Photo credit: John Gussman
By Joseph Bogaard
Executive Director of Save Our wild Salmon Coalition
The Save Our wild Salmon team and I would like to share a few thoughts on the recent election and what it means for our work to protect and restore Northwest endangered native fish and the many benefits they bring to people, fish and wildlife, and ecosystems.
We expect the incoming Administration to pursue dramatic changes starting early next year regarding the federal government’s approach to salmon and orca conservation, and to environmental, energy, and other policies and priorities across the country. While our advocacy strategies and tactics may change in 2025, our overarching goals and values will not.
With your strong support and advocacy over the last four years, we’ve made truly historic progress to advance salmon and steelhead recovery, lower Snake River restoration, and dam service replacement planning. We’re proud of our success to build bipartisan leadership by state and federal policymakers across the Northwest; our outreach and community organizing projects to help Southern Resident orcas by rebuilding the salmon they depend on; and our work to support and elevate the voices and priorities of Tribal Nations – the Salmon People. And we’ve built new and stronger relationships with diverse stakeholders throughout the region.
Regardless of who is in the White House, SOS remains 100% committed to continuing our work with Northwest people and policymakers to develop comprehensive and durable solutions to restore imperiled salmon and orcas, invest in clean water and healthy habitat, support vibrant communities, and uphold our nation’s promises to Tribes – to build a brighter and more resilient future for the generations that will follow us.
Yes, we have a lot of hard work ahead. But that’s almost always the case. At SOS, our team is all in and we’re gearing up now for whatever may come in the new year – and we look forward to continuing our partnership with you. We are very grateful for your past support and advocacy. It means everything to us – and it’s the critical ingredient for our continued success and progress.
Before signing off, I leave you with closing thoughts from an inspiring book I recently finished: Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife recoveries that change how we think about animals, by Christopher J. Preston. Very readable, Tenacious Beasts explores a series of ecological restoration success stories involving wolves, bears, bison, whales, and, yes, wild Pacific salmon. Dr. Preston grew up in England, but teaches today at the University of Montana.
When I first moved to Missoula, I heard that it was once possible to see giant chinook salmon in the mountains that loom above the Lochsa drainage. The idea one might walk among towering cedars and see a salmon in the dappled light of a mountain stream seemed too ancient to be real. The Bitterroot Mountains are hundreds of miles from the Pacific Ocean. I assumed the salmon had died in the great maw of postwar development that reshaped the Northwest. Most of the talk of salmon these days concerned the obstacle four Snake River dams posed to fish that made it through the gauntlet of the Columbia. I doubted any fish still made it to the mountains. But I had never heard definitively that they were gone.
Just over a year ago, I called the Idaho Fish and Game office in Lewiston whose region encompasses the Lochsa River. I asked the officer who picked up the phone if he knew the nearest place to see a salmon.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. “Somebody asked me the same question recently, and I tracked down the answer.” It turned out there is a small fish trap on the Lochsa River not far over the pass that marks the Montana-Idaho border. Every year between July and September, a few chinook salmon return to the facility to spawn. […]
I visited the fish trap twice that summer and chatted to the trap tender. Sam Roetering was from the Midwest and was spending the summer working for Idaho Fish and Game. On a hot July afternoon, I found her sitting on the ground digging weeds from the gravel in front of the trap. The fish had been slow to arrive that year, she told me, but were starting to trickle in. They tended to arrive at night. Roetering hoped there would be enough to spawn by the time September rolled around. The salmon run was barely hanging on, dwindling over the years to about three hundred.
I asked Roetering if there were any fish spawning outside the hatchery this far up the drainage. I felt an urge to know if there were salmon living wild in the Bitterroots. Roetering did not know for sure, but told me she had chatted with a man named John who visited the trap frequently. He assured her there were. I asked Roetering if she could get John’s contact details if he came back.
A couple of weeks later, Roetering sent me an email that included John’s phone number. I called him up, and we talked for a while. John was retired and living in Missoula. He confessed that he had an obsession with the Lochsa. He made the hour-long drive over the pass more than a hundred times a year. Steelhead were his thing, but knew where I could see some salmon. It was a few miles above where Roetering worked. He suggested I get up there quick. The salmon were close to spawning. After that, they would die, and their carcasses would wash downriver and be pulled into the forest by scavengers.
Shortly after our conversation, I headed over the pass with John’s detailed instructions in hand. I’m not going to tell you exactly where John told me to go, but it was easy enough to find. I’m also not going to tell you exactly when I went there, though you could probably work it out. At the appointed spot, a pale slab of rock created a mini-cascade that fed a thirty-foot reach of deeper water. I hadn’t been standing there long before the dark dorsal fin of a big male chinook salmon broke the surface. It took several minutes for my eyes to adjust to the light on the creek, but when they did, I saw another male and several smaller females flicking their tails around the pool. On the far side, beneath four or five inches of crystalline water sat a gravel bed covered with pea-sized stones. It was perfect habitat for a female to dig out a small depression for her eggs. The males chased the other fish around while two mature-looking females scouted the gravel bottom. Their bodies flexed in the late-afternoon sunlight to keep them stationary in the current.
I had seen tens of thousands of salmon before in Alaska, but none were this far from the ocean or this high in the mountains. It was hard to fathom how steep the odds were that these fish had overcome. They had swum more than six hundred miles and climbed over 3,500 feet since they left the ocean for the long, freshwater pilgrimage back to their birthplace. They had negotiated fish ladders on eight giant dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, dodging fishermen and aerial predators along the way. They had eaten very little for months as their bodies went through a final transition, their skin darkening, the jaws of the males forming a menacing hook biologists call a kype. Every rational bone in my body told me it was impossible they should be here. But they were, returning to the mountains to act out the last few scenes of their life.
The chinook salmon I gazed upon that day contained a message about all returning wildlife. They were survivors. They had the power in their muscles and the wisdom in their genes to complete an improbable journey. Their eggs would nourish dippers waltzing along the bottom of the cold mountain streams. The bodies of their young would strengthen killer whales foaming the distant Pacific with their flukes. Each fish enacted its part in a story millions of years in the making. There is a reason salmon are beacons for native people and icons for those with a love of the wild. They exist timelessly alongside us, stitching together a world in which people of conscience desire to live.
At SOS, we’ll continue to take our cues and inspiration from the salmon – their patience, persistence, and forbearance. And we hope that you will as well.
Onward together,
Joseph Bogaard and the SOS team
