Adult winter-run Chinook salmon have been spotted in northern California’s McCloud River for the first time in nearly a century, according to the California department of fish and wildlife (CDFW).
The salmon were confirmed to be seen near Ash Camp, tucked deep in the mountains of northern California where Hawkins creek flows into the McCloud River. A video posted by CDFW and taken by the Pacific states marine fisheries commission shows a female Chinook salmon guarding her nest of eggs on the river floor.
Winter-run Chinook salmon is considered an endangered species by Noaa, and is marked by the organization as “one of just nine species considered to be most at risk of extinction in the near-term”.
The Winnemem Wintu Tribe has long fought the enlargement of the Shasta dam, which has hindered salmon hatching by warming water temperatures above the chilly range that salmon prefer to lay their eggs in.
The introduction of hatchery-raised, winter-run salmon “delays extinction”, according to Rebekah Olstad, salmon restoration project manager for the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, with understanding a longer road lies ahead, one that hinges on full restoration of self-sufficient wild salmon.
“The salmon that exist right now, they don’t know how to mountain climb, they don’t know how to go up waterfalls because they’re blocked,” Olstad said. “So it’s generations and generations of eggs and salmon who don’t have those genes anymore to be wild.”
Olstad is working to help the Winnemem Wintu achieve two further goals.
Constructing a volitional passage for the salmon, meaning allowing a way for the salmon to spawn and complete a full life cycle from ocean to stream, is crucial for eco-systemic restoration, given salmon’s status as a keystone species.
“Salmon are in the McLeod River, and that’s a good thing. But there’s no way it’s for them to get out back to the ocean,” Michael Preston, a Winnemem Wintu tribal member, said. “That’s the real salmon, right? They have to go to the ocean to come back.”
Wild salmon from the McCloud River were long thought by the Winnemem Wintu to be extinct. But international coverage of a Winnemem war dance protest against the Shasta dam in 2004 led to the discovery of McCloud River salmon in an unexpected place – the mountainous rivers of New Zealand.
Chinook salmon were exported around the world by the Baird hatchery in the early 1900swhere some from the McCloud River took hold in New Zealand. The Winnemem Wintu are working with Noaa and the CDFW to bring the fish, and their wild genetics, back to their homeland.
Salmon restoration is not unique to the Winnemem Wintu or their ancestral lands, but to the land across the western US and Canada that the fish historically swam. For the Winnemem Wintu, and other tribal nations, salmon are part of their cosmology.
“Salmon restoration is a part of a prophecy that we’re following. The prayer is that it connects us back into our creation stories,” Preston said.
Last year salmon began “coming home” to the Klamath River along the Oregon-California border after a hard-fought, decades-long legal battle spearheaded by the Karuk, Klamath, and Yurok tribal nations to remove four dams along the river. The project was the largest of its kind in US history.
Conversely, a historic agreement removing dams on the Columbia Riverpart of a step to restoring Indigenous fishing rights and revitalizing north-western fisheries, was reversed by a Trump executive order in June.
Regardless of the political climate, Olstad is determined to help the Winnema Wintu keep pushing for salmon restoration.
“Every single administration has been a difficult administration for Indigenous peoples,” Olstad said. “It doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop.”
