Sunbeam Dam - {Print text }
Rushing past what could have been.
Often a phrase of missed doings;
Yet dams, mines, cows and people
left only traces or ruins; Agkai lives.
A few years ago I saw a bumper sticker on a truck near Riggins. It said: “Have Habitat. Send Fish.”
Have habitat.
The Salmon River – the perfect habitat for a species which carries the river’s name. When I was a kid and we’d travel to the river to fish, we’d just say, “we’re going to Salmon.” Salmon as a place—the particular placed fished that year. Salmon even if we fished on a tributary. Salmon because it summed up the perfect habitat for human and fish.
Have habitat.
Consider the ideal waters of the Salmon. Trees along the bank shade the water and keep it cool even on a hot summer day. Salmon need cool water. And then when the trees die – sometimes with the help of a beaver (another critter that’s well-suited to this habitat) – they fall into the stream and create a hiding place for little salmon. Or those same trees cover a deep hole, creating a sheltered place for salmon on their way home to spawn.
Have habitat.
The Salmon River is what all of the Salmon Nation, the waters that are home to the Salmon people up and down the Pacific Northwest coast, ought to look like. It’s not complicated. Salmon need cool, clean water for habitat.
Send fish.
Even as a child, before I ever heard the word habitat, I knew this river was special. I remember the first salmon I caught. After I hooked it good, the fish started to swim away. I knew it was stronger than me – and I was afraid it would escape. So without hesitation, I dove into the river and wrestled it. I wanted that fish that bad; I still do.
In many ways it’s remarkable that fish are even on this river – or any river – today. It seems like we did so much in our past to destroy everything we could. We dug up and destroyed habitat. We constructed concrete barriers of dams and culverts. And we even cut the trees and killed the beavers. We did everything wrong – even on the Salmon River.
At one time, the Salmon River could have ended as a tragic word play, a reminder of an extinct species. This is now true in some places on the Snake River drainage, such as Salmon Creek Falls near the southern Idaho border. Visitors to Jackpot, Nevada, are promised great fishing. “With the Salmon Falls Creek flowing just out of town, fishing is just from your doorstep,” says one brochure. “Rainbow, brown and brook trout are found in most streams just a few miles in any direction or you can drive twenty miles to the north and catch a record size walleye from the Salmon Falls Reservoir in Idaho.”
What was that? Walleye? Rainbow trout? On a reservoir or creek named for the Salmon? How could that be? Easy: the fish have been gone for more than a century. The Upper Snake River was once like the Salmon itself – a river full of fish with runs that made it as far as the American Falls. But a century of water degradation and dams ended all of that. Nowadays the only thing left is the name “salmon” and a poor reminder for the fisher of walleye.
Then that could have been true for the Salmon River, too. We were just lucky – then and today.
We were lucky a century ago because the boom and bust economy played out exactly right: gold mining towns like Challis or Bonanza City did not become a huge urban area. The gold mining camps didn’t turn into a Boise or Denver: they were big for a time, but were abandoned early in the 20th century.
The same could be said for Sunbeam Dam. This could have been the dam that changed the Salmon River’s history, making it much more like the other rivers of the Northwest. The sockeye salmon run was once so plentiful that a cannery was considered for Stanley. But instead a dam was built by miners in 1910 – the only dam ever built on the Salmon River.
It is this sockeye run – the very fish that gave Redfish Lake its name – that should be extinct. We built the Sunbeam Dam on the Salmon River – and that should have made it impossible for the fish to return to the lake country. Fortunately the Sunbeam Dam did not last long. Its walls were dynamited in 1934. Now we’re slowly making it easier for the fish to return home. Sunbeam Dam is now a ruin, and the salmon habitat remains.
The National Marine Fisheries Service reported that in the decade of the 1990s only 18 sockeye salmon made it back to the Stanley Basin; a few years later that number climbed to 200 fish per year. The federal goal is 1,500 sockeye each year – a number still low by historical standards.
But this is not all bad news. These fish travel 900-miles from sea level to more than 6,000-feet above sea level.
I keep thinking this ought to be the hope for fish that can spread further down river into the other systems along the Salmon Nation.
Another sign of hope comes in the form of an old refrigerator. The box is stripped of all its insides and placed near a creek so that water runs through it. The salmon eggs are planted inside a track where they grow until they are big enough to go into the river. These boxes are different than hatcheries because the fish – although protected from predators – have to learn to act like fish. They’ve got to figure out how to eat and how to get out of the box. Once they’re in the river, they’re naturally salmon.
Indeed the good news, despite all the woes, is that so many people throughout the Salmon Nation are working on restoration. The battle is not over, but it’s not lost either.
Right now a good thing is happening that’s out of our control: The ocean temperatures favor our salmon. It’s just one more thing that makes it easier for fish to return to the river of their name.
Once salmon that spawned in these rivers numbered more than ten million. By the 1960s only a million or so fish made it to spawning grounds. But in the last year or two the numbers have started increasing again – partly because of increased resource protection and partly with the luck of colder ocean temperatures.
In one tributary, for example, there’s a Chinook salmon run that’s more like it once was. You can peer into the clean water and see salmon. Sometimes hundreds of fish. Anyone who looks at this wants to dip a hand, or fish, or spear, into the water and bring a fish out. It’s that tempting.
I took my two boys to that creek last summer. I wanted them to see salmon in great numbers. I wanted them to know what it meant when people said, “you can almost walk across the river because there’s so many fish.” I wanted them to see the fish close, so close that you can reach out a grab a tail.
Then this is the way it should be. This is how the river named for Salmon should be every season.
Have Habitat. Send fish.
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