Open Letter: A little history of the UPRIVER salmon return seasons…

Written By Jason Murieen

I rode the school bus to Yreka High School TWICE a day and had my face plastered to the window, watching our River like a ravenous Osprey. My family has enjoyed the Klamath’s bounty since the late 1930’s. We were taught, from a very young age, to think like a Klamath fish…like a salmon and more importantly, like a Steelhead.

There were always a fair number of salmon to the mouth of the Scott by September 1st. By buck season, (third week in September), there were good numbers in the upper river; entering Shasta River, Bogus Creek and the highly oxygenated afterbay of Iron Gate Dam.

Those fish were allowed to come up a short ladder into a spawning facility. Hundreds of fish a week would come through. The ones that were ripe enough were spawned and carcasses were processed by Fish and Game at Iron Gate and given to food banks.

They would usually meet their quota (the hatchery’s capacity) of 2500-3000 salmon before the end of October. The remainder of the fish would naurally spawn right there or if it was too crowded, they’d go back down the river a ways and find suitable spawning gravels in the tails of certain coveted riffles.

Very few unspawned fish died there at the dam. Some people were ignorant enough to believe that most, if not ALL of the fish that reached the dam, just gave up and died en masse from some metaphysical dilemma of a broken heart from not being able to go any further. We well-meaning humans always tend to over anthropomorphize the “perceived plights” of animals.

Much like the bird with a broken wing doesn’t feel sorry for itself, a fish isn’t irrevocably demoralized by encountering a barrier…manmade or natural…to him, it’s no different than a giant rock face of a waterfall.

He explores, perhaps even smashes his nose into it for a day or two. Eventually, he processes that data, flips around and claims an edge of a suitable riffle downstream. Those eggs hatched with great success and those smolts went back to the ocean, no differently than if those eggs were spawned above the dam. Statistically, they probably enjoyed higher oceanic returns because of less juvenile predation as that Redd originated closer to the ocean. Nature is resilient and she will always find a way…

Look, like salad dressing, eventually, the Goo of Death will precipitate out of the water column and the salmon will swim right over the top of it, virtually unscathed to these artificially hallowed waters above the dams, but at what COST? Was the magnitude of this “pyrrhic victory” even vaguely anticipated by these misguided antidam crusaders? What will the exotically fanciful and artfully fabricated explanations be for the paltry 2027/2028 Salmon returns? Will my unacknowledged “Fukushima surge” theory bail them out in some small measure? Those descendants WERE scheduled to come back during ’27-’28 season…

For future spawning opportunities, the main stem, from Iron Gate to the mouth of Beaver Creek is irrefutably gone for a LONG DAMn TIME.

From what I’ve seen, I’d personally say to the mouth of the Scott as that is the Klamath’s first serious chance at a legitimate scouring. I’m being extremely generous, some would argue to extend the decreed Annihilation Zone to the mouth of the Trinity River.

Nonetheless, was ANY of this really worth destroying the first 50 prime miles of Klamath mainstem spawning habitat?

Folks, it’s really boils down to simple math–we’ve got an international waters, reckless bycatch and trawler overtake problem–NOT a spawning habitat problem.

Jason Murieen