Spotlight on Karuk Tribe: Habitat Restoration on the Klamath River

The removal of four dams from the Klamath River has opened hundreds of miles of habitat for fish in California and Oregon. Already, salmon and steelhead have found their way above the former dam sites.

For the Karuk Tribe, the removal of the barriers is a momentous step toward the healing of the Klamath River ecosystem, says Leaf Hillman, a Karuk tribal elder who started the Karuk Tribe Fisheries Program in the 1990s. “Now that we’ve taken off some of the shackles that have been placed on it, we can begin to manage for abundance once again,” he says.

Long before dam removal became a reality, tribal technicians and biologists have been restoring fish habitat on the main stem of the Klamath, major tributaries like the Scott and Shasta Rivers and dozens of smaller creeks, some of which start high above the Klamath River canyon.

Helping rivers behave a little more like rivers

Left to their own devices, rivers and creeks are naturally unruly. They change course. They overspill their banks. Trees fall across them. Beavers build dams in them. All of this helps create a kaleidoscope of places where fish can feed, rest, grow and produce young.

Streams that have been straightened and “cleaned” of fallen trees and branches may behave more predictably, but they’re not as welcoming for fish, says Toz Soto, fisheries program manager for Karuk Tribe. “Fish like messy places,” he adds.

Healing the scars of gold mining

The Tribe always partners with other organizations, frequently the Mid Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC), on restoration. Ongoing work at Red Cap Creek, a tributary that joins the Klamath River just southwest of the town of Orleans, shows how restoration can help heal the scars of past gold mining and create good habitat for both young salmon and adults that return there to spawn.

Schnable Diggings was the site of a large hydraulic mining operation in the 1900s. The activity left “little to no soil across most of the valley, lots of disconnected floodplains [and] old levees keeping the creek in a mostly single thread channel,” says James Peterson, Fisheries Monitoring Program coordinator at MKWC.

One aim of the project is to connect the creek with “side channels” alongside the main creek. These are often ideal places for salmon to spawn. The partners have also built 15 “log jams” along one half-mile reach. These are collections of logs placed at angles to the stream channel, where they help catch debris and gravel and create little pockets of cool, deep water where fish can rest.

Ponds provide shelter and food for fish

Another important feature is the two ponds they’ve constructed adjacent to the main creek channel, largely for the benefit of young coho salmon.

Soto says these fish prefer “life in the slow lane,” seeking out quiet pools away from rushing water and predators. The Karuk Tribe and MKWC began building “off-channel ponds” in 2010, starting with a simple oxbow shape adjacent to Seiad Creek. The pond filled with groundwater and immediately loaded up with young coho.

Since 2010, the Karuk Tribe and MKWC have built around 30 of these ponds alongside several creeks in the Mid Klamath. Soto likens the ponds to “fish greenhouses”: they stay cooler in the summer and warmer in winter and provide an abundance of delicious bugs.

The ponds at Red Cap Creek will be especially critical in hot summer months, when young coho dart up tributaries to escape the often scorching temperatures in the Mid Klamath River. The partners placed some of the gravel they excavated while digging the ponds into the creek itself, where spawning salmon can use it to build their gravel nests, called redds. All these places give fish more options, says Soto: “Diversity is the name of the game.”

One project, one stream at a time, the Karuk Tribe is part of the enormous collaboration that is helping restore the Klamath watershed to its former abundance.