're making sure that there's a higher percentage of wild fish that are able to make it up the river and that not too many hatchery fish get mixed in with the wild population.

And so they're really ensuring the genetic survival of these species.

We're netting salmon, so all of these fish are coming up.

They've been trapped in here.

We're going to put them in here to figure out if they're wild fish or hatchery fish because they only want so many of the hatchery fish to be mixed with the wild so as to maintain the wild genetics.

That guy's a fighter.

Wow.

It's amazing watching these fish.

They've been on this huge journey swimming from the ocean all the way upriver for a thousand miles.

Here they are.

They still have so much energy to thrash around and fight against the net.

So it's just this power of the fish and the instinctive drive to go back to the place where they were born so they can lay their eggs.

It's this genetic imprint of Mother Nature that's magical.

Wild fish.

Wow!

He's going to take them and check them for whether they're hatchery or wild and he's going to take them and do the checking on pit tags, and code wire tags.

A pit tag is individual fish they can track to anywhere.

Code wire tags is a batch mark.

If it came from a certain hatchery you've got tens of thousands.

What we have here is an E.R.

for fish.

The salmon have been swimming up river.

They're being tracked each day to see what's happening with them and what dam.

And they're able to track where they come from all the way up river.

So it's really important to have a mix of the wild salmon genetics with the hatchery fish.

And so here they have a truck where we've put the fish and the fish are being trucked over to the hatchery where they'll they'll be developed and and these endangered species will be kept alive.

Like I said, this is basically life support for the fish.

We're looking at the old meets the new.

And so we've got this old technology of a way that we supply power and irrigation to great benefit for a lot of the United States.

But we also have the ancient ones who once lived here of the tribes that depended on this river for their connection to the land and to the salmon.

And we now have an opportunity to possibly merge the two together by possibly removing the structure here, restoring a free flowing river and reconnecting people to the land in a different way, more futuristic and provides sustainable electricity, a sustainable economy, and a sustainable connection to the land for everyone involved.

This is so cool because we are here looking at the next generation of how we're going to produce electricity sustainably because as you hear these windmills churning around, you can you can feel how it's using the power of the wind here to generate electricity.

I think of this as a cleaner wave that we've done energy production rather than destroying a river and contributing to salmon, going extinct and other unintended consequences.

At one time, the dams did produce economically viable energy.

But now that we have the solutions like wind and solar and their cost of those are starting to come down, it's actually much less economical to produce the energy through a dam where you have to pay billions of dollars to create fish passage, when you have these low cost, sustainable solutions like wind and solar power.

Since we now have alternative ways to produce many of the services a dam provides.

Let's take a look at a smaller example of what a restored ecosystem on the Snake River could look like if the dams were to be removed.

This is the Kilchis River in the temperate rainforest of northern Oregon on the coast.

And it is a healthy, wild salmon ecosystem and their runs of Chinook Fall, Chinook salmon, chum salmon, some of the last chum, cutthroat trout, coho and steelhead and all the runs are healthy in this river.

And because the habitat is protected, the watershed has all the processes that create salmon habitat are functioning here.

We're on the Kilchis River far cry away from the Snake River.

This is more what a natural system would look like.

This is the Oregon Coastal Rainforest River, and this is an example of where the fish do still come back up.

So this river isn't as industrialized as the reservoirs that we saw on the Snake and the Columbia.

So this is what a river, although a smaller version of it actually looks like.

And how the Snake and the Columbia once functioned themselves.

One of the reasons that we are in such trouble with our wild salmon runs is that in the past we manage them more as a commodity for harvest, and we would harvest them and kind of in a blunt way.

And we forgot that those populations are lots of little populations that make the big run.

So and Lewis and Clark came up the Columbia.

They saw millions of salmon and they looked at the river and all the salmon and they look at this huge salmon run.

But what they didn't know is what they're looking at were hundreds of little populations, each going to a certain place in the Columbia River system.

And that diversity has been damaged by the dams and by the hatcheries and by harvest.

This river is an example of a river that still has that diversity, and the Chinook salmon start showing up in September.

And populations, they keep coming all the way until February because that run is not just one big run, it's lots of little runs.

And so as the climate changes or adversity comes, sometimes some do well and sometimes some don't.

But thet average out with abundance and this is why your stock portfolio, you've got a good manager is carefully managing all those different parts of your investment portfolio, knowing that we need to be ready for a downturn in the economy.

And this is the paradigm shift that we need with wild salmon is to manage with that same granularity.

It's a delicate balance or dance of all these little intricate parts.

In the meantime, private landowners and tribes are restoring the land on their own to manually recreate the functions of a free flowing system, despite the presence of dams.

You█re restoring this land.

So channel work that you're doing, it starts out looking like this, like a pasture.

I think it is a great opportunity to reset the landscape and go through and work with private landowners who realize, you know, at one time they needed that pasture ground, but now they realize that they disconnected a whole ecosystem.

And so, yeah, going from this to what sometimes looks like a moonscape back to a functioning stream is a pretty great thing to be a part of.

It's pretty impressive.

And the fact that we have landowners in eastern Oregon that are willing to do that, it's a passion for me.

It was a legacy that my husband left.

It was his vision to restore this river.

He loved it.

And he he knew that if he could put meanders back in, that it would make a difference for the fish, for the whole river habitat.

This is the lower most of the four lower Snake River dams.

Last one out to the ocean and the first one on the way back from the ocean.

And it is significant because it has the largest lake behind it and reservoir.

The reason for that is this dam actually does provide some proper irrigation.

It's a way of life for the tribes and for many environmentalists and fishermen.

And but then there's some folks that maybe don't want these dams to to disappear.

The whole river system has a very diverse set of stakeholders.

We all have an ideology and a cultural attachment to this river and to fish.

I think one important piece about this whole story is we have a once in a generation opportunity to make everybody whole.

This is one of those unicorn stories that you can find where everybody can actually come out a winner.

Every utility that the river provides for for people can be replaced.

We can find a different way to get grain to to Portland.

We can find different solutions for renewable energy, for clean energy sources.

We can find alternatives to the irrigation here.

We can continue irrigating, you know, in a free flowing river.

But the big difference is that fish need one thing, and that is a cold, fast flowing river corridor to the ocean.

You know, we have that opportunity to really to bring that back and be part of the largest river restoration in North American history.

Basically, what you're saying is it doesn't have to be this or that.

We can have and.

Yeah, we can have renewable energy.

We can have a thriving economy.

We can have fish in the river that are a cultural way of life, and we can keep other cultural ways of life.

We are all connected.

So a healthy river and healthy fisheries are good for everyone.

It's a sacred experience, I think a journey coming down the river and just to sit here and look at this place, just to just to feel it.

And at night, when you see the stars above and to sit here by the river and listen to it and it's got its own story, its own language.

So that's been, you know, amazing time coming down here and, you know, swimming in the river, having fun looking for things here in the history, understanding both the Indian history and the non-Indian history and knowing that there's a connection there.

So I think that's kind of been the best part of it.

I found a heart rock!

The Living Peace Foundation is honored to provide funding support for Wild Rivers with Tillie supporting people and projects that creatively and courageously advance collaboration, compassion and living peace.

This series shares the passion that the Living Peace Foundation has for the health and connectedness of our planet and all who inhabit it.

I invite you to visit us at wildriverswithtillie dot org or wildriverswithtillie dot com