These days, it's mostly surfers who congregate around the mouth of the Elwha River, catching smooth blue combers as they curl up from the water dissolving into white foam near the rocky beach.
Decades ago, this beach on Washington state's Olympic Peninsula would have been alive with members of the Lower Elhwa Klallam Tribe harvesting clams rather than catching waves. The Elwha Klallam have long lived on these shores, relying on the salmon that made their way up the river to spawn as well as little-neck clams and Dungeness crabs found along the shoreline of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Chief among the foods for the Elwha Klallam, along with eagles and many other animals living upriver, was the salmon. In fact, the Elwha once was one of the most productive salmon streams on the West Coast, producing nearly 400,000 coho, pink, chum, and sockeye salmon, steelhead, and mighty chinook salmon that sometimes topped 100 pounds. But those prodigious runs halted some 90 years ago, when a dam was built a mere 4.9 miles upstream from the Elwha's mouth, blocking passage. A second dam, completed in 1926, further severed the river from its once-close ties to the Pacific Ocean.
The dams, built primarily to produce power for a paper mill in Port Angeles, destroyed the once-great salmon runs, diminishing them to fewer than 3,000 wild fish each year. But now, after nearly 20 years of planning and political wrangling, those two dams are about to meet their end. If all goes well, sometime in 2007 engineers will start removing the Elwha Dam and its upstream companion, the Glines Canyon Dam. When work is completed three years later, the Elwha River will run free from its headwaters to the Pacific Ocean for the first time since 1910.
The scheduled removal of the two dams across the 48-mile-long Elwha River means more than restoring a historic run for salmon. It also provides a remarkable opportunity to restore the ecosystem of one of the finest wilderness parks in the National Park System, the 922,651-acre Olympic National Park. The $182-million restoration project is second only to the massive $30-billion proposal to restore the Everglades.
"People just aren't aware of how important salmon are to an ecosystem," says Heather Weiner, NPCA's Northwest regional director. "This is really a wonderful chance to educate them about the role of salmon, that these fish are important for the health of rivers."
Anyone who has visited the big salmon-producing streams in Alaska, for instance, knows that spawning season transforms the character of a river. During the prime fall and spring spawning seasons, the banks of a stream with a healthy salmon population are littered with salmon carcasses.
In addition to providing a valuable food source for a variety of animals - from bears and eagles to pine martens and weasels - each fish is packed with nutrients that eventually return to the soil either directly through decay or indirectly through a predator's scat. "They're like vitamin pills for the ecosystem," says Brian Winter, a National Park Service fisheries biologist who is managing the Elwha dams' removal.
In the Elwha River basin, salmon once contributed more than 300 tons of phosphorus and nitrogen to the river and its surroundings each year. No accurate records exist of the Elwha basin's conditions before the Elwha Dam was built, so it's difficult to say what the loss of that biomass has meant. But experience elsewhere suggests that the return of salmon to the river will pay dividends for virtually every living thing in its drainage. Says Weiner: "We know that some 130 species, from tiny invertebrates up to bears and eagles, benefit from the nutrients in salmon carcasses."
In addition to playing a key role in the health of the ecosystem, salmon have been a crucial element in the culture and lives of the Elwha Klallam.
The 800-member tribe's reservation straddles the river's mouth, where it empties into the Pacific. Some tribal members still fish - primarily for Dungeness crab and geoduck, a big mollusk that is a delicacy in Asia-but the river that once fed them nutritionally and spiritually is a shadow of what it once was. Tribal rituals and festivals were built around the salmon, and even today tribal members mourn the loss of the resource. "It hurts," says Robert Elofson, manager of the tribe's fishery and its chief representative working on the dams' removal. "The river meant so much to us, and even now we wonder what we could have done to keep the dams out."
In the 1980s, the tribe would finally make some progress in getting the dams removed, but not before the structures had dramatically changed the river's ecosystem.
In 1910, land speculator Thomas Aldwell formed the Olympic Power and Development Company and began work on the Elwha Dam on land that he owned. The dam, which straddled a rocky gorge, was completed in 1913.
State law forbade blocking salmon streams, unless upstream fish passage was provided for "food fish" (i.e., salmon.) However, state officials agreed to let him build a fish hatchery in lieu of a fish ladder. But the hatchery was a fiasco; its managers were unable to successfully rear fish, and it closed in 1922. Four years later, the Glines Canyon Dam was built eight miles upstream from the Elwha. Both dams provided electricity to paper and lumber mills in Port Angeles and to communities scattered along the northern Olympic Peninsula.
Within years, all ten runs of anadromous fish - coho, pink, sockeye, chum, and spring/fall chinook salmon, plus
sea-run cutthroat trout, char, and winter/summer steelhead - had dwindled. Locals told of seeing tens of thousands of fish swimming upstream, only to batter themselves to death in a futile attempt to pass the Elwha Dam. Below the dams, the river itself changed, stripped of sediment and logs previously deposited from the upper reaches. Even the beach along the river's mouth changed. Denuded of sand that once was carried down the river, native populations of clams and Dungeness crab vanished. In their place came an ecosystem dominated by kelp and the less commercially lucrative rock crab.
The Elwha and Glines Canyon dams came to be seen as permanent structures. But the Elwha Klallam, long bitter over the destruction of their river and emboldened by court decisions that gave tribes increasing clout, challenged a relicensing application for the Glines Canyon Dam in the late 1980s. With help from several environmental groups, the effort to take the dams out at first moved quickly.
In 1992 Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act, and President George H.W. Bush signed it into law. It directed the federal government to buy and remove the dams. But no money was allotted, delaying the work and giving opponents time to stall.
In particular, a powerful Republican senator from Washington, Slade Gorton, slowed the removal process even though he had co-sponsored the 1992 legislation. In the late 1990s, he tried to implement a two-stage dam removal, with the lower dam taken out and 12 years of "study" following. He also attempted to link the Elwha dams' removal to a bill forbidding any dam removal on the Snake River, another river where dams have devastated salmon runs.
By 2000, Gorton retreated, and in February of that year the federal government bought the dams from the paper company, clearing the way for removal. But much work remains to be done. Beginning next year, plans call for the construction of water-treatment plants to help local water users cope with the heavy sediment loads that will be released by removal of the dams. Two years after that, the dams will be removed.
Removing the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam is fairly straightforward. Engineers will cut out successive notches in the dam's thick concrete wall, gradually lowering the water level until the dam no longer restricts the river's flow. Taking out the 108-foot Elwha Dam is trickier. It was so sloppily built that soon after its completion, the foundation blew out. To plug the hole, engineers filled it with timbers, rubble, and concrete, a patch that extends well upstream from the dam's base. Notching will not work, so instead, the plan is to divert the river around the dam, build a cofferdam that isolates it, then demolish the dam when the lake behind it is drained.
The process is essentially the reverse of building a dam. "Anything that humans put up, humans can take out," notes Winter. When the dams are gone, not many will feel as much satisfaction as the tall, bearded biologist. Now 48, he has spent most of his career in the Elwha's orbit, first as a fisheries biologist with the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, and since the early 1990s as the National Park Service's point man on dam demolition. He knows every nook and cranny of the dams, can readily spout statistics on sediments piled behind them (19 million cubic yards), and is fully confident that salmon will begin exploring the full length of the river within months of the dams' destruction. "The habitat for salmon is intact," he says. "The only perturbation on the river has been the dams."
It will take time for the Elwha to undo the changes brought about by decades of damming. Two lakes formed by the dams, Lake Aldwell and Lake Mills, contain silt and sand that covered slopes logged off before the dams were finished. Park biologists plan to revegetate the upper reaches above the river but will leave the deltas and sand banks to the river to erode and drag downstream. In time, the beaches along its mouth also are likely to resume their former shape, as sand from the river rebuilds stony shoreline. The Dungeness crab and other species are apt to follow. Even surfing may improve, with a better beach to launch from. Winter expects 30 years or so to elapse before the Elwha fully regains what it lost decades ago.
By then, more than a century will have passed since the last great salmon run on the Elwha. But nature can be a powerful and persistent force. Left to their devices, salmon will once again make the Elwha River their rightful home.
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Douglas Gantenbein is a writer based in Seattle, Washington. He last wrote about the Wright brothers for the magazine.
