White Salmon River chinook travel above dam

WHITE SALMON — With a kick of the heel and a watery sploosh, a tank full of oceangoing salmon skidded down a chute and into the White Salmon River.

The curious sight was unusual in two respects.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's tanker truck is normally used to stock lakes with catchable trout, not as a bus service for 30-pound tule fall chinook ready to spawn.

And, more notably, it marked the first time oceangoing salmon have populated the White Salmon above Condit Dam in almost a century.

This year's trap-and-haul program is actually a test run for next year. When dam owner PacifiCorp punches a 15-foot-diameter hole through the dam's 85-foot-wide concrete base, engineers expect it will take six hours to drain the 92-acre Northwestern Lake. With the water will come 98 years' worth of sediment.

Restoring the free-flowing river will reap long-term benefits for salmon, but it will make life a living hell for fish in the short term.

Engineers estimate the lake contains 2.3 million cubic yards of sediment, which will surge into the White Salmon's lower three miles to its confluence with the Columbia.

With tule fall chinook spawning in the river in the late summer and early fall, scientists are aiming to net as many as possible before they spawn — and before they lay eggs doomed to be buried by mud.

As of Thursday, employees of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service had netted and transported 92 tule fall chinook above Condit Dam.

They're aiming for 500, with radio transmitters implanted on 40 of them to track their preferred spawning locations in the 2 ½ miles of fresh habitat between Northwestern Lake and Husum Falls. They're experimenting with gill nets, rounding them up with seines and even collecting a few that wander into a pair of man-made ponds previously used by the nearby Spring Creek National Fish Hatchery to gather wild brood stock for the hatchery.

Why trap fish a year early?

"It seemed like the best option," said Rod Engle, a federal fisheries biologist coordinating the study. "We needed to get out and get some information."

Even after the dam is breached, no one expects the White Salmon to become a massive producer of wild salmon.

Its banks are cut from ancient lava flows, leaving relatively little in the way of braided channels and wide floodplains that characterize iconic salmon streams such as the Cowlitz, Lewis or Yakima rivers.

Yet, the White Salmon retains significant cultural and scientific cachet.

The river forms a visible boundary between east and west, with oak trees rising on the drier east bank and fir trees predominant on the more densely brushed western slopes.

As such, it represents the upper geographic reach of lower Columbia salmon stocks and the lower end of mid-Columbia stocks.

"This is a traditional transition zone," Engle said.

Restoring the White Salmon significantly boosts the biological diversity of wild salmon populations ranging from the mouth of the Columbia all the way to the Walla Walla and Yakima rivers, said Rich Turner, a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service.