Here are the morning’s top stories on Friday, July 4, 2025…
- The Klamath River flows some 268 miles from inland Southern Oregon to coastal Northern California before emptying into the Pacific, crossing high deserts, mountain ranges, and forests. The Klamath watershed is also the ancestral homeland of the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Shasta and Klamath tribes. And it’s an area prime for recreation, especially in the summer months. And the Klamath River is once again free flowing after being held back by four dams for the better part of a century.
Klamath River Comes Back To Life
The Klamath Basin is a large, beautiful area of southern Oregon and far Northern California. This area has long been celebrated for fishing, hunting, agriculture. The river has been the center of life for many tribes who rely on salmon and trout for food. There are rich cultures still there, and their lives revolve around the fish and the river. The Klamath was once the third-largest salmon run on the entire West Coast. And those numbers really crashed after the construction of four major dams during the early part of the last century.
The dams had produced electric power, but they weren’t designed to coexist well with fish. And dams have a limited lifespan. It would have cost a ton of money to update them. And there was much more support to take them down. This was something tribes and others had wanted for decades. And this effort has allowed the river to be reborn in a more natural state. Something else in this area is that land is increasingly being returned to tribal control. Recently, about 15,000 acres were turned over from a conservation group to the Yurok. So this is a time of a lot of change and revitalization along the Klamath.