“Three days after Iron Gate Dam was removed and the water reconnected itself, salmon passed there. Three days. In anticipation of dam removal for 20 years, the brightest minds, the best scientists in the world studied how quickly the Klamath salmon would return. Five years, 10 years, 20 years. … The leader salmon just jammed past where the former Iron Gate Dam was and went into good spawning territory behind it.”
The Wild Idea · September 2026
Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe attorney who spent two decades on the campaign to remove four Klamath River dams, was asked about 2024, the year the dams came out. Roughly 7,000 salmon spawned above the former dam sites that first year and about double that in 2025, reaching into more than 400 miles of habitat blocked for nearly a century. Her book is called The Water Remembers; she said another fitting title would have been The Salmon Remember.
Transcript
You guys are going to have me in tears.
That's what we're going for here. That's what we're going for.
I know. Straight to the point, man. Dang. So, yeah, 2025 was an amazing year. What I will say is three days after Iron Gate Dam was removed and the water reconnected itself from upstream, you know, going over the dam and reconnecting with the downstream. Three days later, salmon passed there. Three days. And imagine this. So, you know, there were in anticipation of climate dam removal for 20 years. The brightest minds, the best scientists in the world studied how quickly the Klamath salmon would return. Five years, 10 years, 20 years, you know, we don't really know because they haven't been able to access that habitat in almost 100 years. You know, and salmon now, you know, they may have that same salmon may have it deep in their DNA where they used to spawn, but they haven't been able to access it. So, you know, their nature is to go where they were born. So they thought, oh, they'll just stop and go where they were born. No, three days later, the leader salmon just jammed past where the former Iron Gate Dam was and went into good spawning territory behind it. And then after. After that, that first year, there were about 7,000 salmon that went up into that historical spawning territory and spawned. And then what's cool is that last year, oh, and I said the year wrong, it was 2024 when the dams came out and that they did the first ascent. So check that. Okay. But so that first year in 2024, there were 7,000 salmon that went past the former dam sites. And then in 2025, there was about double that that went up. And then they went further into the more than 400 miles of spawning habitat that they historically had been into, but had been denied for 100 years. So, you know, my book is called The Water Remembers. Another appropriate version could have been The Salmon Remember, because boy, did they go right back into that historical spawning habitat? And clearly, they had some deep ancestral memory about where they had been in the basin. It's profound.
I'm glad you brought the book back up again. I want to go to a specific part in that in the water remembers in a section of that book that really stuck with me. And it goes back to the reciprocity the creator promised for caring for the land. Can you talk a little bit about the waters of Blue Creek and that significance, both to you and your family personally, but just in general to the watershed? And I'm really, really, really not trying to make you cry here, but that part of the book really stuck out with me, the story of how the water in the end saved, you know. And I just wanted to, I wondered if you'd talk about Blue Creek and that part of your personal family history and what it means in this context of the story about the Klamath Basin.
And were you talking about the part of the story where my dad fell in? Or were you talking
in the river? The cold water literally saved him.