For salmon, an ancient journey turned deadly
Lily Roby
PORTLAND, Ore. (CN) — Picture the journey of a typical Chinook salmon up the Columbia River. As she reaches the end of her migration, she’s traveled around 500 miles, climbed over 2,000 feet and crossed four hydroelectric dams in a monthlong journey.
She traveled the other direction as a hungry juvenile smolt, the current carrying her tail-first toward the Pacific Ocean to feed on crustaceans and smaller fish. Five years and a whopping three feet and 50 pounds later, the Chinook is ready to complete her life cycle by returning up the Columbia to lay eggs and die where she was born.
The journey is mostly a success — then suddenly, there’s an obstacle. A heaping pile of debris blocks her natal stream, preventing her from entering the mouth of the creek.
Determined to reach her breeding grounds, she leaps and leaps again, to no avail. Resigned, she instead lays her eggs in the riverbed outside the creek, where they will most likely be eaten. She dies an undignified death there, one among thousands of native fish each year who never make it back home due to human-made barriers. It’s a mission failure, both for her and likely for her roe.
In Oregon, salmon are so prized that migration protections predate even statehood. When Oregon Territory was established in 1848, its constitution declared that waterways used by salmon may not be obstructed “unless fish passage is provided.”
Still, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife began seriously cracking down on obstructions to fish migration. Enter the state’s Fish Passage and Fish Screening task forces. The groups — supported with federal funding and made up of commercial fishers, conservationists and members of the general public — aim to protect native fish like salmon and their age-old migratory routes.
“Fish Passage is about getting migratory fish to the habitat they need to go to,” explained Statewide Fish Passage Coordinator Mac Barr, while “Fish Screening is [about] keeping fish out of habitats in places we don’t want them to go, like an irrigation canal or pump water diversion.”
It’s a steep task. As of December 2024, Fish Passage’s map of migration barriers listed more than 40,000 obstructions, all of them inhibiting the migration of fish like salmon, steelhead and sturgeon.
From debris and dams to tide gates, anything that delays or precludes native fish movement is eligible for the list. Among the most common are culverts: The pipes can be too small for fish to travel through safely, and the height between them and the water level can be too large for fish to jump.
Barr, who has worked for the ODFW since 2010, helps Fish Passage implement barrier solutions, including resizing culverts to make them fish-friendly. Another common solution is fish ladders: pools of water that steadily increase in height, allowing fish to jump up them incrementally in order to clear barriers like dams.
Of Oregon’s 40,000-plus barriers, how do the task forces decide which to address first? Answers lie in Oregon’s Statewide Fish Passage Barrier Priority List, updated every five years, which details the 600 most ecologically impactful barriers in Oregon.
After recommendations are made, watershed councils and other nonprofits often help the task forces secure additional funds to remove them. In 2022, for example, groups like the Oregon Water Partnership and Trout Unlimited secured $8 million to address 96 barriers and reconnect more than 500 miles of habitat.
At a December meeting, Katherine Nordholm, Fish Screening and Passage coordinator, outlined the task forces’ accomplishments since the last Barrier Priority List was published five years ago. Since 2019, she said, officials had removed 146 barriers and repaired, replaced, retrofitted or bypassed 87 others. But the priority list is always growing, with 167 more barriers recently added for future consideration. Heading into the 2025 season, the task forces hope to continue spreading awareness about the issue of fish barriers — a niche and not widely known issue even in the salmon-loving Pacific Northwest.
In an interview, Barr emphasized that reconnecting migratory routes doesn’t just help fish; it has a ripple effect which can positively impact other creatures that frequent Pacific Northwest waterways like amphibians, small mammals and more.
“Habitat loss has been identified as one of the primary drivers towards population decline of native migratory fish,” he said. Conservationists like him can’t bear imagining fish leaping in vain, unable to complete their lifecycles — and yet culturally significant species like the Chinook salmon must now depend on these organizations to keep those routes open. Until all waterways are safe for migratory fish, the task force intends to continue taking down barriers and restoring ecosystems.