Dam party? No so fast

“Do you want to go to a party?” my fancy friend asked.

Of course, I want to rock ‘n‘ roll all night and party every day.

That's a job description for a wilderness gossip columnist.

Then I found out it was the dam removal party put on by the National Park Service.

Bummer.

In the course of my work I have been kicked out of Olympic National Park so many times I have a permanent stain on my trousers.

It's a bum rap.

In my own defense I can only say that no Olympic marmots have ever been harmed, electro-shocked or molested in the writing of this column. I’ve never transported Canadian fishers equipped with radio collars across county lines just to mess with the biologists tracking them. 

I have never been charged or convicted of impersonating an endangered species. 

I am a sensitive woodland creature trying to share my love of nature and the knowledge gained from 50 years of fishing. That is a blink of an eye in the life of a river but in that short amount of time, our rivers have been subjected to an environmental genocide that makes it seem unlikely the fish will survive another 50 years.

The Elwha dam removal project may be the biggest thing to hit Port Angeles since the coming of the railroad. Those were the good old days, when Port Angeles had a salmon fishing industry and a yearly salmon derby.

These days the salmon fishing industry has been replaced by the salmon restoration industry.

The dam removal celebrations will bring together celebrities, politicians and the best scientists money can buy in an attempt to restore the most pristine ecosystem in the continental United States. This is a risky undertaking where to quote another great American, former Vice President Dan Quayle, “If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.”

We are told that taking the dams out of the Elwha is a grand experiment since no one really knows what is going to happen to the sediments behind the dams or if the fish can still make it up the river.

The lower Elwha dam had a blowout shortly after it was built in 1913. They blasted 40,000 cubic yards of rock into the channel to plug the hole. It's still there. 

In the early '70s there was a landslide that blocked the Elwha up in Convolution Canyon. This is also called the Grand Canyon of the Elwha, located upstream from Hume's Ranch. The slide blocked the river and formed a small lake that was fantastic fishing until it was washed out by a flood.  Unfortunately this slide occurred deep within the National Park so there were no loggers to blame and it can happen again at any time.

The Elwha dam removal project is an experiment, like one of those old black and white horror movies where the scientists are out to lunch while the monster they created slowly comes back to life. 

It is a double blind study that will measure the unintended consequences of the placebo effect. It will test a theory that contends taking the dams out of the Elwha will bring the salmon back when rivers without dams don't have salmon either. I hope so.

We sincerely hope that the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe can do what no others have accomplished on the Olympic Peninsula, restore an historic run of fish on just one of our rivers.

We hope that despite the best efforts of scientists and politicians, salmon will be able to return to the Elwha anyway.

Until that happens it's too soon to party.

Moratorium mumbo jumbo

It was another tough week in the news. 

Fisheries managers announced plans for a fishing moratorium on the Elwha River and all of its tributaries starting next fall. The proposal is part of the Elwha Dam removal project that is scheduled for completion in 2014. 

The Elwha dams removal is the largest such project in U.S. history. It is a grand experiment that will attempt to restore all five species of Pacific salmon along with steelhead, bull trout and sea run cutthroat by removing the dams and allowing the fish access to 70 miles of pristine spawning and rearing habitat within Olympic National Park. 

It has been estimated that the Elwha River once supported a historic population of 400,000 fish. It is thought that the Elwha now supports only 3000 salmon. 

The proposed fishing moratorium is an attempt to rebuild runs of fish that have been blocked from the upper Elwha and its tributaries for 100 years.

Of all the tributaries of the Elwha, Indian Creek could have been the most important small stream in the watershed. In prehistoric times there was a S'Klallam village located at the mouth of Indian Creek at its confluence with the Elwha. Indian Creek was noted for its runs of steelhead, a sea-run rainbow trout and blue backs. That is a popular name for the sockeye salmon. 

The sockeye have always been valued for their beauty and the quality of their blood-red flesh. Sockeye generally run up rivers that have a lake where the adults can spawn and the juveniles can spend the first year of their lives. As the sockeye run upstream to their spawning grounds their appearance changes from the blue backs and silver bellies of an ocean fish to a spawner with a red body, a green head and a hooked nose.  

John Sutherland, a Hudson's Bay trapper who was the first European to discover the lake he named for himself, observed red salmon spawning in November. We can assume these were sockeye. 

Once the Elwha dams were built the Indian Creek sockeye, steelhead and village disappeared. 

With the removal of the dams, it is hoped that the steelhead and sockeye will return to Lake Sutherland.  That's the motive for the proposed sport fishing moratorium in the lake. 

To observe the effects of a sport-fishing moratorium on salmon restoration we have only to look at the Elwha's nearest neighbor the Dungeness River to see what we are in for. 

Like the Elwha, the Dungeness is a river that once supported hundreds of thousands of the five species of salmon. 

Unlike the Elwha, the Dungeness has no dam to blame for making the fish threatened or endangered. 

Back in the '90s the Dungeness River was closed to sport fishing for most of the year as a conservation measure. Who could argue with that? We had the assurance that once the runs were rebuilt we could fish again. 

Ten years after, instead of rebuilding the runs of fish on Dungeness, the government has invested their millions buying waterfront real estate, while allowing a commercial gillnet fishery to continue at the mouth of the river.  Meanwhile, homes along the Dungeness River have been declared bull trout habitat. 

They are routinely purchased from willing sellers, razed and replaced with native vegetation without one fish to show for it.  

The sport-fishing moratorium on the Dungeness is a failed experiment.  Normally, conducting a failed experiment while expecting different results fits Einstein’s' definition of insanity. Here on the Olympic Peninsula we call it salmon restoration. 

Those who ignore history probably don't fish.