After over a century, salmon have returned to the upper Klamath River, waters that hadn’t seen their shimmer since the early 1900s. The nation’s largest dam removal project has reawakened the river, freeing it from four massive barriers that once halted its flow and silenced the salmon runs that sustained Indigenous tribes for millennia. The Klamath, Shasta, Karuk, Yurok, and Hoopa Valley peoples see this as both a victory and a responsibility, a rebirth tempered by the question: what are the fi

The Klamath River Reborn: Salmon Return to Ancestral Waters for the First Time in Over a Century For the first time in more than 100 years, wild salmon are spawning freely in the upper reaches of the Klamath River—past the sites of every hydroelectric dam that once blocked their path. This remarkable event marks not only the rebirth of a river but the dawn of a new era in how we restore and protect our most vital ecosystems. Flowing from the high country of southern Oregon through northern Calif