By Scott Dailey
Lead photo: Sockeye salmon in the Yakima watershed were nearly extirpated by the 1990s, but thanks to better water management and improved fish passage, these iconic fish are slowly making a comeback. T. QUINN PHOTO
Scott Revell says people in Washington’s Yakima Basin don’t measure time in years; they measure it in droughts. Revell, manager of the Roza Irrigation District in the central part of the state, pulls out statistics dating to 1941 that illustrate the up-and-down water supplies in the rich farming region, which is also home to the Yakima River, once considered one of Washington’s most productive destinations for salmon and steelhead.
The 214-mile river—still an excellent trout river—originates at Keechelus Lake in central Washington, flowing down the eastern slope of the Cascades and then through foothills and rolling farmland to the Columbia River near the Oregon border. During the 1980s and 1990s, recurring droughts contributed to a steady decline in the numbers of returning salmon and steelhead, as well as native bull trout, in the Yakima, to the dismay of anglers, fly shop operators, fishing guides, and especially the Yakama Indian Nation, whose 1.2-million-acre reservation includes some 50 miles of the river.
The Yakamas depend on salmon both economically and culturally; in the ’90s, things got so bad that they had to turn to store-bought frozen salmon for their annual spring fish-return celebration. As longtime tribal fish biologist Mark Johnston wryly observes, “It kind of defeated the purpose.”
Dams also played a broad role in devastating salmon populations. Construction in the early 1900s of Cle Elum Dam on the Cle Elum River, near the Yakima’s headwaters, blocked sockeye salmon from their spawning grounds and reportedly wiped them out in one generation. The damming of the Yakima River began even earlier, in 1892, creating five major irrigation reservoirs and many smaller impoundments.
Between the dams and the droughts, the Yakima’s salmon and steelhead suffered mightily, as they did elsewhere in Washington. In 1999, the U.S. government listed nine of the state’s salmon and steelhead populations as newly endangered or threatened. “We were near rock bottom,” says Alex Conley, executive director of the quasi-governmental Yakima Basin Fish and Wildlife Recovery Board. “We might be getting 500 steelhead back to the Yakima. We had a few years when we were getting about that much in spring chinook. There were no coho and there were no summer chinooks [a local run]
Today, that’s gradually changing, thanks to the work of the board, which includes representatives from 22 local cities and counties as well as the Yakama Nation. Founded in 2006 as an alternative to four-plus decades of legal wrangling over water rights on the river, the organization works extensively with entities such as irrigation districts, the state and federal governments, and environmental groups. Its ambitious 30-year goal is to create, through consensus, the infrastructure and the policies that will build storage capacity and distribute clean, cold water fairly to the farmers and the fish. The hope is that all the parties can do more together than by working individually or fighting in court. By uniting around a conference table, the organization can also speak with one persuasive voice when seeking funds and advocating policies at the state and federal levels.
The group’s main objectives are to store more water and upgrade operations to help during drought years. A particular aim is to reduce water waste caused by seepage and evaporation from the river system’s century-old irrigation canals and to replace many of them with water-saving pipelines. Highlights include constructing two new reservoirs and increasing capacity at another, as well as adding fish passages at six dams.
Perhaps the most impressive of 33 initial projects was completed last July; in essence, it’s an ingenious, eight-story circling waterslide that this spring should start carrying juvenile steelhead, bull trout, and salmon, including reintroduced sockeye, from their historical hatching areas above Cle Elum Dam and depositing them into the Cle Elum River, a principal Yakima River tributary. An adult fish collection facility at the base of the dam is now under construction and will keep fish in the water longer as they return upriver. Currently, they’re collected 60 miles downstream and trucked to their spawning territory above Cle Elum Dam. With the new structure, expected to operate by 2027, fish will need to be transported only a few thousand feet.
Conley credits the Yakamas for the impetus to rescue the river’s salmon and steelhead fishery after many considered it a lost cause. “Honestly, if you look in the eighties and nineties, it’s the Yakama Nation that said, ‘We’re not giving up on fish here,’” he says. “And through legal action and building their fisheries program with funding from the power system [from dams] on the Columbia, they really got people to say, ‘No, we are going to save fish on the Yakima.’ Between then and, say, 2015, you saw all these people, us included, jump on that bandwagon.”
In perhaps the most significant court case, U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush, in 1980, required enough flow in the Yakima River to support fish and especially their eggs, which died on the banks when water levels, managed through Cle Elum Dam and others, were allowed to recede after irrigation ended in late fall. The case pitted farmers’ irrigation rights against the Yakamas’ fishing rights, creating controversy, angry demonstrations, and fear on both sides. But the outcome eventually persuaded people to work together.
“It was a management and learning experience and adjustment,” Ron Van Gundy, Revell’s predecessor at the Roza Irrigation District, told the Spokane Spokesman-Review newspaper in 2010, on the ruling’s 30th anniversary. “We had to learn to operate with the fish in mind.”
Local fruit grower, Ric Valicoff, who works closely with the fish and wildlife recovery board, adds that exchanging points of view, especially between farmers and the Yakama Nation, has been vital. Says Valicoff, “We’ve come a long way.”
So have the fish. In contrast to the dismal 1990s, the current 10-year average for returning salmon, steelhead, and lampreys now stands at 12,986 at the fish-counting station at Prosser Dam, the Yakima River’s closest dam to the Columbia. That’s lower than in the early 2000s, but the numbers are rebounding after a poor year in 2019. Last year’s tally again surpassed 12,000 returning fish; especially noteworthy is the ascent of the once-eradicated sockeyes, whose numbers jumped from 104 in 2023 to more than 2,700 last year.
Fishing guide Guy Drew, owner of the Crow Creek Fly Shop in Roslyn, near the river’s headwaters, says he frequently saw pods of up to two dozen sockeyes in the Yakima last year. Steve Joyce of Red’s Fly Shop in Ellensburg, 25 miles downriver, notes that the cold water released during the summer irrigation season improves dry-fly fishing for trout, especially by covering grassy banks and bringing the river closer to terrestrials.
While welcoming the newfound consensus among former adversaries, board director Conley and irrigation district manager Revell both lament the slow pace of the public process and wish projects could be completed faster. Still, they’re keeping their eyes on the prize.
“When we have more water,” says Revell, “everyone will be happy.”
