Tuesday June 16, 2026
High Country News —
In California, a long-abused river has been reborn. For decades, humans disrupted its course and restricted its flows to the detriment of its ecosystem, only to lately reverse direction and restore it to a facsimile of its natural state. And salmon, the bellwethers of aquatic health, have responded, returning much faster and in greater abundance than anyone anticipated.
This description applies not to the Klamath River — or not only to the Klamath, recently liberated from its four lower dams — but rather to the far less-celebrated Putah Creek. Near its headwaters in the Mayacamas Mountains, the Putah is narrow and boulder-studded; as it nears the Sacramento River’s floodplain, it begins to slow and broaden. Along its 85-mile course, it is imprisoned behind dams, siphoned off by ditches, squeezed between artificially straightened and hardened banks. Although it lacked salmon for decades, in 2025 more than 2,000 chinook returned to spawn — an improbable triumph that reflects both human-led restoration and the resilience of the fish themselves.
“It’s the Field of Dreams thing: ‘If you build it, they will come,’” said Andrew Rypel, a fish ecologist formerly at the University of California, Davis and today at Auburn University. “With science, with community, you can do some really special things.”