The banks of the Elwha sprawl and meander now. Just up from the river mouth west of Port Angeles, there are braided channels that crisscross the river basin. Soft sediment is underfoot on the walk through the water in waders, crossing sandy islands that didn’t exist before dam removal.
“Yeah, I mean, the river is completely different than we remember it — than I remember it,” said Vanessa Castle, who grew up on this river with her extended family.
She’s an enrolled member of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. Her mom was a commercial fisherwoman, harvesting mostly coho salmon here. The dams loomed above them then, harnessing the river’s flow and preventing the Elwha’s legendary chinook salmon from reaching their spawning grounds above the dams.
Castle remembers, as a kid, seeing the huge endangered fish jump up and slam against the lower dam, trying in vain to get above it.
“But it was a good experience, growing up on the river as a child.” she said. “I was, you know, seven years old and getting paid 25 cents to clean each fish by all of my relatives that we would camp with for weeks at a time at the mouth of the river.”
That was 30 years ago. Eventually, her mother switched to saltwater fishing to make a better living. Others switched to neighboring rivers. And after they won the fight for dam removal, the tribe voluntarily imposed a moratorium on all fishing on the Elwha, and then extended it twice.
Castle, who now works as a natural resource technician for the tribe, says the 12-year moratorium was necessary to allow the fish to recover. But it created a cultural disconnect in the next generation.
”We have a whole group of children — or young adults now — that have never been out here and have never fished the river.” Castle said.
“And so we're having to re- teach them, and instill those lessons that we've been taught. About [things] like sustainable harvest and the way that we treat the fish — just our tribal customs and our culture.”
First fishery since dam removal
At the main fishing hole beneath a huge bluff, several tribal members are casting for coho salmon. The fishery, a limited ceremonial and subsistence fishery, is only allowed on the lower three miles of the river and anything that’s not coho must be thrown back. Other fishermen nearby say they’ve hooked some bull trout.
Castle wades out into a pool and casts a few times, but the water is turbid. She doesn't catch anything that morning. But she remembers on the first day of the fishery, how she caught her first fish, a big female, and was overcome by emotion.
“I was able to feed my whole family – ten people – including our children, with that fish, that evening,” Castle said.
“So it was very celebratory in that way, that we were all able to gather at the table and have a meal. And it was the first time our children, my sister and I's children, ate Elwha River salmon. So that was something that's really important to us.”
A project to brag about
This fishery has been important to multiple families in the Lower Elwha, not just to Castle's family. Taking the fish home to share is customary. Being able to do so was one of the primary goals of dam removal.
“You know, tribal people typically don't brag, but we like to brag about this project,” said Russell Hepfer, vice chairman of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe.
He said the dam removal shows how the persistence of his ancestors is paying off. They pushed for dam removal for decades and for proactive restoration of the river’s ecosystems and its fish.
Hepfer has served on his tribe’s council for 27 years and joined the fight for dam removal mid-stream.
“A lot of people said 'it's not going to happen. It's a big experiment.' But here we are, took 12 years, but we have a population of coho that we can take some fish.”
Only coho could be kept, with only enrolled members of the tribe catching no more than six percent of the projected return – and very limited use of nets. The tribe’s biologists carefully tracked the harvest.
Hepfer said he considers it a "test fishery."
“And although it's a small fishery, it is a fishery. And I think the whole world's watching to see just how successful it is,” Hepfer said.
Proactive steps to boost coho paying off
Nearby dam removals on the Klamath River and the proposal to breach the Lower Snake River dams are motivated by similar goals: saving salmon species from extinction, while still allowing people to harvest them.
During dam removal on the Elwha, the tribe built a new fish hatchery to boost coho, chum salmon and steelhead trout populations.
Tribal biologist Raymond Moses said they also kick started the coho recovery by transplanting adult fish into the tributaries of the Elwha, to help them expand more quickly into better habitat.
“Any excess fish that we had at the hatchery, we brought up to Little River in Indian Creek…brought them there when they were closer to spawning, so they'd stay,” he said noting that hatchery fish will mostly home right back into the hatchery where they came from.
Standing on a grassy riverbank, next to a state-of-the-art sonar camera that helps count the fish, Moses said their scheme worked.
Coho returns have increased steadily over the past four years.
The tribe also observes fish behavior, along with co-managers from the National Park Service and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. All the data they collected signaled it would be safe to conduct a very limited fishery this year.
“We see these coho are starting to spawn on their own up above,” Moses said. “And if they weren't spawning on their own, and still dropping back and you know, hanging out around here and not moving upstream, then this probably wouldn't have happened.”
Along with strategically moving fish, the tribe is well known for enhancing fish habitat by putting “engineered log jams” into rivers, mimicking what a wilder river might deposit on its own. They layer dozens of big logs and gravel in certain places along the shoreline, to slow flows and create deep pools and shade.
It turns out, we were actually standing on an engineered logjam during the interview. I only noticed once we peered out to the edge that it's a large platform, jutting out from a forested area and rising about 12 feet above the riverbed.
It’s covered with vegetation now, atop sediment the logs caught, so it’s hard to see. But there’s cool water flowing and good places for fish to hide and spawn beneath.
Restoration challenges
Despite all the successes, there has been pushback against tribal initiatives on the Elwha.
The tribe’s biologists proposed transplanting hatchery chinook salmon above the dam sites, to jumpstart their recovery, similar to what they did with coho. They even had funding for it, from the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission.
However, they would have needed to bring them in with helicopters, which the Park Service doesn’t allow. There was also concern about the genetics of the fish, which would have required expensive testing, to ensure only the strongest ones would be moved.
The tribe has let go of that plan for now because of a new blockage, from a rock fall about 16 miles upriver, at Rica Canyon.
The tribe’s Natural Resources Director Matt Beirne said it appears only the strongest steelhead can get past it. Chinook salmon and all the smaller species can’t. They’re cut off from most of the 70 miles of pristine habitat that dam removal had promised.
“So what we're hoping for is maybe a mobilizing flood in the next few years to, you know, work that material downstream, and reopen that to access for fish,” Beirne said.
“It's disappointing for a lot of us that had been involved in this. You know, we're not seeing the fish getting up, well up into the system that we had hoped to see.”
It’s not clear what the options are beyond waiting for nature to take its course, he said, but the tribe has patience. The dams did at least a hundred years of damage and it’s hardly been a decade since they came down.
Back at the fishing hole near the river mouth, tribal members celebrated every coho they caught during the limited October opening.
35-year-old Ryan Elofson said it’s been 18 years since he caught a fish on his home river, the way his mom taught him.
He reels the silvery salmon onto the riverbank and clubs it gently but decisively, then expresses his delight as he admires the fish he’s soon to take home to his family.
He says his kids will be stoked - they’ll join him here after school.
And he says it just feels good to finally be able to catch a fish at home, practically in their backyard.
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