Tuesday February 18, 2025
Sonoma Magazine —
Santa Rosa photographer Kaare Iverson was on a photo assignment for a winery along Dry Creek outside Healdsburg when a colossal construction project caught his eye.
“I found these mysterious wooden pillars sprouting from the edge of the creek,” he remembers. Iverson later learned the pillars were part of a project to create habitat for endangered salmon. “I felt such an immense sense of pride in my community, that we would exert such enormous effort at such expense for conservation.”
Iverson grew up in a commercial fishing family in the Prince Rupert region of northern British Columbia, where a healthy salmon population makes annual returns in prodigious numbers. After moving to Sonoma County, Iverson became curious about the natural history of the Russian River watershed and, he says, “a bit obsessed with the idea that it once held, and could again hold, enormous runs of coho and chinook.”
Sonoma’s Russian River watershed was historically home to hearty populations of native salmon like those Iverson was familiar with in British Columbia. After Russian River surveys in the early 2000s revealed that local species had dwindled to dangerously low numbers, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Sonoma Water and other local agencies have spent the past two decades trying to preserve the unique genetics of native coho salmon.