Restoring the River's Flow | DamNation

Dropped my gear off, schlepped it all out over the fence, drove back down, parked the van, got on my bicycle, rode up there, stashed it. Gl's canyons near vertical; it's very steep, it's dark, it's a damp slippery dam with a 200t abyss right below. So we've got this rope straight across here. Then I clipped my repel rope into that, locked it off, 5-gallon bucket of paint hooked on my harness, and I hung off the edge of the dam and just let go.

Went, and I baain a bit, you know, as a roller, and then I go swinging back, get a couple moves back and forth, get going, get over there, and paint a little bit more. It was covered in paint, so I finished the B free part, finished that, and I was out of paint. I've got L be free. I'm like, no, nothing worse than having a gigantic typo on a dam or whatever, you know? I just could not live with that.

Just dropped everything, left it all on top of the dam, ran out, grabbed my bike, zipped down, jumped in the van. I had like two quarts of paint. Changed the anchor, repel down. If I'm busted, I'm busted. I want to have it finished. It was a beautiful crack; the guy was an artist, there was no question of it, and he did that all in one night. It was an amazing feat.

I think that sort of woke up people to the fact that something had to be done. Water is the same as the blood in our bodies; stagnation brings on death. Rivers are regions with that same kind of stagnation. When it's all slack water, reservoirs, its uses are really limited, and it's not vibrantly alive.

As soon as the reservoirs were drained, the Elwa found its path of least resistance and carved a new river channel in the process, revealing something long forgotten, preserved under a century of sediment: the remains of an ancient old growth forest that had been clearcut when the dams were built. Almost instantaneously, the El's watershed was coming back to life.

Just a year after the removal of the lower dam, biologists were counting fish by the thousands in stretches of the Elwa that hadn't seen a salmon in 99 years. The beautiful thing about salmon; they're incredibly resilient. I mean, if you give them half a chance, they can come back in many ways, but you have to give them that at least half a chance.