BOARD02415

• Board Meeting Date: 3/20/2000
• Description: Directors' Reports
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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Remorseful river runners and canyon lovers, inspired by the writing of Edward Abbey, began to
talk of a campaign to remove the dam and empty Lake Powell. Barry Goldwater ruefully
acknowledged that his support for the darn was the one vote of his career that he most regretted.
The elegiac photographs of Eliot Porter in The Place No One Knew inspired people in different
parts of the country to look at their own rivers with new vision. Gradually the tide of national
opinion turned and projects began to come under question. The two dams proposed in Grand
Canyon were killed by the Congress. In California Governor Reagan halted a project on the Eel
River and the legislature followed with protections for the remaining wild rivers in northern
California.

Thus it was that the Glen Canyon experience awakened long dormant drearns of river restoration
and dam removal. In 1992 Congress took a tentatiye step in the direction of dam removal by
authorizing the National Park Service to examine the feasibility of removing two dams on the
Elwha River on the border of Olympic National Park in Washington. The two darns, Elwha and
Glines Canyon, present a textbook case for dam remoyal. The Elwha River rises in the
snowfields of the Olympic Mountains, thunder, down a narrow canyon toward the Pacific and
then slows to a dead halt against the concrete barrier of Glines Canyon Dam. A few miles below
Glines Canyon, the river gathers force once ag<lin only to come against the second barrier, Elwha
Darn.

The structures at Elwha and Glines Canyon were erected early in the century to provide power
for a then-isolated community on the Olympic Peninsula. Today, however, that community, Port
Angeles, has access to the regional power grid in a region where there is a huge surplus of power
hanging over the market. Meanwhile the two d<lms have eliminated one of the great chinook
salmon runs ofthe Northwest. A few of this salmon stock linger on in hatcheries awaiting either
restoration or probable extinction. Also awaiting dam removal are over seventy miles of streams
radiating downward from the heart of Olympic National Park.

In 1996 the Park Service completed an environmental impact study demonstrating the feasibility
of taking the dams down. In 1997 I signed a formal decision recommending removal. Having
requested us to study and make a recommendation, the Congress is now equivocating, refusing to
appropriate the full sum necessary to carry out dam removal. But with strong support from
Washington residents and Governor Locke, and partial funding extracted from this Congress
under threat of Presidential veto, it now seems only a matter oftime until the darns come down
and the salmon once again make their way upstream in to the living heart of Olympic National
Park.

The next big test for river restoration is approaching on the lower Snake River and its four
salmon killing dams. And it will be an epic debate, rivaling the great controversies of past years
over Hetch Hetchy and Dinosaur National Monument. This time it will not be about protecting
scenery within <l National Park. It will be about restoring a river ecosystem and its salmon runs.
That fact alone demonstrates how we as a nation have come to comprehend that our stewardship
obligation extends beyond park borders to encompass entire watersheds and landscapes.

The Columbia-Snake is one of the most industrialized river systems in America. The largest of
its dams, Grand Coulee, cuts off more than a thousand miles of salmon streams in Washington
and British Columbia. Bonneville Darn, dedicated by President Roosevelt in 1937, initiated the
darmning of the lower river. After that the dams marched relentlessly up river - the Dalles, John
Day, McNary, Priest Rapids.