On August 28, 2024, an excavator broke through the final cofferdams of the Iron Gate Dam in Northern California. The direct result was the restoration of the Klamath River.
The waterway ran free from Lake Ewauna to the Pacific Ocean for the first time in more than a century.
What happened that day was the final chapter of a demolition project that had been mired in dispute for decades. Today, it stands as the largest river restoration project in United States history.
Four Dams, a Century of Damage
For decades, the Klamath River supported the third-largest salmon runs on the West Coast of North America.
That all changed in 1918, when construction began on the first of a series of hydroelectric dams that would block its flow for the next century.
Between 1918 and 1962, four dams were built — Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, J.C. Boyle, and Iron Gate — which blocked fish migration, degraded water quality, and threatened the cultural and economic survival of the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa, and Klamath tribes.
The dams lacked fish ladders or any passage mechanisms, leaving Chinook salmon cut off from hundreds of miles of spawning grounds they had used for millennia.
The damage finally reached a breaking point in September 2002. Historically low flows, high water temperatures, and an unusually large concentration of migrating fish created the perfect conditions for a gill disease outbreak. The disease killed more than 34,000 salmon before they could spawn.
It was the largest salmon die-off in the history of the American West. Some estimates suggest the actual toll surpassed 70,000 fish.
That episode was more than an ecological disaster. The die-off coincided with the expiration of the dams’ operating licenses, serving as the catalyst that galvanized tribal support for the dam removal campaign.
The Decades-Long Fight
The Klamath River and its 15,000-square-mile basin have been the ancestral territory of the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa Valley, and Klamath tribes since time immemorial.
Historically, an estimated 880,000 salmon traveled up the river each year to spawn. When the dams blocked that route, more than 90% of the fish at the heart of these communities’ nutrition, tradition, and spirituality vanished.
The indigenous-led campaign to remove the dams lasted more than 20 years. It involved litigation, protests, and negotiations with PacifiCorp, the private utility company that owned the infrastructure.
In 2004, a 30-member delegation from the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa, and Klamath tribes traveled to Edinburgh to pressure the company’s shareholders — then Scottish-owned — making their case before British media, politicians, and London bankers.
Then in 2016, after years of negotiations, scientific studies, and unprecedented collaboration among the tribes, federal agencies, the governments of California and Oregon, and PacifiCorp itself, the parties reached a historic agreement to decommission and demolish the four dams.
The removal process began in 2023 with Copco No. 2 and concluded in August 2024.
The Salmon Arrived Ahead of Schedule
The first signs of recovery came swiftly.
Just two weeks after the river channel was cleared at the Iron Gate Dam site, a monitoring team spotted a pair of salmon spawning in a tributary the species had been unable to reach for more than a century.
Within a year, a sonar counting station at the entrance of the newly opened habitat detected more than 9,600 fish passing through. An estimated 7,700 of them were Chinook salmon.
Barry McCovey Jr., director of the Yurok Tribe Fisheries Department, noted that the river’s pace of recovery surpassed even the most optimistic scientific models.
A year after the demolitions were completed, scientists observed bald eagles soaring over the river and documented a significant increase in bear, beaver, otter, and osprey activity throughout the watershed.
The ecosystem began recovering at a pace that researchers themselves described as unexpected.
The Largest Restoration in History Is More Than Ecological
The project opened more than 370 miles of habitat for migratory fish and is recognized as the largest dam removal and river restoration project ever attempted in the United States.
The scale of the undertaking also required managing thousands of acres of land that had been submerged under reservoirs for decades — land that was suddenly exposed to erosion and invasive species.
For the tribes, however, the most meaningful aspect of the project goes beyond ecology. For millennia, the fishing practices, ceremonies, and communal life of these communities revolved around the salmon’s annual migration.
As for them, restoring that cycle means reclaiming far more than just a river.
With the return of the salmon, fish populations are expected to double in the coming years, directly benefiting the coastal fishing industry and the local communities that rely on it.
It took more than a century for the Klamath River to regain its natural flow. Scientists caution that a full ecosystem recovery could take several more decades.
But its waters are running free once more — and the fish already know it.
