By The Toledo Tribune
Rivers, if left to their own devices, know exactly what to do. They carve valleys, feed forests, and carry salmon on great, winding journeys between mountain streams and the sea. They do not ask for directions, nor do they check their watches. They move, as rivers do, at the steady pace of time itself.
But for the better part of a century, the Klamath River was told otherwise. Four great concrete walls rose up along its path, turning wild waters into still reservoirs, holding back the rush and tumble that once carried fish to their spawning grounds. It was progress, they said—power for homes, water for fields. A fair trade, if you weren’t a salmon or a river.
And so, for generations, the Klamath was a river interrupted. The salmon came as they always had, noses pointed upstream, but the journey ended in quiet water, the old spawning beds lost beneath silt and stone. Native tribes who had fished these waters for millennia watched as the runs dwindled, then disappeared, their traditions and livelihoods stranded like fish in a dry creek.
But rivers have long memories, and in 2024, the Klamath was given a chance to remember. In what is now the largest dam removal project in U.S. history, four aging hydroelectric dams were taken down, and the water was set free. The river, after a hundred years of waiting, began to move again.
And just two months after the final dam fell, the salmon returned.
Matt Dribble followed the Klamath’s journey and shared the story with Voice of America, capturing the voices of the environmentalists, Native American communities, and scientists who fought for the river’s restoration. The people who lived alongside the Klamath, once powerless in the face of its transformation, now watch as the water pulses with new life, carrying the salmon home again to spawning grounds that had been lost for over a century.
It is a story of resilience, of a river and a community rising together, reminded that even the oldest scars can heal when given the chance. The Klamath is back on its path, and it’s a reminder that when nature is allowed to return to its course, it often knows just what to do.
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