Sum

mer 2

00

7 •

$3

C o n s e r v i n g , R e s t o r i n g & E d u c a t i n g T h r o u g h F l y F i s h i n gfedflyfishers.org

THE OSPREY’S

FLIGHT

SNAKE RIVER fisheries

LONG

IN CRISISSalmon and steelheadcaught in politics ofextinction

TIPS FORmuddy waterBASS FISHING

FEATURESM

ag

azine of th

e Fed

eration of F

ly Fish

ers • S

umm

er 20

07

Volum

e XL, N

o. III

DEPARTMENTS16 Last Call for Conclave

Reel fun for everyone in Livingston, Montana.

21 Sudden Death Overtime for Snake River SalmonPart IV in a long-term look at the status of this important fishery. By Ed Chaney

27 Freemont RiverA fabulous desert fishing excersion. By Harley Reno

30 The Osprey’s Long Flight Celebrating its 20th anniversary. By Jim Yuskavitch

34 Muddy Water Bass Six steps to better bass fishing. By Terry and Roxanne Wilson

46 Project Healing Waters Events help connect wounded vets to fly fishing.

Cover photo: Salmon circle in Idaho’s Selway RiverWilderness. See the full photo, and story of theSnake River Basin’s endangered fisheries, onpage 21.

Photo by Dick Walker/Alpha 1 Photography

This page: Combat fishing for spring chinook at themouth of the Little Salmon where it enters theSalmon River • Story page 21

Photo by Bill Mullins

5 Just Fishing The FFF is getting things done.By R.P. Van Gytenbeek. And, the implications teaching fly fishing has toour youth. By Ron Cordes, Ph.D., J.D.

6 Letters8 I Am a Member

Meet Lenny Jagoda.

9 Home WatersFly-fishing news and notes.

36 Biology on the FlySpruce moths. By Ken W. Davis

38 Woman’s OutlookThinking about teaching your wife to fly fish? Think again! By Carol Oglesby

40 The Fly Rod CornerThe future of rods and rod building. By Dave Mosley

42 At the ViseThe Come and Get Me. By Al and Gretchen Beatty, with Tim Blount

44 Fly BoxSteelhead flies. By Verne Lehmberg

45 Fly Tips How to keep material in place. By Bob Lay

Flyfisher Summer 2007 [21]

Sudden Death Overtime for Wild SnakeRiver Basin Salmon and Steelhead PART IV

In the early 1960s and ’70s,American Indian fishermenwere being arrested for trying

to exercise their treaty-guaranteedrights to fish for salmon and steelheadin the Columbia River and tributaries.

During this same period, theArmy Corps of Engineers built fourlarge pork barrel dams on the lowerSnake River commons in southeasternWashington. The Corps negligentlyfailed to design the dams to allowjuvenile salmon and steelhead tomigrate from the vast Snake RiverBasin to the Pacific Ocean.

To date, the four dams and reservoirs have killed and wastedmore salmon and steelhead than Indian fishermen caughtthe preceding 1,000 years. That’s a rough estimate. AllSnake River salmon and steelhead now are listed as threat-

ened or endangered under theEndangered Species Act (ESA). Nocitations have been issued.

For more than a decade, Federalgovernment agencies repeatedly, andwith increasing desperation, have triedto shield the lower Snake River damsfrom the ESA. In late May 2007, theGeorge W. Bush Administration triedagain with a plan to implement a shop-ping list of non-dam related actions itclaims would offset the damage by thedams, which would stay in place andoperate much as they do now.

In fact, the administration’s planwould perpetuate the dams’ egregiousongoing social, economic, cultural and

ecological damage throughout the many-thousand-mile-longmigratory ranges of the fish. It would put wild Snake Riversalmon and steelhead at even greater risk of extinction. Itwould subvert the intent of the ESA, the law of last resortfor threatened and endangered species great and small.

FlashbackPrevious articles in this series summarize the dark

history of the struggle to protect wild Snake River salmonand steelhead and the people who depend on them.

These fish are one of the world’s most magnificent natural assets, once numbering millions of adult fish annu-ally. For 10,000 years, since the Ice Age, they contributed tofisheries thousands of miles along the Pacific Coast and1,000 miles inland.

By Ed Chaney

In 2001 excellent ocean conditions following severalyears of high winter snow-packs allowed for thelargest salmon in-migrationin years in the Snake RiverBasin. Dick Walker capturedthis extraordinary shot of apod circling in a salmonhole in Idaho’s Selway River Wilderness.

The law locks upboth man and woman

Who steal the goosefrom off the common

But lets the greaterfelon loose

Who steals the commonfrom the goose

Anonymous, from Social and Industrial

History of England, Edward Potts Cheyney, 1901

Snake River salmon and steelhead spawn in the largestcontiguous wilderness and roadless land complex in

the Lower 48. It includes more than 4.4 millionacres in six wilderness areas, more than 700

miles in 12 Wild and Scenic Rivers, andnearly 1 million acres withintwo National Recreation Areas.These vast areas are the safedeposit box for a genetic heritage millions of yearsold, since the Ice Age

uniquely adapted to infinite habitatniches extending nearly 1,000 miles inland.

Present-day SnakeRiver salmonhabitat

Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of articles on the threatenedextinction of the wild salmon and steelhead in the Inland Northwest’s SnakeRiver Basin. See the Winter 2004, Spring 2004 and Spring 2005 issues.

Photo by Dick Walker/Alpha 1 Photography

[22] Flyfisher Spring 2007

Over time their numbers dwin-dled as their spawning and rearinghabitats were diminished in quantityand quality. A vast area of high qualityhabitat remains, much of it legally pro-tected in Wilderness Areas, NationalRecreation Areas, and Wild andScenic Rivers. The Army Corps ofEngineers’ four dams on the lowerSnake River threaten to make thatlegal protection meaningless.

Congress authorized the damswith the intent that Snake Riversalmon and steelhead and the people

who depended on them would be sub-stantially protected. Hatcheries wouldbe built upstream to mitigate for thefish habitat inundated by 130 miles ofreservoirs behind the dams and for theunavoidable annual mortality of juve-nile and adult fish migrating throughthe lower Snake River to and from the ocean.

The Corps’ design for the damsincluded fish ladders to allow adultfish to migrate upstream, albeit notwithout difficulty and some loss.Despite repeated warnings from fish-eries experts, the Corps’ design negli-gently made no provision for juvenilesalmon and steelhead to migratethrough the reservoirs and past thedams. Disaster happened.

The Corps responded by spend-ing many millions of dollars retrofittingthe dams with various accessoriesdesigned to reduce the damage. It was like pasting butterfly wings on pyramids in hopes of making them fly.The fundamental design error couldnot be overcome.

It is difficult to imagine what theCorps could have done to make the

dams and reservoirs more deadly todownstream migrants. During chronicyears of low runoff, there is insufficientcurrent to carry young fish throughthe series of slack water reservoirs.Their travel time has been increasedfive to 15 times over what it was whenthe free-flowing river swept young fishdownstream. The damaging effects ofthis delay are compounded by highwater temperatures and large popula-tions of predator fish that thrive inreservoirs. Many migrants don’t makeit to the dams.

Those that do are stressed andconfronted with a series of enormousconcrete structures where they are pre-sented with four alternatives, all ofwhich are very unfriendly to small,fragile fish.

Driven by the primal urge tomigrate, the young fish are forced tocommit an unnatural act and dive 50to 70 feet and then: 1) be suckedthrough the turbines; 2) be screenedout of the turbine intakes into a bypasssystem and be routed through thedam and dumped back into the river

downstream; or 3) be routed to a col-lection facility and transported down-stream in river barges or trucks; 4) besucked through the spillway in themiddle of the dam and be spewed outthe downstream side. Either way it’snot a joy ride.

Spilling water and juvenile fishthrough the dams instead of running itthrough the turbines proved to be theleast deadly option. Bonneville PowerAdministration, which sells the powergenerated by the federal dams, doesn’tlike that. Spill reduces the amount of

power Bonneville can sell to pay for itsenormous nuclear power plant andenergy futures gambling debts, as wellas to keep power costs low, its custom -ers happy and politicians compliant.

The Corps eventually conceded thedams and reservoirs were lethal to juve-nile migrants (a fact the apologists forextinction still can’t internalize). Itresolved to strain most of them out ofthe river, put them in barges and shipthem 400 or so miles downstream to thelower Columbia River. Unfortunately,fragile wild salmon and steelhead,

The Snake River is the largest tributary to the Columbia River. It originates in the state ofWyoming and flows 1,038 miles [1671 km] to its confluence with the Columbia. The Snakedrains an area of about 109,000 square miles [282,310 km2].

It’s about the money, of course. The PorkAlliance covets every dime it can squeezefrom the Federal Columbia River PowerSystem and insists it would lose too muchmoney if it had to stop stealing the lowerSnake River commons from the goose.

The Corps claims it would cost more to fix thelower Snake River dams than to breach them.The cost of breaching is translated into prog-nostications of economic doom for the region.This is The Big Lie used to frighten and ener-gize the rubes, which gives politicians pretextfor shamelessly going along with the con.

The Big Lie is based on the false premise thatthe people of the Northwest must pay theentire cost of fixing the mess created by theCorps’ negligence. The Corps did not build thedams Congress authorized. It ignored con-gressional intent. It would be irrational andwithout precedent to saddle the people of theNorthwest, including the victims of the Corps’negligence, with the full cost of cleaning upthe mess.

The cost of breaching the four dams – includ-ing keeping whole waterway shippers and ahandful of affected irrigators – properly

treated as a federal obligation and spreadacross the nation would have an impercepti-ble economic effect on the nation and a largepositive economic effect on the region. Thecost to the Northwest for replacing the lostpower – less than 5 percent of the region’scurrent firm energy production – over, say, 15years while sequentially breaching the dams,would be subsumed to insignificance in thecost of new power plants that will be neces-sary to meet growing regional demand.

It costs more to kill wild Snake River Basinsalmon and steelhead than it would cost to

HOW HAVE WE COME TO THIS? AND FOR WHAT?

Flyfisher Summer 2007 [23]

already stressed from navigating thereservoirs, didn’t take well to the roughhandling and Rube Goldberg substitutefor natural downstream migration.

Barging was hailed as a way toreduce mortality of juvenile migrantsat and between the dams. In fact,barged fish returned as adults at aboutthe same rate as fish that hadn’t beenbarged, even though the latter had topass a gauntlet of up to eight damsand reservoirs to reach the ocean. Thiswas no improvement. Consequently,the number of adult wild fish returning

to the Snake River Basin continuedthe perilous downward trajectory.

In 1980, Congress responded tothe deepening crisis with strong fishprotection mandates in what is com-monly called the Northwest PowerAct. It said salmon and steelhead mustbe provided with adequate quantityand quality of flow at and between thefederal dams on the Snake andColumbia rivers. Fish must have equi-table treatment with all other uses ofthe Federal Columbia River PowerSystem, including power production.Salmon and steelhead must berestored to formerly productive levels,not just prevented from going extinct.

The act also contains a legaltrump card that makes the “ColumbiaRiver Pork Alliance” tremble with rageand trepidation: the cost of modifyingthe hydrosystem to fulfill these man-dates cannot be used as an excuse notto do so. The U.S. Court of Appealshas so ruled, and the U.S. SupremeCourt declined to hear the appeal.

Longtime fish advocates, holdingthe quaint view that the rule of lawstill means something, breathed a sigh

of relief. It was premature. The Columbia River Basin is not

Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. It is apolitical fiefdom long ruled by theColumbia River Pork Alliance, a politi-cally powerful, regional clique of com-promised bureaucrats, monopolists,crony capitalists, entrenched pork bar-rel economic interests, and allied politi-cians who feed off public largess andeach other. It includes electric utilities,waterway transportation, Big Ag andenergy intensive industry. The energyfaction dominates: Bonneville is the

goose that lays the golden eggs andringmaster.

The Alliance defeated every pasteffort to substantially reduce the fed-eral dams’ damage to salmon andsteelhead and related economies. It setout to defeat the salmon restorationintent of the Power Act. It succeeded.This success made listing Snake Riversalmon and steelhead under theEndangered Species Act a self-fulfillingprophecy. It soon came to pass.

The listings elicited the customarywailing and gnashing of teeth andprophecies of doom for life as weknow it in the Northwest. The PorkAlliance, of course, blamed its victimsfor causing all this trouble. It set out todefeat the ESA. This made it inevitablethat the federal courts eventually wouldintervene. And this, too, came to pass.The Alliance blamed radical environ-mentalists and activist judges.

Using the ESA toProtect Dams

National Marine Fisheries Service(NMFS) has the duty to identify andprescribe remedies for things that jeop-ardize recovery of listed anadromoussalmon and steelhead. For the lowerSnake River Dams, NMFS analysesproposed actions by the federal “actionagencies,” Bonneville, the Corps andBureau of Reclamation, which controlssome upstream water storage reser-voirs. It issues a formal finding called aBiological Opinion (BiOp) that is sub-ject to judicial review.

The Middle Fork of the Salmon River was the first Wild and Scenic River in the nation. It rises inand flows through the 2.4-million-acre Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, largestwilderness in the lower 48.

“ … It is now painfully, inarguablyobvious that the salmon and steelhead runs of the upper ColumbiaBasin will not survive the federalagencies’ continued refusal to pro-vide the comparatively small fractionof main-stem flows necessary to mini-mize salmon and steelhead mortali-ties at main-stem hydroelectric dams.

“It is now equally clear the federalhydropower agencies in theColumbia Basin will not and perhapscannot change their traditional attitudes and operational procedureswithout a direct congressional mandate to do so.

“It is my view that the failure toinclude such language will inevitablyresult in the virtual extinction of whatonce were the largest, most valuablesegments of the world’s largest chinook salmon and steelhead runs.”

Testimony of Ed Chaney, director of theNorthwest Resource Information Center,invited by U.S. Rep. John Dingell in Boise,Idaho, during field hearing on proposedPacific Northwest Electric Power Planningand Conservation Act, December 14, 1978.

Phot

o by

Bill

Mul

lins

restore them to productive levels. The ring-leaders of the Pork Alliance know this.

It’s not just about the money. It’s about covering up and evading responsibility forthe horrific human and ecological conse-quences of egregious errors and misman-agement. It’s about defending, at all cost to others, the incestuous regional culture of compromised bureaucracy, crony capi-talism, monopolies, political hegemony,and the personal power and sinecures thatculture bestows as reward for betrayingthe public trust.

[24] Flyfisher Summer 2007

NMFS produced its first BiOp in1993. It acknowledged the lower SnakeRiver dams and reservoirs jeopardizethe fish, but it waffled on remedies.Lawsuits were quickly filed in federalcourt. In March, 1994 U.S. District

Court Judge Malcolm Marsh said theBiOp needed a “major overhaul” andsent NMFS back to the drawing board.NMFS tried again in 1995 with thesame strategy – protect the damsagainst the ESA – with the same result.

In the following 2000 BiOp,NMFS persisted in trying to makejeopardy disappear by offsetting thedamaging effects of the dams with avariety of non-dam-related actions ofhypothetical effectiveness. U.S. DistrictCourt Judge James A. Reddenrejected that approach and sent NMFShome for another redo.

Meanwhile, the George W. BushAdministration had come into power.When NMFS unveiled its 2004 BiOpfor Judge Redden, it averred the damsno longer jeopardized the fish. Thisdramatic reversal was based on threebold core assertions:

1) The four lower Snake Riverdams and their reservoirs are part ofthe landscape. They were built beforethe ESA became law in 1973 (the firstdam was completed in 1961, the last in1975) and, therefore, the dams andreservoirs per se are exempt from theESA. Only the operations of the proj-ects are within the act’s purview.

2) The ESA did not require thatthe listed species actually be recov-ered, only that the greatly diminishedpopulations be stabilized and notallowed to get any lower.

3) A laundry list of new,

improved, non-dam-related actions,including tributary habitat improve-ment projects, predator control, tinker-ing with hatchery policies, etc., plusexperimental improvements in juvenilefish passage at the dams (a new add-

on spillway weir does look promising)would, in time, offset the damagingeffect of the dams sufficiently to stabi-lize the listed populations. Lawsuitsquickly followed.

In September 2006, Judge Reddenruled the 2004 BiOp also violated theESA. NMFS was ordered to collaboratewith the action agencies and, withoutprecedent, also with state fisheries agencies and tribes, to come up with alegally and biologically defensible BiOp.Meanwhile, the Bush Administrationappealed Redden’s decision to the

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Itwould prove to be another bad hairday for NMFS and the administration.

On April 9, 2007, the NinthCircuit upheld Judge Redden’s deci-sion on the 2004 BiOp. The three-

judge panel unanimously held that,among other flaws, hiding the fourlower Snake River dams in the land-scape and only considering the effectsof their operations, “amounted to littlemore than analytical slight of hand,manipulating the variables to achieve a‘no jeopardy’ finding.”

Justice Thomas wrote, “Statisticallyspeaking, using the 2004 BiOp’s analyt-ical framework, the dead fish werereally alive. The ESA requires a morerealistic, common sense examination.”

The appeals court also upheld

This 1973 photo shows a catch of spring chinook from the Middle Fork Salmon River twoyears before the uppermost Corps of Engineers’ dam was completed on the lower SnakeRiver. Salmon fishing in this pristine wilderness/wild and scenic river and its tributaries wasclosed in 1978 and has remained closed for 34 consecutive years to date. Prior to the fourlower Snake River dams, as much as 1,000 miles of stream within the vast Salmon River Basinin Idaho were open to fishing for wild spring/summer chinook for a month or two every year.In 2007 about 100 miles of stream were opened four days a week, some areas for a fewweeks, others for a couple of months. Only hatchery fish could be retained.

Photo by Middle Fork Lodge, courtesy Idaho Rivers U

nited

IT’S NOT A JOY RIDEFish that pass through turbines are exposedto extreme pressure changes and mechanical injuries while going through the turbines. Some smolts are guided into a collection and bypass system by intakescreens. From the intake screens, theguided smolts are returned in three secondsback to the surface (about 20 meters) intoa turbulent gatewell. Smolts go from one tothree and back to one atmospheric pres-sure in about ten seconds. At Lower GraniteDam they are then piped from the fish collection area nearly 0.4 km to below the

dam at high velocity (9 meters per second)and pressured through two 90-degreeturns, experiencing high turbulence andrapid deceleration at the end. Smolts arepassed through a device to separate fish bysize, dewatered and then passed through atube that leads to a PIT-tag detector.Remember, this account describes the passage through only one of eight dams.

From “Evidence Linking Delayed Mortality ofSnake River Salmon to the Earlier HydrosystemExperience,” Budy, Thiede, Petrosky andShaller. North American Journal of FisheriesManagement, 2002.

This Rube Goldberg contraption at McNary Dam,located on the Columbia River below its confluencewith the Snake River, pipes juvenile salmon and steelhead strained from the river to collection facilities to load onbarges and trucks andbe hauled to thelower ColumbiaRiver.

Photo by Steve Pettit

Flyfisher Summer 2007 [25]

Redden’s rejection of the administra-tion’s assertion that the ESA does notrequire the listed species be recovered,only that greatly diminished popula-tions must be stabilized. “Under thisapproach, a listed species could begradually destroyed, so long as eachstep of the path to destruction is suffi-ciently modest. This type of slow slideinto oblivion is one of the very ills theESA seeks to prevent.”

Back to the FutureOn May 21, 2007, the action agen-

cies released their new proposal torecover threatened Snake Riversalmon and steelhead. It was ceremo-niously passed on to NMFS – whichhelped write it – to “analyze” for itsnext Biological Opinion on whether ornot the proposed actions jeopardizesurvival of wild Snake River salmonand steelhead.

The court-ordered collaborationwith the states and tribes turned out tobe like Lucy holding the football forCharlie Brown. State and tribal recom-mendations that deviated from thefeds’ preserve-the-dams-at-any-cost-to-others game plan were ignored. Thefix was in.

It was not realistic to expect anysubstantial change in administrationstrategy. Like Bonnie and Clyde,NMFS and the action agencies havecaused such enormous damage andare in so deep they had no choice butto brazen it out to the end. It followsthat their new proposal basically ismore of the same-old same-old, withsome bold and ominous new twists.

The new proposal continues to try to shield the dams with non-dam-related actions, promising enough fishon paper, sometime in the future, toachieve minimal population targetsthat NMFS guesses would constitute“recovery.” While NMFS tests its high-risk hypothesis, real fish and real people would continue to suffer.

Improving degraded tributaryhabitat is a centerpiece of the agen-cies’ proposal. It’s a puzzler. Vast areasof existing pristine habitat are chroni-cally, perilously under-seeded withwild salmon and steelhead. Improvingcurrently degraded habitat and saltingit with hatchery fish won’t change that.

The agencies also propose toreduce spill at the dams (proven the

least deadly passage option for juvenilefish) during peak juvenile fish migra-tion periods, and to eliminate spill forup to a month at the tail end of themigration period in August (that’s bigbucks spilling over the dams). Agreater percentage of juvenile migrantswould be collected and barged to thelower Columbia River.

Their proposal would make worsethe lower Snake River reservoirs’ dam-aging effects on juvenile migrants bystopping the (already inadequate)releases of water from storage reservoirspresently used to help propel young fishthrough the slack water reservoirs.

In short, the federal agencies pro-pose to tighten their iron grip andsqueeze a few more dollars out of thelower Snake River commons. That’sbold. That’s we-stole-it-fair-and-square-and-intend-to-keep-it bold.

They would perpetuate the dams’ongoing social, economic, cultural andecological damage throughout themany-thousand-mile-long migratoryranges of the fish. They would put ateven greater risk of extinction wildsalmon and steelhead still produced invast, pristine habitats – fish that are

the genetic seed corn for restoring theruns to productive levels.

It is very hard work not to under-stand this. Many have made the neces-sary effort. The action agencies andNMFS understand this. Judge Reddenalso appears to understand it, so thereis hope.

At some point in the foreseeablefuture – though definitely not by theoriginal July 31, 2007, deadline –NMFS will deliver Judge Redden anew BiOp. In due course the judgewill rule on its legal adequacy underthe ESA. Lawsuits will follow. Andmore lawsuits.

There is reason for cautious opti-mism that the law of last resort forcreatures great and small may at longlast force the Corps and Bonneville tocomply with the will of the people andintent of Congress in authorizing occu-pation and use of the lower SnakeRiver commons. Perhaps it will hap-pen within the lifetimes of some of themany good men and women whofought and sacrificed for so manyyears to hold the line against thepredatory Pork Alliance to make possi-ble that day of reckoning.

Calling John DingellThe Endangered Species Act cannot

ensure Snake River Basin salmon andsteelhead will be restored to formerlyproductive levels. It cannot cure theunderlying failure of governance andserial betrayal of the public trust. Thoseare jobs for Congress.

Around the time the last of the fourlower Snake River dams was nearingcompletion, thedominant energyfaction of the PorkAlliance was shop-ping draft congres-sional legislation toincrease the flow ofpork from East toWest and to spreadit more widely.

A small groupof veteran Idahosalmon and steel-head advocatessmelled more trou-ble brewing. Theypersuaded U.S. Sen.Frank Church ofIdaho to intervene. He added a shortparagraph to the draft energy bill thateventually blossomed into the salmonand steelhead restoration mandates in thePacific Northwest Electric Power Planningand Conservation Act of 1980.

Church got the ball rolling. U.S.Rep. John Dingell, a MichiganDemocrat, then chairman of the HouseSubcommittee on Energy and Power ofthe Committee on Interstate Commerceand Foreign Commerce, quarterbackedit to the finish line.

More than a quarter century andseveral billion dollars later, wild SnakeRiver salmon and steelhead and thepeople who depend on them are inmore dire straits than before the act waspassed. No citations have been issued. Noone has been held accountable.

The time never will be riper forCongress to investigate how the salmonand steelhead restoration mandates ofthe Northwest Power Act were sub-verted, to amend the act, and to bringresponsible public entities to heel.Bonneville should be stripped of itspower of the purse over fish restorationthat it blatantly uses as a velvet fist toblackmail, bribe and intimidate in serv-ice to the Pork Alliance. The hopelesslydysfunctional regional council estab-lished to oversee implementation of the

act should be replaced with a new insti-tution charged with fiduciary duty forwhich it can be held legally accountable.

The Northwest congressional delega-tion will not initiate reform of the PowerAct. Many members will strongly resistreform out of fear it would tip over thepork barrel. This tangled political webcries out for a classic deus ex machina.

The Lone Ranger is no longer on call. Shane never came back.Fortuitously, Dingellnow is chairman ofthe influential HouseCommittee onEnergy andCommerce. He hasa very big stake inthe salmon and steel-head restoration pro-visions of the PowerAct. He fought hardfor passage of theEndangered SpeciesAct. What bettercongressional cham-pion for wild SnakeRiver salmon and

steelhead in their darkest hour?

Bearing WitnessWe are eyewitnesses to a

struggle of epic proportions. Itwill determine if the will of thepeople and the rule of law canprevail over failed governmententities that slipped their publicinterest moorings and collabo-rated with pork barrel economicinterests to serially betray thepublic trust.

Wild Snake River Basinsalmon and steelhead are agenetic heritage millions of yearsin the making. For 10,000 yearssince the Ice Age, they uniquelyadapted to infinite habitat nichesas far as 1,000 miles inland.Their fate hangs in the balance.And now it may depend on twomen, a federal judge and aMichigan congressman. What’swrong with this picture?

Stay tuned. The pork barrel apologists for extinction are starting tosweat. It’s going to get interesting. Ed Chaney has nearly 40 years professional experience with Columbia/Snake rivers salmonand steelhead issues. He lives in Eagle, Idaho. Thearticles in this series and related information areposted at www.nwric.org.

In a new development at press time,on June 20 U.S. District Court JudgeJames Redden told the federal actionagencies their latest proposal at bestcontains few improvements overwhat he previously rejected as inade-quate. He added that at worst it“represents a retreat” from relativelysuccessful spill and reservoir flowenhancement, and would increasereliance on removing fish from theriver and barging them downstream.

Redden made clear he expects thenew BiOp, now due October 31,2007, to do more to recover thelisted salmon and steelhead. If it failsto do so, he said, “Consequencesare going to be very severe.”

Redden’s comments followed a June 13 ruling by U.S. District CourtJudge John C. Coughenour nullify-ing a Bush administration policy that included hatchery fish whendetermining the status of wildsalmon and steelhead for protectionby the Endangered Species Act.

“The purpose of the EndangeredSpecies Act is to promote populationsthat are self-sustaining withouthuman interference,” Coughenourwrote. “If the ESA did not require

that species be returned to a state inwhich they were naturally self-sus-taining, preservation of the habitat ofthe species would be unnecessary.”

This commonsensical ruling unravels another thread of theAdministration’s effort to underminethe ESA.Anti-ESA forces areexpected to appeal JudgeCoughenour’s ruling to the NinthCircuit Court of Appeals.

AT PRESS TIME Judge Redden Sends Feds Warning

Phot

o co

urte

sy A

rmy

Cor

ps o

f Eng

inee

rs

The first of the lower Snake River dams, Ice Harbor, wascompleted in 1961 about 10 miles (16.1 km) upstreamfrom the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers.The last of the four-dam complex was completed in 1975.

[26] Flyfisher Summer 2007

WRITE HIMCongressman John Dingell is a cham-pion of the Endangered Species Act of1973 and of the salmon and steelheadrestoration provisions of the NorthwestPower Act of 1980. Can he be per-suaded to step into the breach onemore time in behalf of wild Snake RiverBasin salmon and steelhead and thepeople who depend on them in this,their darkest hour?

Honorable John Dingell2328 Rayburn House Office BuildingWashington, DC 20515(202) 225-4071E-mail him through his Web site:www.house.gov/dingell