Author’s note: This is the second part of a four-part story on the looming extinction of wild Chinook salmon in Idaho’s iconic wilderness river, the Middle Fork Salmon River. The first part details the Middle Fork’s terrible salmon returns of the last decade, which if continued will result in their extinction in our lifetimes. This essential factual background will not be repeated here, so I encourage you to read part one, if you have not done so, online. This installment, and a third to follow, focus on the costs to Idaho people and communities if salmon extinction in the heart of Idaho proceeds, and, conversely, the many benefits if Idaho people and leaders don’t let it proceed.   

Business and salmon recovery. Some may incline to see these as opposed terms. But not on the Middle Fork Salmon River. 

Commercial outfitting on the Middle Fork and main Salmon Rivers is a unique business. It is state-licensed, state and federally regulated, and has its own set of necessary skills, best practices and logistics webs across water, air and land.

Based on public lands and waters, in mountainous rural Idaho, the enterprise is seasonal, weather and conditions-dependent, visitor-dependent, with tricky profit margins and often whole-family commitment. 

On our watch: Salmon extinction on the Middle Fork Salmon River in the heart of Idaho

The business is not separable from its places or communities. Outfitting is often only one part of an economic strategy to live in Salmon, Challis and Stanley, but the challenge comes with rewards: an outdoors life, close to vast public lands and waters, in small towns, not cities. Over decades, an outfitting/guiding culture has grown around the Middle Fork Salmon River, the main Salmon River and the nearby towns.          

Idaho outfitters have supported keeping Idaho’s wild country wild for decades. Today’s Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness would be smaller and of lesser quality without the active support outfitters gave it 50 years ago. In 1979, at U.S. Sen. Frank Church’s tense, high stakes public hearing in Salmon on what wilderness to create for the Middle Fork, Salmon residents who spoke for a 2.3 million acre wilderness outnumbered residents who opposed it.

Middle Fork guides were the difference. Earlier, when President Jimmy Carter came to Idaho in 1978, he floated the Middle Fork with outfitter Norm Guth. 

From within this culture, I have gathered some perspectives on salmon and steelhead extinction from Middle Fork outfitters, guides who work for them, one of their customers and two local elected leaders. I mainly feature their own words.

Together they suggest the breadth of this culture, its intimacy with the Middle Fork Salmon River, and the stakes for it as the Middle Fork’s wild salmon disappear. 

Decades of outfitting in Idaho

Ken Helfrich co-owns Helfrich River Outfitter in Salmon. He is the third of five Helfrich generations to outfit and guide on the Middle Fork Salmon River, in his case for 50 years.

Steve Zettel came to Idaho from Philadelphia in 1980, found work on the Middle Fork Salmon as a guide, and became an outfitter in 1993. Zettel’s Idaho Wilderness Company, in Challis, takes customers down the river, and he also has a hunting camp in Big Creek, a major Middle Fork tributary.

Dustin Aherin is a fifth-generation Idahoan, raised in Lewiston. An adventurous young boatman and creative citizen in the 1990s, he has guided trips on the Middle Fork since 1998, and started outfitting there with his Idaho River Adventures in 2011. He resides in Salmon and Darby, Montana.

Over seven thousand people boat the Middle Fork with commercial outfitters each year. That’s about 70% of all those who take this five to eight day river journey through the largest wilderness in the 48 states. Helfrich, Zettel and Aherin are three of 27 licensed commercial outfitters on the Middle Fork Salmon River. All three have been down the river over 100 times. Helfrich’s self-estimate is an astounding 500 times. 

They know close-up that the salmon which name the river they work on are near extinction.

“The dire straits are obvious if you’re paying attention on the river, which we do,” says Aherin. “In my entire career,” Zettel tells me, “I’ve never seen a salmon in the mainstem Middle Fork itself.” In three weeks on the Middle Fork last year, Helfrich did not see a single salmon, redd (nest) or carcass.      

What are the consequences? Helfrich: “Uppermost for me is the value of the big biomass salmon used to leave behind with the dying fish after they spawn. The natural enzymes that salmon put back in the Middle Fork, for the aquatic life, the birds, bears, and so on. The enzymes are unique, proteins that all the aquatic life depends on. We are losing that, and I am really concerned.  

“We don’t see the life the Middle Fork had when salmon were plentiful. There’s been a big impact on trout. Bull trout feed on young salmon, but they don’t have that now so they are declining too. Years ago we’d watch black bears on the river drag salmon up into the trees to eat, and then come back to the river for more. Today the bears are pretty much gone.”

“And there are effects on vegetation, the riverbanks, the trees. They all need that salmon biomass; it’s been here millions of years. We can’t lose that. It’s hard to think we can just come in, wipe salmon out, and leave a Middle Fork without them.

“There are no hatchery fish in the Middle Fork. Its salmon have a pure genetics that produces adaptable fish that thrive in all kinds of conditions. A diverse gene pool is important. When you’re down to single pairs in most of the river, you have brothers and sisters spawning with each other, if they can even find each other. That reduces their ability to survive.” 

Dustin Aherin: “We’re at the point of no return. The lack of salmon nutrients is degrading the land and water. There aren’t enough animals. The salmon are important to me, but they’re more important to the watershed and its whole array of life.”

Biologist Russ Thurow and two colleagues estimate that an average 48,000 Chinook returned to the Middle Fork in the 1950s. That’s close to one million tons of marine nutrition coming into the river each year. In the 1930s, it was close to two million tons. Over the last three years, the average Middle Fork salmon return is 811 fish. The 2026 return is nearly certain to be below that, about 1% of the estimated abundance 70 years ago.  

“This isn’t really a business issue for me,” says Steve Zettel. “It’s called the Salmon River, right? They should be there, in their river. They are the core of its ecology, its biology.

“What do I tell my customers? I say, welcome to the Salmon-less River.” 

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The salmon decline after dams, reservoirs take hold

Zettel, Aherin and Helfrich know why salmon and steelhead are going extinct in the Middle Fork.

“It has nothing to do with this river,” Helfrich says. “The spawning capacities are still what they were when thousands of salmon returned. We started seeing the decline when the last reservoir went in downstream. It is mainly due to the number of impoundments.”

That number is eight. The federal government owns and operates eight dams, and 320 consecutive miles of reservoir, on the lower Snake and Columbia Rivers. Snake River salmon and steelhead must traverse this ponded gauntlet twice, going to sea and then returning.

Salmon returns to Idaho have been dropping for 150 years, but Helfrich is correct that the final decline toward extinction has been since the last of these dams went in, in 1975.

All three men are non-degreed students of salmon science. All hope the lower Snake will be restored to flow free by notching out the earthen sections of its four dams.

They are not optimistic it will occur, but they know the Middle Fork Salmon will die as a salmon river if it does not occur.    

Outfitters have another concern: that their operations will again be targeted for tighter regulation, while federal agencies duck the real causes at their own dams and reservoirs. Outfitters saw that movie when salmon were listed under the Endangered Species Act in the 1990s.

“The feds determined our use was a detriment to the salmon, and began reducing it,” says Steve Zettel. “They even installed cameras to watch our use. They’ve lightened up some since, which certainly makes sense given the lack of salmon.”

Dustin Aherin was president of the Middle Fork Outfitters Association for 12 years. “Our outfitters have worked hard to protect salmon during spawning, with the Redd Alert program we started in 2017. I am not interested in putting further burden on outfitters and river users that isn’t going to help prevent extinction.”

Redd Alert volunteers tell people who are about to launch why and how to avoid salmon redds, which are flagged. Yet most of the mainstem Middle Fork no longer has redds. None have been found in the lower Middle Fork, below Indian Creek, for the last three years. (2026 returns are not yet estimated.)          

The economic impact of outfitters, river guides

Jack Hurty is a river guide who is also policy and communications director for the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association. One goal of his job is to restore salmon and steelhead, in the Middle Fork Salmon and across central Idaho.

Results would include a healthier Middle Fork, more wildlife, better business for his members, healthier communities, retaining the ancient metabolic knit of salmon with the entire watershed, and assuring that knit is part of the experience outfitters can offer 7,000 people each year.         

Twenty-seven outfitters operate 28 permits on the Middle Fork Salmon River. Hurty gave me some rough estimates: “We estimate revenue from each permit averages $700,000 per year, a bit under $20 million in total. With a standard multiplier, that works out to over $30 million in positive impact, most of it felt in the small towns around the river in a three or four month period.”

“I just talked to an outfitter who had invoices from 26 local businesses. That’s how these dollars spread out. And revenue isn’t the full story. Guide wages are about 45% of outfitter costs, and guides spend a lot of that in the towns, on gear, drybags, hats, meals …”  

Then the customers. “You think about a family of four, coming to run the Middle Fork with an outfitter. There’s lodging before and after, two nights in towns at minimum. Four to six meals for four people. They buy gear at the local stores. They pay for shuttles, and flights into Indian Creek for launches. Five aviation companies and their pilots would have trouble without them.”

Hurty knows Middle Fork outfitting won’t collapse if its salmon are extinct. People will still want to run the river. “But the mid- and long term really worry me. We’re selling the experience of the Middle Fork ecosystem — the white water and river, the eagles, otters, bighorn sheep, trout, the ponderosa pine, the tributaries, the tribal and non-tribal history, the wildness. All were fueled by salmon. The Middle Fork is a world-class week-long wilderness river experience. Losing salmon and steelhead will degrade that experience, in obvious ways and ways we don’t even understand. Central Idaho’s economic and cultural future will be terribly narrowed. And we’ll lose the future upside so much has been done and spent to restore: a return to salmon abundance.”   

Plus a soul cost. “Salmon and steelhead extinction would be crushing, a terrible blow to central Idaho’s outfitter and guide culture and communities. It would mean we all had failed.” 

Steve Zettel: “You wonder who watched the last passenger pigeon die. Now here we are in the same position — watching.”

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‘The Middle Fork was our home. We are homesick for what our home has lost.’

Jim Norton began guiding on the Salmon River in 1993. His first Middle Fork trip was in 1997. “I joined up with Steve Zettel’s crew at Boundary Creek. The river was at eight feet, really high, really fast, a big river after a big winter. We launched late morning, had lunch over 30 miles downstream, and got to the Flying B [a private ranch] in late afternoon. We imitated baby salmon all the way down — stay in the current, using oars rather than fins to keep under control. We made 70 miles in six hours on the water, a barely controlled descent. We knew the baby salmon were zooming out to sea below us, and four years later a spike of adult salmon indeed came back. The high water sort of negated the dams, turning the Snake River back into more of a river for a couple weeks.  

“For guides, those bigger salmon returns in 2001-2 [a small spike upward that has not repeated] were the same event as the big 1997-98 flows that took those same fish to the ocean. That connected tissue of river and fish, across time and space, is our experience of the Middle Fork.”

Jim has guided on four continents, but “the Middle Fork is different. The opportunity to work on a river that flows through the largest wilderness outside Alaska, on such large scale, is special. On every trip in my first years we watched salmon, those living connections between the ocean and the mountains, leaping in front of us at Dagger Falls. It told us the world was OK.” 

Dagger Falls was, and for a lucky few still is, a spectacular place to watch 2 and 3 foot salmon, bound upstream to miles of spawning grounds, leap up and through a crashing series of falls it does not seem possible they can power through. Yet they did, and in very small numbers still do. Dagger Falls is a short walk from the Boundary Creek put-in, where most Middle Fork trips begin.   

“It was a custom for guides, a pilgrimage. We’d finish rigging at Boundary for our launches next day. Then we’d jump the fence, sit out on the useless unusable fish ladder at Dagger, and watch the fish jump. We’d stay until dark. We’d cheer every leaping fish. Just awesome. The next day we’d be guides for company a, b, c, or d, but at Dagger we were one.”

“My generation of guides arrived on the scene just as what looked to us like salmon abundance was ending. But it was still such a part of the story. I was in Salmon 12 years. It took me awhile to grasp the tension: living and working in places with such salmon iconography and identity — the names, the rivers, the mountains, the town. And at the same time the absence of salmon abundance. It was palpable in the early ’90s that we’d just missed it.” 

Years later Jim found a name for this feeling: solastalgia. Wikipedia defines it as “a sense of homesickness for a place that is still home, but has become unrecognizable or distressing.” 

“There was so much cultural and economic association with salmon in the towns and on the river. But the salmon weren’t there. The whole community of guides experienced it. The Middle Fork was our home. We are homesick for what our home has lost.”

Some years ago, when Congressman Mike Simpson was assembling his inclusive vision for Columbia-Snake salmon, energy and agriculture, Norton was a panelist at a large public meeting in Salmon that was packed with guides and river people. He said something I think many there had felt, but only truly knew after he said it. “At Banner Summit, on Highway 93, you cross from the Payette River into the Salmon River and the Middle Fork’s headwaters. You pass a threshold, and you feel it. Salmon are the difference. The land and water, the relations people have with them, are so different when salmon are in the system.”  

“To think about turning the Middle Fork into the Payette,” he says now, “induces panic. Such sterilization — nutritionally, experientially, spiritually. The Payette is a fine river. But it’s wholly different without its salmon [which were lost to other dams in the 1950s-’60s]. We destroyed the Payette’s embodiment. We still have, barely, the embodiment of the Salmon River. Doing to the Middle Fork Salmon what we did to the Payette is unthinkable to me. Yet it is happening.”

Loss of salmon season has been devastating to Idaho’s Salmon, Challis and Stanley

    

From 1970 to 1999, Gary Power worked for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, in Challis, Yellow Pine and Salmon, where he still lives. After 43 trips down the Middle Fork in his agency years, he got a commercial guide’s license after retiring, and made 8-10 trips each summer, working for several outfitters. 

Idaho’s general salmon season was still open his first summers with Idaho Fish and Game. “Salmon were a big food source for people here, on top of the recreation. School was out when the fish returned, so families and friends built vacations around them. I worked on the Middle Fork that last open season. People flew into Big Creek and the Middle Fork to fish. Others drove in to the top of Camas and Loon Creeks to camp, then got up at 1 a.m. to claim a good fishing hole. Tin Cup and Meyers Cove were packed with campers. It was a huge economic driver in central Idaho.”

In 1978 the general salmon season closed in the Middle Fork and the Upper Salmon, because of too few fish. “It generated all sorts of local outcry. Businesses were gutted, we had fish-ins and protests. It was devastating in Salmon, Challis and Stanley.” There has been no salmon season in the Middle Fork since — and only a few, very limited seasons in the upper Salmon.

“In those first years I fished the Middle Fork, Loon, Camas, and Big Creeks, and more. First time you get a salmon on, it’s such a thrill. I’d take my family to see them digging their redds in the riffles, and chasing over shallows like mini-hydroplanes. It is something to be four feet from spawning salmon.” 

Power affirms the effects of lost salmon nutrients. “In 1970, when I first caught cutthroat trout in Big Creek, they were 16-18 inches. Now they are much smaller. Large numbers of deteriorating salmon carcasses used to heavily fertilize the river, to the benefit of other species. Fingerling salmon, resident fish, and all sorts of wildlife had more food. Now that’s gone.  

“These are the only watersheds on earth where salmon climb 6,000 feet or more to spawn. You can’t put a salmon from anywhere else here, and have it work. The native fish have an irreplaceable adaptation, to make this arduous migration from the ocean up to the mountains of Idaho. To lose that isn’t a reasonable option, when we can save them. 

“When obstructions in the river are removed, the effects on salmon are immediate. Look at the Klamath River after four dams were removed, and the Elwha River. For the fish, it’s like opening a new McDonald’s. They have to go check it out.  

“To lose these fish makes no sense. Everything around here that’s named after salmon — we’d have to change all the names.” 

A Middle Fork outfitters customer’s perspective: ‘Every place on that river has a memory for me.’

Mark Williams, of Birmingham, Alabama, grew up on a farm near Nashville, camping and roaming the creeks. He is a physician, and an attorney, with two sons and two daughters. His perspective is as a customer of Middle Fork outfitters for over 40 years.   

While camping once near Stanley, by accident he met Middle Fork outfitters Dave and Sheila Mills. The next year, Mark, his father, and his brothers returned for a Rocky Mountain River Tours trip down the Middle Fork. “It was the early 1980s, spring, high water, a real adventure. I was surprised there weren’t more salmon. But I got interested. I brought more of my family out. We just loved that part of Idaho — the wildness, the adventure, the people, the joy of sharing it with family, friends and colleagues. Our guides were great people, hard-working, self-reliant. I have lifelong friends I first met as Middle Fork guides. 

“I’ve probably been down the Middle Fork 50 times now. One year, I brought over 200 physicians out. They were astonished at the beauty, the wilderness, free from their cell phones. The isolation and purity — I took great joy to watch them feel it too. Everyone regretted the last day on those trips. Over many years we introduced several hundred physicians, colleagues and other friends to this beautiful river and Wilderness, many of whom returned on family trips of their own. Every place on that river has a memory for me. I loved to watch the changes over years — deadfalls, washouts, fires, the river changes all the time.”  

He bought a home on Agency Creek, a Lemhi River tributary near Lemhi Pass — “Captain Lewis and the Corps of Discovery literally traversed our place” — and rented it to river guides when he wasn’t there. “I met people like Jim Norton, Jerry Myers, John Caccia. They really knew salmon, and had a powerful sense of stewardship. You want to be like those people.  It’s not monetary. The place is so deep in them. One of my daughters became a river guide, and so did I.

“I noticed the salmon decline. Some guides were great at explaining how the salmon were protein for all the other animals. And the decline without them, no food for the eagles and trees. People I brought would always ask, where are the salmon? They’d hear the story, and couldn’t believe it.”

What would extinction mean to him? “Oh — a profound loss and waste. An integral part of Idaho, lost forever. The Salmon River, without salmon? Salmon, Idaho, without salmon? And we just watched it happen?

His advice to Idaho’s leaders: “I know people will always love to come to Idaho just to see salmon. Salmon is a recreation hub now. Imagine if Salmon the town had salmon the fish back in the Middle Fork. What an opportunity to bring people to Idaho. I hope your representatives see the value of it for all Americans. The hundreds of people I brought to the Middle Fork — they left changed.

“And, we owe the Native Americans. The Middle Fork is a spiritual place. I’ve watched River of Return, a video of the young Shoshone-Bannock children, going down the river with Sam and Jessica Matsaw, learning about the salmon, the mussels they found, the tribal history along the river. So moving. The United States made those children a promise before they were born, to have fish to fish for. Shouldn’t we keep our promise?” 

“I have friends who still remember a super-cold trip 40 years ago. The first week in May, I brought an entire hospital leadership team from Birmingham. We came over the pass from Boise to four feet of snow. Snow everywhere. They started to wonder, why did we do this? A waitress at Redfish Lake Lodge told us a group had flipped their boat and had to hike out.  It was snowing when we put on the river, in a stiff wind. Then misery became an adventure, and it turned out fine.          

“I’m too old for it now. But what a privilege to have that time, in that country, with those Idaho people we met. It always provided peacefulness, away from the rest of the world.”

A conflicting optimism/pessimism about salmon

Breann and Matt Green are life residents of Salmon, both born in Salmon’s Steele Memorial Hospital. In between raising four children, they own River of No Return Wilderness Outfitters. They operate on the wilderness stretch of the main Salmon River, into which the Middle Fork flows. Both once guided on the Middle Fork, and Matt has fished and hunted there. 

“The Middle Fork provides about half the flow for the main Salmon where we operate,” Breann says. “It is a shining gem, the most untrammeled 100-plus miles of river I know, the heart of the Frank Church Wilderness. Our business would be a lot better if salmon and steelhead were here. We’ve offered some combo trips, steelhead fishing and chukar hunting, in the spring and fall. But with fish numbers so low, it doesn’t feel right. We’d love to do that again if the numbers go up.” 

“Salmon are a keystone species,” adds Matt. “So it is catastrophic to lose them, with the chain effect on all the other species. Emotionally and culturally, it would knock us down to our knees.”

Like many in Salmon, Breann and Matt have a conflicted optimism/pessimism about salmon. The optimism is based in the resilience of the fish, the pessimism in politics and all the infrastructure built around the lower Snake dams downstream.

Breann: “I have a lot of hope, if the fish can get here. Our town is named Salmon — it’s important to us to keep these fish and keep advocating for them.” Matt: “The impact of the reservoirs is getting worse, with how warm the water is getting. We have smallmouth bass now in the Salmon River. But you have to be optimistic, otherwise why be in our business?”  

Breann and Matt are also active in another salmon story in Lemhi County: the growing number of restored streams on ranches and private lands along the Salmon River and on tributaries like the Lemhi and Pahsimeroi Rivers. 

“When this work started in the early 1990s,” Breann recalls, “it was a little controversial here, but that’s gone now. Everyone in the valley knows and respects what’s been accomplished.”

For several years, Breann worked for the Lemhi Regional Land Trust, a key local partner/catalyst in the restoration projects. Matt once worked for Trout Unlimited, another partner, and now, on top of his outfitting, works for Rio Applied Science and Engineering, a Boise-based company that designs stream and habitat restorations. 

“We’re restoring our watersheds and protecting ranching values,” Breann says. “We’re keeping water in the basin, rebuilding healthy braided streams with huge benefit to fish and wildlife. We’re now seeing rainbow and cutthroat trout throughout the system. We’ve created good jobs. It’s important for the whole valley.”

“A lot of people we know have the ability to live here due to this work,” Matt adds. “It’s very positive for the community.”

The Idaho Department of Fish and Game is a key partner. Gary Power was Fish and Game’s regional supervisor in the early 1990s: “Everybody downstream was pointing fingers at the headwaters, saying salmon decline is your fault, not the dams. So we went to work on the local problems. We installed better screens, to keep the salmon and resident fish out of irrigation ditches. We restored spawning and rearing habitats. Ranchers changed grazing systems. Farmers changed from flood irrigation to sprinklers, allowing better water management for crops and fish. Historically, the Lemhi and other tributaries were de-watered; that has been corrected. A lot of good collaborative work.”

 “Resident fisheries, bull trout and cutthroat, benefited,” says Power. “But it didn’t bring the salmon back.” Breann Green: “We are building miles and miles of good salmon habitat. But we know it won’t restore the Chinook. We’ve built it, but the salmon don’t come.”  

Yet much of the work was financed with dollars dedicated to restoring salmon. “We used lots of Bonneville Power Administration and Pacific Salmon Recovery funds for the projects,” Breann adds. “Bonneville was the source for maybe a third of our funds. Now they are cutting and cutting, not renewing their funding agreement with Idaho. There is lag time, so we’ll see most of the effects in the next few years.”

Bonneville Power is the federal agency that markets power from the federal dams. Despite its 30-year failure to recover salmon, the agency is now sharply cutting its salmon funding, including spawning habitat restoration dollars to states and tribes. The Grand Ronde Valley in eastern Oregon, the Lemhi and Pahsimeroi Valleys in Idaho, the Nez Perce, Shoshone-Bannock and Umatilla Tribes, and salmon and steelhead will be among the losers.

Stanley’s strong connection to Middle Fork recreation, tourism

Steve Botti is the mayor of Stanley. He moved to Boise in 1988, where he worked for the U.S. Park Service at the Boise (now National) Interagency Fire Center. “In 2007, I moved to Stanley to ‘retire.’ It didn’t work out that way.” 

Stanley sits in a vast circle of salmon habitat, to north, south, east and west: the upper Salmon River, Redfish Lake and the other sockeye salmon lakes in Sawtooth Valley, the Yankee Fork Salmon River, East Fork Salmon River, and Middle Fork Salmon River. The Middle Fork’s headwaters in Marsh and Bear Valley Creeks are west of town, used in all seasons and cherished locally.

“Stanley’s economy has a strong connection to the Middle Fork,” Mayor Botti told me. “We are an outfitter and guide hub. In season, a steady stream of planes goes in and out of the Middle Fork from Stanley, and a steady stream of boats go in. Our economy is almost 100% based on recreation and tourism now. You’ll find a lot of shared values here, which is pretty essential to living, and making a living, here.”

Stanley is 6,600 feet high; its winters are a reward for those who love snow and can handle severe conditions. 

Two years ago, I asked Mayor Botti what restoring salmon would mean to the Stanley area. “Fishing always attracts people, and is important to our economy. Fishing interest would expand dramatically if salmon could be restored. I’m a fisherman, so I understand that.      

“But deeper, we don’t see salmon as just a fish. They are a living embodiment of wildness and for their amazing migration. Most of us sense that something important is missing from our landscape and community. Let’s say all the mountain goats and elk, or the camas and shooting stars had vanished. And then, decades later, they came back. People would treasure that. 

“It would be personal for many in and around Stanley. We are keenly aware of the passing seasons, the seasonal dramas. The changes are so dramatic. People enjoy those rhythms — the sandhill cranes return in the spring, the progression of wildflowers. It’s like a movie. Salmon are minor characters in the landscape now, but people know they were once the lead actors. Having them migrating here again would reconnect our past to our present.”

The good work underway by Pacific Northwest salmon people in northeast Oregon

Two weeks ago, I asked him about the impact, locally and personally, if salmon go extinct. “Many people come to Stanley for the fishing experience, and connect to the wild lands in that way. When I dig into that experience, I find that for me, and no doubt many others, it extends far beyond catching fish. The window into the natural environment that fishing provides me is more important than catching a fish. So extinction of salmon is much deeper than just not being able to marvel at the sight of them in the river.

“For me, the loss of salmon makes the wilderness less wild in ways that I’m sure I cannot even imagine. Some of those changes are subtle, but I sense the loss even so. I recall a study years ago about how people respond to wilderness that was quite revealing. As wilderness impacts increased, those who had experienced the loss of much more natural ‘wilderness’ were displaced by those who were satisfied with a much less ‘wild’ experience. The current users mostly accepted what they found as the way it’s always been, and did not feel the loss. I suspect that is what is happening due to the immense reduction in current salmon numbers.”

In natural science, this is called the “shifting baseline syndrome.” Russ Thurow, the leading authority on Middle Fork Chinook salmon, has co-authored a paper which in part explores how the syndrome applies to Middle Fork salmon. A summary of the paper can be found at SYCU – Rethinking the possible: Applying long-term datasets to estimate historic salmon abundance in the Middle Fork Salmon River.

Mayor Botti is also a botanist, and is working on a book about Sawtooth Valley botany. “We know the nutrients salmon bring from the ocean spread far and wide through Salmon River ecosystems. If your first article is right, about 97.5% of those nutrients have already been lost in the past 60-70 years. I wonder how this ‘pre-extinction’ has already affected plant populations and species diversity. This may be an example of subtle changes we are unaware of, so we accept the flora and fauna we see now as the way it always was. We don’t have a sense of what has been lost.”

Botti wonders if “the extinction of salmon as a profound element in the natural ecosystems of the Salmon River has already occurred.” 

I was struck by Botti’s phrase “pre-extinction.” Russ Thurow would agree that salmon “as a profound element” in Salmon River ecosystems have been severely compromised by the general absence of salmon nutrients.

But his work, alone and with colleagues, has also shown that, even though at very low numbers, Middle Fork salmon still retain all the building blocks — genetic, behavioral, and habitat excellence, plus demonstrated resiliency — to restore themselves if we take a small part of our hydroelectric foot off their necks.

The next step downward, which Thurow expects within 15 years unless actions are taken downstream, will be salmon numbers declining to so few that their capacity to recover will be lost. That, he says, will truly be pre-extinction, with no road back.

Those distinctions aside, both men agree on the main point: Middle Fork salmon are in crisis, and science-based action is urgently needed now.     

As local restoration restores ecosystems, ‘we need to connect salmon to people again’

Russ Chinske moved to Salmon from Missoula in 2002. He was a Middle Fork guide for Helfrich Outfitter and has taught Salmon’s elementary students for 23 years. Now he is in his third term on the Salmon City Council: “I decided I’d rather do something than complain.”

“Salmon are not a big priority for the City Council. We’re only 3,000 people, with a shoestring city budget. Roads, police, water, sewer — the basic needs take our time.”

But salmon are important to Mr. Chinske. “I fish less now, but I love being on the river. I agree the situation is dire. We are staring down extinction, and we need to act. I think it comes down to the dams on the lower Snake River.

“The local restoration work has been great. We now have restored habitat on the Lemhi River [which joins the main Salmon at the town]. It shows we can maintain the local ranching culture, and get the water back to high quality, and create jobs. Lots of people are engaged now. And the Middle Fork is the crown jewel of salmon habitat, as pristine as you’ll see anywhere. We are ready to have fish.

“The Middle Fork is part of our economic picture. We don’t have much stable year-round economics, and we’re pretty isolated. Agriculture has staying power. And river recreation started here right after the city was created. It is stable and sustainable, people love it, outfitters base here, there’s a strong culture. It is seasonal, but a big positive jolt to the economy. People coming off and going on the Middle Fork and main Salmon spend dollars here.”

If salmon were restored? “An economic benefit for sure, for us, for Riggins, and other towns. It would get more crowded, but … And salmon nutrients would return to the system. Salmon are a real local resource. Many people here just get by, so having fish to harvest would help people out.  

“And the sheer magic. I talk to the old-timers, hear their stories of huge abundant salmon. A great mystique — but I’ve never felt or seen it, multiple generations haven’t seen it. We need to connect salmon to people again. There is nothing bad about restoring salmon. It’s frustrating to know that long local history, the magic and benefits that used to be here, and not have it now.  

“I don’t think we have all the answers yet about how to adjust if the dams come out — for the barges getting crops to market, the energy. Until we have a ‘replace this with that’ plan, with real solutions happening, I doubt it will happen. But I’m optimistic because it’s possible. The science is clear. All the hatcheries, failure after failure. When dams come out, nature does its thing and salmon return. Look at the Elwha and Klamath dam removals.

“The state and feds are not putting huge energies into small places like Salmon. We’re only 3,000 people; we don’t have a big voice. But I see no reason we can’t have both energy and salmon. The versus, either/or stuff has to go. We can do both. We need to start thinking like that. Why not? What’s holding us back?”

Former Republican majority leader of the US Senate calls for Snake River restoration

I had planned to end on Chinske’s excellent question. But a few days ago I heard from Mark Williams, the Alabama man interviewed above. He sent along this fine essay, written for Forbes magazine, by Bill Frist, the former Republican majority leader of the U.S. Senate: https://apple.news/Ar1T054bdSHqACMEwZrwf8w.

In August, Mr. Frist floated the Middle Fork with leaders and staff of The Nature Conservancy. Sammy Matsaw, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal member whose Middle Fork trips with Shoshone-Bannock youth, in the film River of Return, so moved Mark Williams, is featured in Frist’s essay.

Matsaw is Columbia Basin salmon program director for the conservancy. Five salmon the group saw in Loon Creek are also featured. Near the end of his thoughtful and feeling-full essay, Frist calls for the detailed advance planning needed to restore the lower Snake River by removing its four dams. 

U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo served with Sen. Frist, and U.S. Sen. Jim Risch likely knows him. I hope both read that their former fellow senator visited Idaho for a week on the peerless Middle Fork Salmon River — and that the powerful experience led him to a conclusion they have resisted. Mr. Frist’s float was outfitted by Solitude River Trips, so his essay is also the most recent fruit of Idaho outfitters’ continuing work to defend Idaho wild country and restore Idaho salmon.

What’s next in the salmon series

I hope I have given readers a sense of central Idaho’s outfitter/guide culture, and of the great black hole within it which salmon extinction will leave. I thank all my interviewees for speaking with me, Jack Hurty and the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association for invaluable contacts, and Russ Thurow for scientific guidance.

My next installment will focus on Indigenous tribes, whose treaties with our nation, should we honor them, guarantee salmon to fish for in the Middle Fork Salmon. And on Idaho young people, whose Idaho has never had abundant salmon and, unless we act quickly, never will. And on the bottomless connections between Idaho public lands and Idaho salmon. You might start to look for it in two months.