a day ago
First time in 100 years: young kayakers on a ride for the ages
If all goes as planned, the kayakers will pass the rehabilitated sites of the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history. They will pass salmon swimming upstream in places that the fish had not been able to reach since the early 1900s. They will pass through the ancient territory of their tribes -- the Klamath, Shasta, Karuk, Hoopa Valley and Yurok among them.
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And when they reach the wide mouth of the river at the Pacific Ocean near Klamath, California, they will be celebrated as the first to descend the full length of the Klamath, source to sea, since the dams went up and pinched life from the water.
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'I'm really excited to be on the river with friends, celebrating this huge accomplishment that our people have been fighting for forever,' said Ruby Rain Williams, 18, of the Karuk tribe.
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The sky was blue. The mood was, at turns, celebratory and solemn. The colorful kayaks glided across a pool of crystal water, headed downstream.
To'nehwan Jayden Dauz, a 15-year-old from the Hoopa Valley tribe, bounced through a Class IV rapid that didn't exist a year ago, in a narrow canyon where one of the dams fell. Ruby followed, emerging from a stretch of steep white water with a wide grin. The expedition was soon. Scouting the difficult section of rapids from a raft, Keeya Wiki, a 17-year-old Yurok, whooped at her new friends.
All three grew up along the water, in different tribes, hearing stories of ancestors who could walk across the Klamath on the backs of so many salmon. Today, everyone was more likely to get dinner from a local convenience store than from the river.
The arrival of white settlers, starting with a group of beaver trappers in 1826, interrupted the rhythms of life here for the next 200 years. Gold miners and timber companies came. Farmers and ranchers arrived, sucking and diverting water from the river and draining the fish-rich wetlands near the headwaters.
The first hydroelectric dam, Copco 1 (named for the California Oregon Power Co.), was built in 1918. Others followed: Copco 2 (1925), J.C. Boyle (1958) and Iron Gate (1964). They were 400 vertical feet of water stoppers and lake makers within a 45-mile stretch straddling the Oregon-California border. Salmon had no way to get through.
For decades, tribes and environmentalists, seeing and feeling an ecological and cultural disaster unfold, demanded the removal of dams and the restoration of the river. Voices went largely unheard until 2002, when tens of thousands of dead salmon and steelhead trout washed up on the lower banks of the river.
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The dam-removal movement gained momentum, and politicians and other power brokers slowly acknowledged that the relatively low amounts of power generated by the dams in such a rural region was not enough reason to continue suffocating the river and its tributaries.
In small creeks that feed into the Upper Klamath, hundreds of miles from the ocean, salmon were spotted 11 days after the last dam fell last fall.
By then, a small group of river runners, having recruited and extensively trained about three dozen Indigenous teens growing up along the Klamath, had grand plans to be the first group to paddle the length of the freed river.
Two smaller dams remain, upriver from the dismantled ones and not far from the headwaters. The paddlers will have to portage around the dams. The tribes would like them gone, too.
Then 'all of our relatives can be connected again,' said William Ray, Jr., the chair of the Klamath Tribes, a consortium of the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin people.
Recently, some of those teens, preparing for the expedition and practicing their skills, paddled through a section that had been the floor of Copco Lake for more than a century. They could see the fading shoreline of the old lake, as the river found its old course.
Water has memory, tribal elders say.
On riffling current, the paddlers passed houses that had stood lakeside for decades, now sitting far from the river's edge, their old docks leading nowhere. They passed a graveyard of bald trees, still standing, that had been submerged for years. A boat anchor hung, tangled, on one of the naked gray limbs.
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Entering Kikacéki Canyon, they passed the site of Copco 1. Almost all signs of the massive structure have been removed. This year's river runners might not realize it had been there just last summer.
Rush Sturges, 40, is a professional kayaker and filmmaker who grew up on California's Salmon River, a tributary of the Klamath. His parents ran a kayak school for 40 years. Sturges knew all about the fight to remove the dams.
'But I didn't know a single Indigenous kayaker before this,' he said.
In 2021, he met Weston Boyles, 38, founder and executive director of Ríos to Rivers, a global organization advocating Indigenous youth and rivers around the world through education and exchange programs. They discussed life after the dams.
Shouldn't Native children be the first to paddle the full stretch of the re-flowing river?
Paddle Tribal Waters was born. It soon recruited Danielle Frank, a 21-year-old Hoopa Valley tribe member known as Ducky and a dynamo of activism and advocacy work in the Klamath Basin. She helped connect the organizers to the tribes.
The long-term plan for Paddle Tribal Waters is to connect children to the rejuvenated river. Some students, like Jayden -- 'one of the most talented kayakers I've ever seen learn the sport,' Sturges said -- have organized kayak clubs in their tribes.
The short-term plan was less philosophical. 'We wanted to train these kids to lead this first descent,' Sturges said.
With stretches that include technical and dangerous Class IV rapids (Class VI is not navigable), the Klamath is not for novices. So Paddle Tribal Waters ran multiweek summer programs in 2022, 2023 and 2024, teaching 45 teens how to paddle white water. At night, they took tribe-led classes on activism, ecosystems and cultural knowledge. Some then took part in semester-long school-and-paddle programs around the world.
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About 14 youth and seven staff members plan to paddle the entire stretch of river. Another 30 or so teens will join the party midway. They will camp on the river's banks. There will be planned ceremonial meetings and meals with tribal members and families. Food and gear will be shuttled in at various access points, part of a coordinated and complex logistical challenge.
Along the way, the young kayakers will be encouraged to help name rapids, maybe in native languages, so that the many commercial outfits that run the river in rafts and kayaks might adopt them.
The group is scheduled to arrive at the Pacific Ocean ahead of a large-scale celebration July 12 and a symposium the next day.
But that was still 300 miles and several days away. Scarlett Schroeder, 13, and Coley Miller, 14, who belong to tribes on the Upper Klamath, daydreamed about reaching the ocean about a month from now.
'We're definitely going to go down in history,' Scarlett said.
'Our grandkids will know,' Coley said.
'Our great-, great-, great-grandkids will know,' Scarlett said.
At the headwaters near Chiloquin, Oregon, not far from Crater Lake National Park, the kayakers and supporters gathered in a circle near the water's edge. Leaders from the Klamath tribes took turns explaining the significance of the 'sacred journey.'
The kayakers gathered in a circle in the water. They let out a collective shout, then began to paddle away. Soon they disappeared around the bend, headed for history.
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