These salmon couldn’t swim freely for 100 years. Now they’re finally wriggling up the river!

The salmon swim along the Klamath River and its branches. That’s near the California-Oregon border. Just last week, people removed a dam there. It was the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.

Chinook salmon began migrating October 3 into new spots. Well, not new exactly. Salmon used to swim in those places. Then people built dams along the river. 

“It’s been over one hundred years since a wild salmon last swam through this reach of the Klamath River,” says Damon Goodman. He works for the conservation group California Trout. He says the salmon are returning home. 

Scientists will track migrating fish through the fall and winter. They’ll watch Chinook salmon, Coho salmon, and steelhead trout. They want to make sure fish spread out over the river again. 

The Klamath was once the third-largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast. Then a company built dams to generate power. (Hydroelectric dams capture energy from moving water. This makes electricity.) The natural flow of the river stopped. 

God designed salmon to spend most of their lives in the ocean. They return up river to have babies. Dams made that impossible. The fish population shrank.

In 2002, a bacterial sickness broke out in fish. Low water and warm temperatures killed more than 34,000 of them. Most were Chinook salmon. People paid attention to the fishy problems. Eventually, they decided: Let’s ditch the dams.

And He said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”— Matthew 4:19