Salmon swimming in the Upper Sacramento once again??

You could say the news caught my eye.

The court-ordered biological opinion on restoring salmon to California's largely salmon-free waters was just released, and this tidbit from the Redding Record Searchlight suggests salmon could be restored to the Upper Sacramento River above Lake Shasta?

A federal plan to revive salmon in the Sacramento River could put the fish upstream of Shasta Dam for the first time in seven decades and would mean the end of Lake Red Bluff.

The National Marine Fisheries Service made the two recommendations in its 800-page biological opinion for the Central Valley Project released Thursday. The Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Shasta Dam and the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, has tentatively approved the federal court-ordered plan while it reviews the lengthy document.

The Keswick and Shasta dams have blocked spawning beds on the Upper Sacramento and McCloud rivers north of Shasta Dam since the bureau began construction on the dams in the 1930s.

Federal and state scientists will develop a pilot project to truck fish trapped in the lower Sacramento around the dam by 2011, said Maria Rea, supervisor of the fisheries service's Sacramento office. A permanent plan for moving the fish past the two dams should be created between 2012 and 2015, she said.

What? I thought - frankly - that it was just a mixup due to terminology (some call the Sacramento River near Redding the "upper" part of the river).

Then we went digging around the Sacramento Bee's should-be-award-winning California water wars coverage, and found this:

The rules require the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to restore access for fish to waters above Nimbus and Folsom dams on the American River, Shasta Dam on the Sacramento, and New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus.

Those dams were built decades ago without fish ladders and have blocked access to hundreds of miles of historic spawning grounds.

The Bee's Matt Weiser is not the kind of writer to get this stuff wrong, so I'd suggest moving salmon around Shasta Dam is at least a consideration.

Frankly, I'm not all that sanguine about the potential for trapping and trucking salmon - it hasn't exactly been a raging success in the Columbia basin. And the mechanism for doing so - or returning the salmon smolts to the ocean - isn't at all clear.

Then again, I've also long heard that Shasta Dam effectively blocked access to better than 80% of California's salmon and steelhead spawning habitat.

One Thing Is Clear
With many of California's native and anadramous fish populations in a state of collapse, the water wars are firing on all cylinders - including a broadside from Arnold "Fish Terminator" Schwarzenegger, who has consistently cast this as an issue of "fish vs people" - an idiotic stance, especially given the clearly unsustainable nature of current water projects, and the fact a lot of commercial and recreational fishing dollars are also being lost (I'm waiting for someone to ask Ahhnold why he  favors Alfalfa over People).

Still, salmon swimming again in the McCloud, Upper Sacramento, and Pit Rivers?

I'd be surprised. Still, we're all about news here at the Trout Underground. I bet there's plenty more of it to come.

UPDATE: Note from Underground Fave Reporter Matt Weiser in response to my question about whether the plan really provided for Upper Sacramento salmon passage: "Yes it does, in great detail, starting with trial reintroductions, then full permanent fish passage by 2020."
For now, I'm going fishing. See you on a stream, Tom Chandler.