Posted: Monday, October 5, 2009
For the first time in more than 100 years, sockeye salmon are
spawning at Lake Cle Elum in the Cascade Mountains.
Correspondent Tom Banse reports the fish will need a helping hand
for many more years to firmly reestablish in the area.
Early settlers and farmers wiped out the sockeye salmon run in
the Yakima River basin when they dammed mountain lakes to store
irrigation water. This summer, tribal fish biologists trucked a
thousand adult sockeye to Lake Cle Elum. The fish came from
another run in the Columbia River. Steve Parker with the Yakama
Nation fisheries program says everyone’s excited to see the sockeye
spawning after a hundred year absence.
Parker: “It’s always very satisfying and exciting to restore
something that has been extirpated. This is a very satisfying
achievement.”
Parker says with no fish ladders, adult spawners bound for Lake
Cle Elum will have to be trucked around two dams for the
foreseeable future. The Yakama Nation is also working on restoring
sockeye salmon to another irrigation reservoir in Washington’s
central Cascades, Bumping Lake.
Copyright 2009 KUOW