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Populations of salmon re-establish spawning habitat in a tributary in Southern Oregon in October 2025. To get here, the salmon had to swim past Keno and Link River dams and through Upper Klamath Lake, which was made possible after four hydroelectric dams were removed downstream on the Klamath River last year.<\/p>\n
Paul Robert Wolf Wilson<\/p>\n
For the first time in more than 100 years, Chinook salmon have been spotted at the confluence of the Sprague and Williamson rivers in Chiloquin, the government seat of the Klamath Tribes in Southern Oregon. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s the latest milestone following the removal of four dams on the Klamath River last year<\/a>, which was the largest river restoration project in U.S. history. <\/p>\n \u201cA hundred and fifteen years that they haven\u2019t been here, and they still have that GPS unit inside of them,\u201d said the visibly giddy Klamath Tribal Chair William Ray, Jr. \u201cIt\u2019s truly an awesome feat if you think about the gauntlet they had to go through.\u201d <\/p>\n Ray said salmon traditionally comprised about a third of the diet of the Indigenous people in the Upper Klamath Basin. That food source vanished with the building of Copco 1 Dam in northern California in 1918. <\/p>\n Related: Klamath River ecosystem is booming one year after dam removal<\/a><\/p>\n Scientists have been tracking the migration of this year\u2019s run of fall Chinook as they\u2019ve passed all of the old dam sites on the river. <\/p>\n Last week they reached a huge milestone: A Chinook was photographed entering Upper Klamath Lake<\/a>. But it was unclear how that fish and the others waiting to scale the fish ladder would fare in the lake, which has been plagued by water quality issues, including toxic cyanobacteria blooms<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThis past summer the water in the lake was so toxic that you could not drink it or swim in it,\u201d said Ray. <\/p>\n Ray says the Klamath Tribes fisheries staff started tracing the tag on one of the Chinook as it passed through the Link River Dam fish ladder in Klamath Falls on Oct. 8. Just a couple days later, the fish was detected passing into the Williamson River, having swum approximately 15 miles through the lake. <\/p>\n A guide to salmon returning to the Upper Klamath Basin created by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in October 2025.<\/p>\n Courtesy of Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/MNEJZZ4UR5BR3A5K56DQI4C27Q.png\")
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