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All
of this flat, southern Oregon farmland was inundated by Lower Klamath Lake 100 years
ago.
Broken
Chain
A
hundred years of bad ideas, greed and racism trash a sensitive ecosystem and its
people.
Story
and Photos by Orna Izakson
Morning at the headwaters of the Wood River: A shallow
pool glows perfect aquamarine. Whispers of fog lift into the trees. The boggy land
is wet enough to feel spongy even through shoes. Frost lingers on the grasses and
sedges below the pines and yellowing aspens.
The Wood River is the northern tributary of Agency Lake, which
feeds Upper Klamath Lake and the Klamath River -- the third richest salmon river
in Western North America. The crystalline water that starts here, among the springs
under Crater Lake and the eastern hills, in a few miles becomes the most polluted
in Oregon.
For thousands of years, the complex ecological system that linked
the ponderosas to the redwoods and the desert to the Pacific Ocean was filled with
abundant salmon and suckers, a winter haven to eagles and migratory birds.
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Ron
Larson of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service examines wocus, a Native American
staple, in the Upper Klamath Lake.
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In the past 100 years the U.S. government and the settlers it encouraged
rewired the system. They drained the lakes for farmland, eroded the uplands through
logging and grazing, dammed the river and drew its water for irrigation.
Two salmon species are now extinct. Bald eagles and coho salmon
are threatened; Lost River and shortnose suckers are endangered. The perfect aquamarine
water upstream kills fish just a few miles downstream. In many years, including this
one, the river doesn't punch through the gravel bar across its mouth until fall.
The issue came to a head in the summer of 2001, during one of the
worst droughts on record. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) specifically
articulated the water needs for fish and eagles. The basin's Indian tribes -- including
the Klamath upstream and the Yuroks downstream -- sued for water to protect their
court-supported fishing rights.
The summer's news was filled with the demonstrations of farmers
who, after nearly 100 years, found their federally subsidized water cut. But the
stories of eagles, native fish and native people went largely untold. This is the
story of 9,691 acres of Indian Country that went from abundance to scarcity in a
century.
People of the C'wam and Qapdo
There was a time, people of the Klamath Tribes say, when
you could walk across the Sprague River on the backs of the c'wam ("ch'wam")
and qapdo ("kop-doo") -- Lost River and shortnose suckers -- as they migrated
upstream from Upper Klamath and Agency lakes to spawn.
"I lived during those times," says Elwood Miller, now
head of natural resources for the tribes.
The Klamath tribes were and are a people of land and river, marsh
and forest. And now the resources on which they depended are all but gone.
As a boy, Miller and his friends used to play with the fish that
lined up below the dams. The c'wam and qapdo came in waves, but sometimes the runs
jammed up to create the effect of a scaly, solid surface just beneath the water.
At one time, he says, the tribes of the upper Klamath basin caught as much as 50,000
tons of fish.
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This
irrigation-dependent Tule Lake farm was under water for up to a million years before
federal efforts rerouted and evaporated the water.
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Miller also remembers a story his father told him about the c'wam
and qapdo: When you watch them swimming in the water, he said, they move their bodies,
shifting things around the river bottom and sucking at the rocks.
"What they're doing," the elder Miller told his son,
"is they're cleansing the river. They're cleansing the rocks." The rocks
clean the river, Miller's father told him. And the fish clean the rocks.
The Klamath Tribes are a U.S.-forced confederation of three peoples
who traditionally fought over 20 million acres around the rich Klamath lakes until
an 1864 treaty whittled their lands down to a reservaton of two million acres.
The area's abundance allowed the combined tribes to do such a good
job of sustaining themselves that Congress in the 1950s declared them ready to be
assimilated into the mainstream, white culture. As part of that "termination,"
the government took away the land that had provided that self sufficiency. The land
was taken for national forest or sold piece by piece to private individuals. Today,
the poverty rate among tribal members is three times that of surrounding Klamath
County, the poorest in Oregon.
The Klamath Tribes were recognized again in 1986, and they have
petitioned the U.S. government to get back 690,000 acres of their original reservation,
most of it in the Winema and Fremont national forests. That acreage would be enough
to sustain them-- if, Miller says, they managed it right.
Since the tribe was "terminated" and the land put into
private ownership, the land has gone to grazing, the hills have gone to logging,
most of the marsh has gone to farmland and the fishing has gone to hell.
Dams built early in the last century cut off the coho and chinook
salmon that came up from the ocean to spawn. And the c'wam and qapdo are in such
dire straits that in 1988 the tribes successfully petitioned the USFWS to list them
as endangered species.
Upper Klamath Lake's tributaries -- the Sprague, the Sycan, the
Williamson -- are all but dead, Miller says, and the lake itself is dying.
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Life
Blood
Either fishing bites you or it doesn't, says David Bitts, a commercial
troller out of Eureka, Calif. And salmon fishing bit him.
When he moved from what is now Silicon Valley to the northern California
coast in 1975, fishing was good. At the salmon fishery's peak in 1980, about 8,000
boats had permits to catch the coho and chinook that spawned primarily in the Klamath
and Sacramento rivers. Today, fewer than 2,000 boats have those permits.
The Klamath salmon that provided the backbone of the fishing economy
from Fort Bragg, Calif., to Florence have crashed. Chinook are at about 8 percent
of historic numbers. Coho, once the workhorse of the area's fisheries, are down to
1 percent of historic numbers. Chum and pink salmon are extinct. According to the
Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, the loss of those fish cut
$4.5 billion from the nation's economy.
Bitts says there was no compensation for the fishermen as the season
got smaller. "We were just allowed to quit or go broke." More years than
not in the last decade, he adds, fishermen saw their allocation cut by as much as
half.
There are many reasons for the decline, but restoration at this
point depends on water.
First, there's not enough of it. Major tributaries are drawn off
for agriculture; the Scott River didn't flow into the Klamath at all this year until
irrigation season ended on Oct. 1. Even then, the Scott was just a glittering trickle
in the fall sun.
Second, the water is so hot or toxic that it often kills the fish
it's supposed to sustain. In two of the last five years, fishermen saw major fish
kills in the Klamath because of water quality, even though those were relatively
wet years.
Forty percent of the Klamath River water that reaches the ocean
comes from the upper reaches of the basin, where vast desert lakes were converted
to irrigated farmland. The water that makes its way down the river comes from fish-killing
lakes or hot off the upper-basin farms, through an impassable, 84-year-old dam.
"To me the upper basin is just a way to fuck up the water
that comes out of Iron Gate Dam," Bitts says. "And they do a pretty good
job of it, too."
He won't attack the farmers on economic grounds, however. "We're
as tiny a fraction of the coastal economy as the farmers are of the (upper) basin
economy," he says.
But the fishermen feel they've paid, and that it's time now for
the farmers to do their share.
Every one Klamath fish Bitts protects means 50 other fish he can't
catch. "So we do it -- and for what? So more juveniles can die from lethal conditions
and we can do it all over again? That's not good business."
Bitts supported the 1997 listing of coho salmon as threatened under
the Endangered Species Act with the idea that it would help bring the fish back.
Did it?
"Ha!" he says.
"Well," he adds, "it did get water for fish in the
Klamath River this year at some political cost -- This is one of the first tangible
benefits for fish that I can recall resulting from the coho listing."
But without help, the fishing industry will die. And without people
like Bitts who have "the direct, life-blood interest" in keeping salmon
around, so too will the wild fish.
"If we go away," he says, "I just don't see wild
runs of fish surviving progress for a long time." -- OI
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"All of our rivers jump right out of the ground here," he
says. "They don't come by nowhere else, they start here." It bothers him
to see these waters "go such a short distance and be ruined."
Sitting in his truck at a boat launch on the east side of Agency
Lake, it's easy to see the landscape as beautiful, an endless freshwater bay dotted
with ponderosa-topped islands with a backdrop of apparently unbroken Cascades forest.
Go look at the water, Miller says.
From the dock, the lake water is thick with unbroken clouds of
green algae -- living -- swirling under clouds of brown algae -- dead.
Pea soup is the usual analogy.
The tribal harvest has dwindled from 50,000 tons per year to one
or two individual fish, and it's the biologists charged with protecting the fish
who catch them for tribal ceremonies and abundance prayers.
"A lot of our elder women ask us daily when they're going
to be able to take the fish again," Miller says. In the fish ceremonies, "we
have the elders pray for them."
As much water as land
Twelve thousand years ago, all of this area was under water.
Lake Modoc inundated what are now the low hills for 1,000 miles, one of the giant
lakes that covered much of the interior West during the last millennia of Ice Age.
The climate changed, the air warmed and the land dried. Great Salt
Lake in Utah, Mono Lake in California, and Goose and Abert lakes in Oregon all are
salty remnants of those glacial lakes.
Those waters turned to brine because the water escaped only through
evaporation, leaving salt behind.
Lake Modoc's remnants -- including Upper and Lower Klamath lakes,
Agency Lake, Tule Lake, Clear Lake -- stayed sweet because the Klamath River drew
off the water. Shallow and full of nutrients, the lakes fed uncounted numbers of
fish and became a lush stopping ground for birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway
(see accompanying story).
The suckers and redband trout of Lake Modoc evolved enough to survive
in its successor lakes, becoming "some of the last living relatives of fish
that lived throughout the West millions of years ago," explains Ron Larson of
the USFWS Ecosystem Restoration Office in Klamath Falls.
The lakes became the locus of one of the first human settlements
in the interior.
Thousands of years later, the area also drew the attention of white
settlers. Armed with the dream of the yeoman farmer spreading across the continent
and feeding the hungry nation, they looked at the abundant desert lakes and wooded
hills, and decided there was good farmland under the lakes if only they could drain
off some of the desert's excess water. On a 1905 federal map, words across the blue
circles of Lower Klamath and Tule lakes read: "To be reclaimed."
And "reclaim" it the government did. The shallow marshes
along the edge of Upper Klamath Lake were diked and ditched and drained. The nascent
Bureau of Reclamation began a complicated process of moving water around.
Too much water flowed into Tule Lake from the Lost River, so Reclamation
dammed its source at Clear Lake to hold more of it for evaporation. They blasted
a hole in the natural granite dam where Upper Klamath Lake spills into the Klamath
River to lower the water level. They set up complex irrigation networks to return
water to the farms that once were covered with it.
Too salty for farming, Lower Klamath Lake became a wildlife refuge,
managed in rotating thirds between grain farming, wetlands that have water in the
winter and wetlands that have water year-round. Two dots of water on the drained
surface of what was once Tule Lake are sumps, storing agricultural runoff.
Between 1900 and 1990, engineers and farmers eliminated 79 percent
of the wetlands and marsh in the basin -- dropping the total from 350,000 acres to
less than 75,000.
Unintended consequences
Among the unintended consequences of human engineering
was that the system Miller's father described of the rocks and suckers cleaning the
lake stopped functioning. Grazing and logging along the rivers that feed the lakes
and agriculture all around began adding nutrients to a system that had been in an
evolving balance for millennia.
Before that time, winter winds would stir up nutrients that were
consumed in turn by a succession of algae. Eventually those nutrients got used up,
and the lake would clear until winter winds started the cycle again.
Aphanizomenon flos-aquae, a blue-green alga that produces
its own nitrogen, first attracted biologists' interest in the 1940s. (The Klamath
Lake blue-green algae sold in health food stores is a different species.) Core samples
of the lake show no evidence of the algae before the basin's systems were disrupted,
although Larson says it was probably present in small amounts, awaiting its chance.
What held it back, researchers suspect, were insufficient phosphorus
and the tannins released by decaying marsh vegetation.
With the marshes substantially reduced and the phosphorous coming
into the lake from sediments eroded upstream, Aphanizomenon erupted. The tiny
individual algae cluster into what look like blades of mown grass. Those clusters
multiply to fill the top 3 to 4 feet of the lake's surface, swirling in clouds that
eventually darken the water enough to kill the algae growing below. It stinks as
it dies, and sucks oxygen out of the lake -- the same oxygen needed by resident fish.
Redband trout as ancient as the suckers escape to the tributary
streams when the lake gets too gunky. But suckers evolved by hiding from predators,
and don't go to the rivers until it's time to spawn. They prefer to hide in the deepest
water they can manage, never venturing into lake water less than three feet deep
and substantially preferring water six feet or deeper. To remain in the depths they'll
even swim, suffocating slowly, beneath the rotting mats of Aphanizomenon.
Pelican Bay, on the east side of Upper Klamath Lake, is an exception
to the rule of poor summer water quality. Throughout the year, springs of unknown
sources feed the inlet and its protected marshes of tule and wocus -- a yellow water
lily whose seeds were also a staple of the Klamath tribes. The water in Pelican Bay
is clear.
The bay is too clear -- and, often, too shallow -- for suckers
to swim into it as an escape from the rest of the lake. But the largest summer concentrations
of suckers congregate just on the edge of the clear water, catching whiffs of it.
The issue this summer for Lost River and shortnose suckers was
keeping the water level high enough that those whiffing fish on the edge of the bay
could stay deep enough and close enough to the only clear, oxygenated water they
could find.
In the 2001 drought, there wasn't enough water for both farms and
fish. So the Endangered Species Act drew the line -- in this case, a lake-level line
-- and for the first time told the farmers they couldn't have their water in the
desert that once was considered wastefully flooded.
Crossing the Rainshadow
Between the desert and the ocean, the Klamath River flows
from dry farmland to ponderosa mountains, through a volcanic valley and through the
knot of the Klamath-Siskiyou mountains to the ocean.
Just over the border in California, before leaving the Cascades,
Iron Gate Dam severs the river. It was built in 1917, and California law didn't require
fish passage -- even though upstream Oregon did.
Even this, the wildest land along the Klamath River in the mountains
before the sea, doesn't rejuvenate the water as it once did. Two of the major tributaries
-- the Scott River and the Trinity -- have long been diverted for agriculture and
hydropower. Fishermen say the Scott dried up completely during the irrigation season
this year, and none of its water reached the Klamath.
When Bruce Babbitt, interior secretary in the Clinton Administration,
tried to halt diversion of the Trinity to help the Klamath fish and honor the water
rights of downriver tribes, opponents successfully sued and overrode the decision.
The landscape grows more lush the deeper west you venture. Ridge
line after ridge line knifes into the river. Below Somes Bar, at the confluence of
the Salmon River, the valley begins widening in earnest. The air is smoky from nearby
wildfires. The ponderosas have given way to Douglas fir. It's the beginning of the
west side, the wet side of the rainshadow, past the crest and heading, like the river,
to the sea.
Oregas and Rli Rq
At the mouth of the Klamath River, two rocks stand on the
wide, redwood-flanked shores. The Yurok tribe say Oregas and Rli Rq are two women,
sometimes sisters, sometimes twins.
Every year, the river punches through a different spot in the sand
spit stretching a mile and a half between Oregas on the north side and Rli Rq on
the south. The Yuroks say the sand spit is the sisters' legs: When the river comes
out to the south, Oregas has her legs extended. When the river comes out to the north
it's Rli Rq who gets to stretch.
When the river didn't break through the sand bar, the people knew
someone had done something wrong. They would perform rituals and prayers asking the
sisters to move their legs and let the salmon in and the tribal canoes out.
This year, freshwater didn't set its course -- straight down the
middle -- until the end of September. Ocean currents affect that opening, but mostly
the Klamath River didn't cut through the spit sooner because of the drought.
"For the Yurok Tribe, this is it," says Troy Fletcher,
the tribe's executive director. "The Klamath River is our big issue. The mouth
of the Klamath River is impacted by everything that happens in the basin."
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Arnie
Nova of the Yurok Tribe nets a hatchery coho in the incoming tide.
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The gravel bar at the river's mouth teems with wildlife. There are
the usual sea lions and cormorants, but also brown pelicans, a species so endangered
it may always need human intervention to survive. Despite this abundance, the Klamath
River's mouth has no official designation -- unlike the upper-basin refuges that
hogged this summer's media limelight.
On weekends the spit is filled with fishing families. Like Elwood
Miller upriver, Fletcher says that fishing is important to the social makeup of the
tribe, one of the poorest in the country. Eighty percent of people living on the
reservation have no phones or electricity because no one ever thought it worthwhile
to deliver those services there. Drug and alcohol abuse rates are high. Fishing,
Fletcher explains, "helps keep a consistent theme alive in the culture."
It also can help put food on the table, although there aren't enough fish anymore
to keep the people fed.
The Yuroks have had to fight for their right to salmon. In 1933,
California shut them out of the salmon fishery. When a tribal gillnetter was caught
fishing in the river in the 1960s, the tribe took the issue all the way to the Supreme
Court and, in 1993, won.
"But," Fletcher says, "we realized all along that
the right to fish is meaningless unless there's fish."
Forty percent of the water at the mouth of the river comes from
the upper basin, much of it the polluted runoff from farms or the algae-ridden stuff
that kills the suckers upstream. Yurok biologist Monica Hiner said water temperatures
in the estuary averaged a fish-killing 79 degrees this August; on Oct. 9, the 61-degree
temperatures was 9 degrees below lethal.
There won't be fish without more water, in better shape, at the
right time of year. The tribe supported listing coho as threatened under the federal
Endangered Species Act, because of the law's ability to force changes in recalcitrant
and deleterious practices. "Water management in the basin needs to change if
we're ever going to see the species recover," Fletcher says.
Federal courts have affirmed the tribe's water rights, quantified
as "the amount necessary to protect and restore our fisheries resources,"
Fletcher explains. "That's why we have so many scientists working on flow-study
issues to identify how much water fish need at different times of the year."
The tribes have water rights only because their treaties give them
the right to fish; as with fishing rights, water rights mean nothing, Fletcher says,
if there are no fish left in the water.
"All this is so important," he says. "That's why
we're fighting, to continue to fish, (and to continue) the life Yurok people have
been living since the beginning of time."
Rli
Rq, one of two sister rocks, watches the south shore of the Klamath River as it meets
the Pacific Ocean in northern California.
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Triage
& Eagles
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Phil
Norton, manager of the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge, walks through the
parched mud of what once was Lower Klamath Lake.
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To Western migratory birds, the highways of the air run in wide fans
at the north and south ends. But midway along the route, all the roads converge at
the lushest rest stop of all: the upper Klamath basin.
In the 1950s, during the peak months of late fall and early winter,
up to 6 million birds might stop at the marshes and lakes in what are now a system
of national wildlife refuges. That's the equivalent of 5 birds per second, 24 hours
a day for 14 days.
It's not like that now.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, at that rate all
the birds that now fly through the bottleneck along the Pacific Flyway could pass
in 60 hours.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of the seed-rich marshlands that
drew the flyway lines together were drained and converted to agriculture early in
the last century. Without the cleansing wetlands, the desert lakes that weren't converted
sometimes become toxic to their once-abundant fish. With so much food gone from the
rest stop, there's less fuel to further the birds' migrations.
The national symbol, the bald eagle, is among the historic beneficiaries
of this bottleneck. Every winter, up to 900 congregate in the upper Klamath basin
to feed on the migrants -- the largest overwintering bald eagle population in the
lower 48 states.
One of the first birds protected as an endangered species in the
United States, the bald eagle for several years has been touted as an example of
how the Endangered Species Act does work to bring wildlife back from the edge of
extinction. If delisting bald eagles was important for Democrats to show that the
embattled ESA works, it is no less important for the Bush administration to prove
that species are recovering on its watch.
Bald eagles were the one potential casualty of the Klamath basin's
water wars that didn't make the news this summer. But while the farmers who lost
their irrigation this summer screamed for federal intervention to protect people
before salmon and suckerfish, the bald eagle issue may have prevented a full executive
branch assault against endangered species. What president or Interior secretary would
write off the nation's symbol in front of so many cameras?
Lower Klamath and Tule lakes are the heart of the refuge system.
And they are now as managed as the most intricately orchestrated rivers in the world.
The refuge land within what was once Lower Klamath Lake is divided into three parts,
each area switching every few years from being wet year-round, being wet during the
rainy season and being leased for grain farming. The leases require 25 percent of
most years' grain to be left for the birds.
Although the surface of Lower Klamath Lake once was evenly divided
between tule marsh and open water, there is little sign of open water now.
Phil Norton, the pipe-smoking, cowboy-booted, Texas dry-land farm
boy in charge of the Klamath refuges for Fish and Wildlife Service, says he learned
in January that there wouldn't be enough water to meet the needs of all four of the
protected species in the basin. And, after years of sharing top priority for upper-basin
water with the irrigators, a 1995 solicitor general's opinion put the refuge's needs
dead last.
But, as threatened species, the eagles remained a priority. With
no water for the refuges, the eagle would have slipped away from health and back
toward extinction.
So Norton and his staff began thinking triage. To keep 900 eagles
around, the refuge would need to retain 125,000 ducks through March, which meant
they'd need to have enough land wet through the summer to attract 500,000 ducks in
the fall. From that, they were able to determine the bare minimum of land that needed
water throughout the year.
When water stopped flowing to the refuge, Norton says he "cannibalized"
water for the eagles' prey from less critical areas of the refuge.
In the end, through purchases and cannibalization and politics,
the refuges got just barely enough.
In October, the ducks were beginning to swarm. -- OI
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