On a cool, sunny morning in March 2000, a small crowd gathered in the Deschutes National Forest along Spring Creek, a tributary of central Oregon’s Metolius River. The onlookers, a mix of government personnel, school kids, reporters, corporate representatives and a few curious locals, fell silent as Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Chief Delvis Heath and tribal spiritual leader Fred Wallulatem gave a blessing in their native language. Then, under the watchful eye of their teachers, the kids moved forward to receive buckets of small fish to dump into the creek. It was over quickly. But if all goes as planned, this brief ceremony will someday be recalled as a historic occasion—the first time that chinook and sockeye salmon had swum the waters of this crystal-clear Oregon river since a downriver hydroelectric project blocked their spawning runs more than thirty-five years ago.

It’s all part of a long-term effort to return two native salmon species to the river. But there are myriad problems to overcome, not the least of which is getting the fish over the three dams on the Deschutes River—the Pelton-Round Butte Hydroelectric Project—of which the Metolius is an upper tributary.

“Fish passage is the main impact of the project,” says Don Ratliff, chief of aquatic biologists for Portland General Electric, the Portland, Oregon-based utility company that owns and operates the dams. “We’ve been working towards this for the past six years.”

There are still many ifs and a lot of work to do before success is declared. But if that day comes, it will be due largely to the efforts of a disparate group of people, from corporate executives to environmentalists and agency fish biologists to American Indians, who together believe that in the long run they can pull it off.

Born of springs at the base of Black Butte on the east slope of the Cascades, the Metolius River is a natural wonder. It emerges fully formed from its source at a nearly constant forty degrees Fahrenheit, flowing north for almost thirty miles through a bright forest of ponderosa pines, firs and cedars before vanishing into the slack water of Lake Billy Chinook, the reservoir formed by the uppermost impoundment, Round Butte Dam.

The river drains about 149,000 acres of the Deschutes National Forest, through which most of it flows, and another 90,000 acres of the adjacent Warm Springs Indian Reservation, a 1,000-square-mile piece of mountains and rangeland that’s home to about 4,000 Paiutes, Warm Springs and Wascos. In 1988, the Metolius was designated a wild and scenic river.

This delightful environment, thirty-five miles northwest of Bend, has drawn summer tourists since the late 1800s, when ranchers and their families came here for a brief respite from the summer heat of the open rangeland to the east. Today there is a small cluster of bed-and-breakfasts, lodges, restaurants, private homes, summer cabins, campgrounds and a general store along the river in the vicinity of the small town of Camp Sherman.

Many of those who come to the Metolius these days are drawn by the opportunity to fish for its redband trout, a unique form of rainbow trout. The Metolius River basin is a stronghold for bull trout as well, listed as threatened in 1998 under the Endangered Species Act. Nevertheless, they too provide a limited recreational fishery under provisions of the act, which permits angling for listed species under carefully controlled management conditions. Mountain whitefish, not much sought after by anglers, are found in abundance in the river’s deep, slow-moving pools.

The Metolius once offered a complete native fishery. The name Metolius is interpreted one way from local American Indian tribes to mean the smell of rotting salmon, alluding to the profuse spawning run that ended in the river’s headwaters.

Historically, runs of sockeye salmon reached the Metolius to spawn from mid-September into November, after first ascending the Columbia and Deschutes rivers on their 300-plus-mile-long journey from the sea. The eggs, buried in the river gravel in nests, which the females dug, hatched in the spring. The young fish spent one year in the river before swimming to the ocean in March or April, growing to adulthood there and returning to spawn and die after one to four years at sea.

Travelers to the area in the mid and late 1880s reported that spring chinook were especially abundant. These fish ascended the river to spawn each spring, their fry emerging from the gravel early the following spring. As with sockeye, the juvenile chinook stayed in the river for a year before going to sea, returning to spawn in two to four years.

These salmon runs, part of a larger population that spawned in the upper Deschutes River basin, contributed to the American Indian economy and culture and later, as European-Americans settled the region, to the commercial and sportfishing industries. But by the late 1950s, in spite of an ongoing hatchery program, the runs in the Metolius, as well as throughout the upper basin, were dwindling. By the following decade, they were gone.

The culprit was the construction of the Pelton-Round Butte Hydroelectric Project on the Deschutes River north of Madras and below the mouths of the Crooked and Metolius rivers. Finished in 1965 and capable of producing more than 400,000 kilowatts of power, the project consists of Round Butte Dam, Pelton Dam and the Pelton Reregulating Dam.

Although a fish passage system was built to help upstream migrating salmon over the project, unexpected glitches arose. Many refused to use the fish ladder. Some made it upstream to spawn, but their sea-bound offspring vanished into the depths of 4,000-acre Lake Billy Chinook.

Fish biologists fiddled around with the system for a few years, trying to make it work, then gave up. The barrier created by the dams had ended not only the salmon runs on the Metolius River but also the salmon and steelhead runs on the Crooked and upper Deschutes rivers and their tributaries. But in the late 1990s, an opportunity arose to try to fix all that.

Like most private-sector hydroelectric dams on public waterways, the Pelton-Round Butte project was licensed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which issues thirty- to fifty-year licenses for hydroelectric projects in the United States and regulates the transmission and sale of natural gas, oil and wholesale electricity. And in 2001, the project’s operating license was going to expire.

The hydroelectric relicensing process is long and complex. Dam owners often begin the initial work a decade in advance. The process involves extensive public involvement and input from a host of state and federal agencies culminating in a final application describing the project in great detail.

The Pelton-Round Butte project was all the more complicated because part of it is located on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. The tribes are co-licensees with PGE for the lowermost Pelton Reregulating Dam and receives income for the electricity produced at that facility, and PGE pays the tribes for the use of their lands.

Because of this vested interest, the tribes prepared a competing application in the hope of wresting project ownership from PGE. The result of that challenge was an agreement struck in early 2000 between the tribes and the company to join forces to prepare a joint application to FERC, with each entity becoming a co-licensee for the entire project. It also gave the tribes the option to eventually purchase up to a 49.99 percent share of the project.

An important aspect of a FERC relicensing application is its assessment of a project’s impact on environmental, cultural, economic and social resources within the area. Because many dams were initially licensed at a time when their environmental impacts were not fully considered, relicensing offers the opportunity to mitigate for damage—especially since FERC and some government agencies can require a dam operator to meet certain conditions before a new license is issued. On rivers with current, or historical, runs of anadromous fish, fish passage over a dam is often a primary mitigation goal for fish advocates.

“The Department of the Interior and the Department of Commerce have conditioning authority in hydro relicensing,” explains Scott Carlon, fishery biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of the Department of Commerce. “And for hydro projects, that means fish passage.”

With this inevitability in mind, both the tribes and PGE employed technical teams made up of federal and state agency people, fisheries consultants, tribal members, conservationists and other interested parties to develop strategies to pass salmon over the project.

“We’re using the FERC relicensing process to take a second look at whether or not we should be putting anadromous fish back into their historic range above the project,” says PGE’s Ratliff. “It’s pretty obvious that using new information, new technology and new methodologies that we should make as good a try as possible.”

For the tribes, with their long cultural history intertwined with salmon, especially chinook, reestablishing salmon above the dams has been something long wished for. “The goal for the tribes,” says tribal fisheries biologist Mike Gauvin, “is to have a full complement of anadromous fish above and below the project.”

Although it will be another two to four years before the new hydroelectric license is finalized, along with its attached conditions, PGE and the tribes have moved into the early, experimental stage of the project, largely to shake out any unexpected problems.

Since the bulk of the river flows through the Sisters Ranger District of the Deschutes National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service is actively involved as well. “From a Forest Service perspective,” explains district fish biologist Mike Riehle, “we’re interested in seeing if reintroduction is feasible. There are lots of benefits to the forest to have the salmon back.”

In addition to the aesthetic benefits of restoring this misplaced piece of the river’s ecological puzzle, other pluses include the ocean-origin nutrients that the rotting carcasses of spawned-out salmon release, something that recent research is showing to have been an important component of inland Pacific Northwest forests. Salmon fry in the river would also provide more food for the native bull trout. And more than a few anglers are hoping they’ll live long enough to cast a salmon fly into the Metolius’s waters with a chance of actually catching one.

The Forest Service and PGE tested the waters—literally and figuratively—for eventual reintroduction during the winter of 1999-2000, incubating 74,000 chinook salmon eggs and 4,600 sockeye salmon eggs in four hatchboxes placed in tributary streams in the upper Metolius. (Hatchboxes contain trays that hold fish eggs. They are placed in a stream where water flowing through the box supplies the eggs with fresh water and oxygen as they incubate. When the eggs hatch, the fry remain in the box until they are ready to be released. Hatchboxes are believed to be a more natural way to artificially raise trout and salmon than in a traditional hatchery.) Of those, 43,800 chinook and 4,400 sockeye hatched and survived. They were released in early 2000.

Strictly speaking, the reintroduction phase has not yet begun. Reintroduction is in the experimental phase, working with salmon above the dams mainly to see how the young fish fare in the Metolius environment. “The reason for the hatchboxes,” says PGE fisheries biologist Scott Lewis, who is overseeing much of the fieldwork, “is to have naturally raised test fish [instead of fish raised in the artificial environment of a hatchery]. It wasn’t intended to be the start of the reintroduction.” There is also a study being conducted on the river by the U.S. Geological Survey to compare survival rates between hatchery and wild salmon, unrelated to the reintroduction project.

The habitat in the Metolius is good for both spawning and rearing, although Riehle expresses some concern about the lack of pools that juvenile chinook prefer—the result of the past management practice of removing woody debris from streams.

Another critical issue is that passing salmon above the dams will introduce fish diseases found only downriver. Because of the risk, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife samples all experimental salmon for disease before they are put into the Metolius.

“You have pathogens downstream, and if you decide to introduce fish upstream, you are going to introduce those pathogens as well,” says department fish virologist Mark Engelking. “It’s going to be a benefit versus risk. I think there will come a point when it looks like the benefits outweigh the risks and we’ll just manage for it.”

But the real challenge will be getting ocean-bound salmon, called smolts, downstream.

“What broke the back of early efforts was the inability to collect the smolts for downstream passage,” says Ratliff. When the dams were built, a fish collection intake was constructed along the east side of Round Butte Dam. It would draw the smolts from the reservoir, send them down a chute to be dumped out below the dam, and they’d be on their way. But few fish were ever collected. Researchers finally learned why.

Lake Billy Chinook is fed by the Metolius, Crooked and upper Deschutes rivers, which form the reservoir’s three long, narrow arms. The cold waters of the Metolius sink to the bottom of the reservoir while the warmer water of the others gravitates to the upper layers. Strange currents result that trend toward the Metolius River arm rather than downstream to the dam. That, explains Ratliff, caused most smolts to end up confused in the Metolius arm of the reservoir, regardless of where they started. The power company has been releasing radio-tagged steelhead smolts into the lake and tracking them in an effort to determine how these currents affect fish movement.

For now, the apparent best technology to solve the water current problem is to construct a downstream fish and water-cooling facility at the dam. This structure would be designed to control reservoir water temperatures, manipulating water currents to move migrating smolts to the dam, where they would be drawn into the facility. “Once the license is granted,” says Ratliff, “we’ll go ahead and spend the $50 million to $80 million for that facility.” This facility would also permit the reintroduction of salmon and steelhead to the Crooked River basin and upper Deschutes as well.

At that point, it would be what is called a “trap and truck” operation. Downstream migrating smolts would be captured and collected at the dam facility and then trucked and released into the Deschutes River just below the reregulating dam. Salmon and steelhead migrating upstream would be captured in a trap at the reregulating dam then trucked and released into Lake Billy Chinook to continue their spawning run.

During this period, the fish passage bugs would be worked out, with the eventual goal of having the fish pass over the dams without any direct human help. That will require figuring out why fish shunned the fish ladder when the dams were first put in. One theory holds that at three miles, the ladder is so long that it picks up its own scent and character and the fish didn’t recognize it as the river their instincts drove them to ascend.

In spite of the immense technical challenges, most involved in the effort are cautiously optimistic. “It’s a reasonable thing to do with a likely chance of success,” asserts Dave Nolte, who served as a conservation group representative throughout the planning process. “You’ve got to start somewhere.”

The Forest Service’s Riehle says , “We realize that it isn’t going to happen overnight. But we’re optimistic and we view it is a long-term commitment to work out the passage problems.”

There is one tantalizing piece of evidence suggesting that it may just work. Lake Billy Chinook has a population of kokanee, a landlocked version of sockeye salmon that use the lake as their “ocean” and spawn in the Metolius. Each year, a thousand or so are accidentally flushed over the dams and disappear downriver. And each fall, a dozen or so of these fish show up in the fish trap at the reregulating dam, having made it to the ocean and returned as bona fide sockeye salmon in search of a place to spawn above the dams.

If you walk along the Metolius River in September and October, you will see the kokanee spawning run. The fish are smaller, just ten or twelve inches, and nowhere near the rich red of a sockeye in full spawning dress. But there they are, a miniature version of a Metolius River sockeye salmon run. It is a whisper of what once was here, and what could be again.