Chinook salmon on their method to spawning, view from Ballard Locks in Seattle|image by Wlodzimierz
Recalling, the huge story of 2025 was the amazing healing of the Klamath River Following the last elimination of the 4 lower dams (Iron Gate, Copco 1 & 2, and J.C. Boyle) late in 2015, 2025 ended up being the “Year of the Return.” Reports from California Trout and the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department validated what optimists barely attempted to hope: by late October 2025, over 7,700 fall-run Chinook had actually passed the previous Iron Gate website, pressing into tributaries like the Williamson and Sprague rivers that have not seen anadromous fish in over a century. The images flowing on Instagram– silver kings keeping in water that was a stagnant tank simply 18 months earlier– are absolutely nothing except spiritual for the angling neighborhood.
Nevertheless, the state of mind is starkly various in the Pacific Northwest’s Snake River basin. While the Klamath streams totally free, the battle to breach the lower Snake River dams struck a legal concrete wall. In a sharp turnaround of 2024’s momentum, the brand-new political administration relocated June 2025 to rescind Biden-era contracts that led the way for breaching. Online forum chatter on regional online forums turned heated, with anglers discussing the “energy vs. ecology” compromise as salmon returns continue to flatline. This might stay the single most polarizing subject in the fly fishing zeitgeist as we move into 2026.
