Emergency declaration announced by Klamath Tribes to save suckers

On Sept 26, citing “irreparable harm and damage to the Klamath Tribe’s culture, traditions and subsistence,” the Tribal council declared an emergency for the restoration of c’waam and koptu.

A 75 percent decline in breeding fish over the last two decades, combined with an aging breeding stock of fish in Upper Klamath Lake, prompted the board to make the declaration. This was followed by an Oct. 22 meeting of potential stakeholders hosted by Klamath Tribes Chairman William Ray Jr., who outlined a massive restoration plan for Upper Klamath Lake to help save the fish.

The fish stocks of the c’waam and koptu in the lake have grown old, some born as early as the 1990s. While the existing fish remaining have ample eggs to spread, estimates are in the millions. The poor water quality and extensive bird predation have caused the younger fish to die off at an alarming rate. Without a successful year of spawning in either of the last decades, these fish are predicted to go functionally extinct in the next three to five years.  

The problem for the young c’waam and koptu all starts with the toxic Algae that grow in the Upper Klamath Lake. As the algae grow, it grows aggressively due to the build-up of phosphorous in the lake sediment that flows in from the Sprague River. When that algae dies off, the rotting algae starves the lake of Oxygen, which the younger fish need to survive. Couple the low oxygen with a lower water level, partly due to the ongoing drought coupled with water diversion for irrigation; the struggling fish are easy targets for hungry birds without hiding places. Those that don’t get eaten are forced to swim in a gyre of currents that the lake now flows with until they either die off from low oxygen or wash over the dam into the link river.

It was recent samples taken by the U.S. Geographical Survey this summer that gave evidence of the massive declines in the fish stocks held sacred by the Klamath Tribes, which prompted the emergency declaration and led the Chairman to develop a sweeping plan of restoration that he presented to the several area foundations, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, the owners of the Running Y Resort and dozens of other tribal members and interested parties at a meeting held by the Klamath Tribes Oct. 22. The Klamath Tribes Ambodot Department has drawn up plans to address the dwindling fish populations to grow the juvenile fish they have been breeding into larger fish before reintroduction; however, limitations on space and time make this plan difficult.

In response to the emergency declaration, Chairman Ray Jr. outlined what he called a “Pie in the Sky” vision for a complete restoration of the Upper Klamath Basin land with the idea that if we make the existing farmland back into marshland in more than a dozen strategic spots, we might save the fish, but he stresses for his plan to work, time is of the essence.

With the suckers facing extinction in what could be three to five years, the Chairman stressed to the packed auditorium that many of the projects outlined at the event need to be done “yesterday,” he implored.

One of the first projects the Chairman introduced with the help of Alta Harris, interim director of Ambodat, involved Barkley Springs at Hagelstein Park, which serves as a public park known and is owned by the county and abuts a farm to the South. The cold-water streams that bubble up in that area play host to one of the last viable populations of young c’waam and koptu.

The site has long been sacred to the Klamath Tribes and served as a winter village for previous generations of the tribes. However, samples of water taken this summer still showed fecal matter in the water, which prompted the county to ban overnight camping at the park last year. The current plan involves the Klamath Tribes overseeing the park and farm and restoring the historic marshes and wetlands that once allowed perhaps millions of c’waam and koptu to breed successfully in the wetlands there.

But that is just where the plan started. The Chairman and Harris spent the day’s meeting sharing a complete vision for more than a dozen properties around Upper Klamath Lake and adjoining streams, creeks, and brooks that will not only help save the fish from extinction but also replace the silver bullet solutions that area activists tried to initiate in previous decades.

Another major project discussed extensively was the restoration of the Williamson River Delta – taking a page from restoration projects in the Mississippi River Delta. Dave Coffman, Director of Resource Environmental Solutions, a company that specializes in environmental mitigation and water quality management, suggested that rebuilding some of the levees that were removed to flood the area in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries and dredging of the lake bottom to rebuild land could help the natural deposit of sediment from the river into the lake and allow newly arrived juvenile fish a place to grow.

“That approach gets taken in a lot of places,” Coffman said. “Lake Pontchartrain is a good example of the Bay Area where you’re dredging or someone, usually the Army Corps of Engineers, dredging shipping channels, and that dredge spoil goes and enters into this beneficial reuse process where it’s taken to a place to counter subsidence, to build wetlands.

“The way those work and have been so successful is that beneficial use of spoil, right when you generate spoil when you don’t need something somewhere, and it needs to be moved somewhere else…What we would be talking about here is more of a generating fill material through that dredging, generating the beneficial material needed by deepening other portions of the lake, or grabbing sediment, maybe from Agency Lake, and bringing it into depositing it within a sedimentation basin.”

Harris stated that this innovative thinking will make this plan happen despite its ambitious nature. “This is the process we’ve established for restoration in the basin,” she said. “It works well; we have a lot of voices in the room, and we are making every effort to bring forth, you know, new experience from other areas in coordination with experience that we have had in the space and now to make sure that we’re making the best decisions and getting the best paying for our buck on all these projects.”

The plan is as comprehensive as it is ambitious, with projects ranging from the upland rivers and tributaries down through various lake areas, including the Skillet Handle, the Wood River wetland, and the Klamath Marsh.

The Chairman admitted that this is a daunting plan. “I think about everything our ancestors lost in 1909,” he said. “If you think about it like this, a third of our diet was taken away since 1909. In 1986, we had another third or a half taken away cultures in the Indian world, and any indigenous people cannot survive that kind of devastation. And I look at it with my 87-year-old parents, who enjoyed the reservation and the purity and how some of us grew up with millions of c’waam and koptu, and now to see them in this predicament is tough not to feel. And because a whole generation of Klamath, Modocs and Yahooskins have not fished these fish, have not tasted these fish. It hurts our culture, and now our deer are in serious peril, along with our trout and our craw daddies our freshwater muscles, our plants. The fires that happen hurt, and it continues to peck away at the viability of our cultures. It’s hard not to get emotional for all of us who are citizens of our nation.”

Klamath tribal member and meeting attendee Garin Riddle offered these sentiments about removing the Klamath River dams and future ambitious plans for restoring historical wetlands. “Everybody that was a part of that dam removal didn’t think it was possible,” he said. “And at the very end of the day, after 30 years, everybody’s celebrating and excited because something happened that nobody thought could happen because there are so many different working parts that had to line up just perfectly for those things to be successful. And here we are today, 2024, a success story. That’s the same thing that those spirits of all those foods and all those plants and animals are doing right now. They have their hands up saying, ‘Help me. Help me’…Now is that chance to not only make a blueprint for what could be in other parts but to be a part of that success story for our future generations to come.”

Current and future projects and areas of focus for future restoration projects

-Wetland Intrinsic Potential and Incised Channel Mapping

-Sprague River Flood Plain Reconnection Modeling

-Big Swing Sprague River Largescale Collaborative Restoration

-Beatty Gap

-Barkley Springs 

-Agency-Barnes

-Lakeside Farms

-Rusted Gate Farms

-Klamath Marsh National Wildlife Refuge

-Rocky Ford

-Hog Creek and Trout Creek Watersheds

-TNC Sycan Preserve

-Blue Creek, Merit Creek, Long Creek and Dry Creek