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

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.