The announcement that salmon restoration in California could lead to salmon and steelhead once again swimming the Upper Sacramento River above Lake Shasta caught pretty much everyone by surprise.

And while the idea is an interesting one, actual implementation faces a lot of hurdles - not the least of which is the 602' high Shasta Dam. In fact, transporting fish over the dam and then back down (of the two, back down might be harder) could relegate this project to has-been status - except that the fisheries people don't see many alternatives.

Underground Fave water journalist Matt Weiser wrote this article about the project, where he notes the issues, but also pens several telling passages (both key passages bolded below):

Restoring fisheries above Folsom, Shasta dams faces high hurdles | Sacramento Bee

The Sacramento was the only river in western North America with four salmon runs. They numbered in the millions – so numerous that American Indians and settlers could catch a salmon dinner with their bare hands. Now one run is gone, and two are endangered. The fourth could join them soon.

Restoring a fragment of that spectacle to the Central Valley is the goal of rules proposed by the National Marine Fisheries Service. The service wants, among other things, restoration of winter- and spring-run salmon above Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River, and steelhead above Folsom Dam on the American River.

Combined, the fish transit order is considered the biggest of its kind in U.S. history.

...

"It's pretty substantial, the amount of work that's required," said Mike Chotkowski, regional environmental officer at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dams. "We still haven't even determined whether it's feasible."

The fisheries service says that without restoring access upstream, it's likely the three fish species will go extinct. Climate change means it will be harder to maintain cold-water habitat below the dams, so they must have access to better habitat.

"The fish are at that jeopardy point where it's important for us to take immediate steps," said Howard Brown, Sacramento River basin chief for the fisheries service.

Wow. Frankly, this is an idea I hadn't even heard proposed before, and now some consider it essential. Is it a desperate throw of the dice, or simply a recognition that the hatchery mitigation model has totally let us down, and that habitat destruction in the central valley is largely irreversible?

Some have already suggested it's far most cost-effective to simply restore small creeks below the dams:

Rabe said 600 small creeks between Modesto and Redding also could be restored – at far less cost than fixing the big dams.

"Don't
waste time and money on the dams. Spend it on the creeks," he said.
"That would open literally thousands of miles of spawning, which would
make a huge, huge difference."

Still - as we learned from the destruction-by-irrigator of Singlebarbed's home waters - most of the Central Valley's waterways are tied up by the West's arcane water laws, and restoring cool, clean, sustainable flows to them might be even more involved than figuring out how to move fish around big dams.

In other words, it appears we've pumped all our easy options into oblivion, and all that's left are the hard choices that nobody wants to make (so they probably won't get made). 

See you on the dam, Tom Chandler.

salmon restoration, california salmon, california water wars, sacramento river salmon, shasta dam, matt weiser, upper sacramento river