PacifiCorp's Condit Dam Removal White Salmon River Restoration and Dam Explosion!

I was excited to get to visit the White Salmon River, in Washington.  My partner Scott and I raced and won the whitewater team trials here in 1998.  The section we raced is upstream of this picture of Husum Falls.  It is a thoroughly unpleasant whitewater run.  You put in quite literally in the middle of a Class IV rapid, and take off.  There's one corner where you come around blindly into a giant wave which was big enough to stop our C-2 racing canoe.  The wave would surround you and wash over your head, and because the water is literally ice-cold glacier water coming from Mt. Adams, one of the snow-capped volcano mountains, you'd get a wicked ice-cream headache that took a few moments to shake off....while you blindly went through the next rapid. 

I was telling Karin how weird it is on this river - it's an ice-cold gut-check.  You're wearing ALL your paddling clothes and freezing.  You'd get done with a run and be shivering, scared, tired, and cold.  Then you'd see the people up on the shore, mowing their lawns in shorts and drinking iced beverages.  Weird.  Here's a picture of the White Salmon at Husum Falls.

So, happy to not be paddling, and excited to see the river restoration effort from where the downstream Condit Dam was removed just five years ago.  The dam was owned by PacifiCorp, and was removed during the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) permitting process.  In essence, PacifiCorp was going to be required to put in a fish ladder to allow fish to make it up to their former habitat on the White Salmon River.  This was very expensive, so instead of doing that, PacifiCorp, in partnership with a lot of state, federal, and non-profit agencies, removed the dam.  This freed up some 75 miles of stream habitat for Salmon and other migratory species.  

Here's what the dam and lake looked like.  According to the kiosk, the dam was built in 1913, was 125 feet high, and generated 15 MW of power.  The lake was about 1.7 miles long.  For you water resources students, this is a concrete gravity dam.  You can also see the spillway structure.  According to the PacifiCorp website, removal was completed in 2012.

The take out for the lower easier whitewater run was at the head of the lake.  We'd make our whitewater run, and take out at this boat ramp, which would be about half under water.  Now it is dry and blocked off with rocks.

This bridge was the race finish line.  The lake water level was up around where the white of the concrete posts meets the darker steel posts.  That gravel path on the left is a new take out.

Looking downstream, you can see the new river bed, and the green which is plants growing on the old lake bottom.

 This was cool.  These are the old stumps from the trees that were cut in 1913 when the dam was built and the lake formed.  Preserved by the ice cold water for over a hundred years.

This fellow had a lake front house.  You can see the old dock hanging.... You can also clearly see the "bath tub ring" from where the top of lake used to be. Watch for this throughout the pictures.

As part of the restoration process, thousands of plants were planted.  We couldn't identify most of the sticklike trees, but there were a lot of pines and they seemed kind of closely spaced together. As far as low growing plants are concerned, other than grasses we saw mainly achillea and lupines.

More plantings, and more "lake front" houses.

If you look in the front left of this house, you can see the old posts that led to this fellow's dock.  All of these environmental remediations are a compromise and don't come without cost to someone.  The environment and the fishery gained a lot, but I bet this fellow wished he still had the lake.  It was a beautiful alpine lake.

Just upstream of the actual dam site. 

More of those old, old stumps and more replanted area near the dam site.

And here it is, the dam site.  See how to the right is the "bath tub ring" of the old lake, and the replanted area, while to the left is the native vegetation and steep gorge area.  Dam developers typically put dams in places that are easy and inexpensive.  This one was already partly completed by nature with the narrow rock formation.  To my eye, this seems like an uncommonly good job of removing a huge man-made project with a lot of concrete and steel.  Now, mother nature just needs a little time.

You can learn more at PacifiCorp's website on the Condit dam, and watch the video of the explosion blasting through the dam and releasing the water.

Now you see it....

Now you don't...

a remediation success!

The Klickitat River Gorge

We made a trip to visit my old training river, the Klickitat in Washington.  This is a wonderful whitewater river, with miles and miles of good class II-III whitewater to train on.  This is a natural flowing river without dams, draining the Mount Adams areaIt is warmer than most rivers in the area.  Karin and I lived in Lyle Washington, and these pictures are taken about a mile from our old house.  Since we left, the state created a really nice rail to trail trail on an old rail bed up the river.  

Here's the river running through the Klickitat Gorge, a crack in the basalt formation. If you are interested in learning more about the geology of the Columbia River basin, here is a easy to read explanation of the geology, including maps of lava flows and the location of volcanoes.

I'd estimate the river is running about 2,000 cfs  or 57 m^3/s.

A feeder stream...

Here, you can see more of the Native American fishing platforms for dip netting, like you saw in the Bridge of the Gods post. This website by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife explains all about fishing rights of the Native American tribes Columbia river basin.

You wouldn't guess that there's a river in this crack, huh?

My training area was upstream of the Gorge, where the Klickitat behaves like a regular old whitewater river.  Every once in a while, I'd look down here, and think about making a run...but then you see all the cables from all the current, old, historic, and very old dip net platforms....and you imagine being tangled up in them....

 About 15 miles upstream is the put in, where there is a hot spring.  I used to warm my hands here before making a run down the whitewater.  Notice that the bottom is very red.  That's where iron is dissolved into the ground water under anoxic conditions, and when the water bubbles to the surface, the iron gets oxidized and is deposited as rust.  The water smells mildly sulphery, and felt a little bit soapy to the touch.  Oh, and it was warm, evidence of the volcanic activity just below the surface :-)  Mt. Adams, one of the many volcanoes in the area, is about 20 miles from this site.

This picture is right at the mouth of the Klickitat, before it flows into the Columbia River.  This is where I would do my flatwater training.  Really nice place to workout.  This was just a few hundred feet from our house.

In the year and a half  we lived there, we had a lot of trouble with people stealing things - sadly, it was mostly Native Americans.  We had one of those trash bins with rollers get stolen, only to find it a few hundred yards down the street in one of our neighbor's yards.  Our cars were broken into on two separate occasions, stealing our camera, a laptop, and our checkbook.  

The guy that stole our checkbook wrote checks to himself and cashed them in Oregon.  Because the checks were stolen in Washington  but illegally cashed in Oregon, neither state's police would do anything about it.  So, that was a big mess to deal with.  We knew the guy's name - he just lived on the street above our house.  What was most frustrating was that he had an easier time cashing our checks than we did.

We even had someone try to get into our house while Karin and the kids where home. Luckily, we locked the doors and windows all the time by then.  We had people come into our yard and steal our yard sale stuff.  We were happy to move from this bad Karma place.  You might wonder if it's changed in the 20 years since we lived there?  If this note someone posted at the river put in is any indication, I'd guess that it hasn't changed much.