Thursday September 19, 2024
The Modesto Bee –
In a few weeks, Chinook salmon once again will swim up the Tuolumne River looking for places to spawn. They will encounter a dam that has blocked migration past La Grange since 1893. They also will find that mining many decades ago ruined some of the gravel beds where salmon lay their eggs. And the water can be too low during droughts such as that of 2020 to 2022.
The salmon are getting help from a pair of projects at La Grange that launched over the summer. One is by the Tuolumne River Trust, an environmental group. The other is just upstream and sponsored by the river’s main diverters, the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts and San Francisco.
Both projects put bulldozers and other heavy equipment to work in reshaping the Tuolumne channel back toward its natural condition.
“There’s a lot of short-term disturbance for the long-term benefit,” said Julia Stephens, restoration program director for the trust. She led a Sept. 12 tour of the project site for The Modesto Bee.
The trust got a $3.7 million grant from the California Department of Water Resources for its project, which also involves the Tuolumne River Conservancy. It will completed this fall on about 10 acres in the main river channel and floodplain…