Shaped by fire and ice, the Columbia River and its landscape have been forever changing.
Cataclysmic shifts of nature — massive eruptions, moving oceans and grinding tectonic plates — have formed this basin over millions of years.
But in just a blink of time, changes made by humans have pushed this river to the brink.
We’ve hammered the habitat. Overfished the salmon. Mismanaged hatcheries. And most of all, harnessed the immense power of this river, turning its cold, fast waters to miles of warm, slackwater reservoirs.
The Columbia is really many connected reaches and tributaries: the upper, middle and lower, the Yakima, the Snake and Salmon, the Clearwater and Deschutes and Willamette, and many more, draining a vast region, including parts of seven states and British Columbia, where the river rises.
The Columbia is not just one story. But there are trends, and with around 150 hydroelectric dams, the basin today in many places is hostile to native species.
People since the settlers’ arrival extensively dammed the Columbia and its tributaries, including its largest, the Snake, and exploited its fisheries, promising we could have it all. Abundant salmon and cheap hydropower, slackwater navigation from the Pacific Ocean all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, and irrigation for some of the region’s largest farms.
The face of today’s Columbia isn’t the silvery visage of a salmon. It’s the fanged gape of the invasive walleye. So tasty, and championship size. Today, anglers pour in from all over the Midwest for the walleye action, hunting lunkers that come out to feed on freezing mid-Columbia nights.
Yet many populations of salmon and steelhead, another prized native species, are in freefall.
Nearly 100 years after the start of this audacious remaking of the great river of the West, a reckoning is coming due. The Columbia today is stuffed with invasive species, its waters are warmed hotter than 70 degrees in summer, and while sport fishers make trophy catches, Native fishers pull empty nets. Meanwhile, climate warming, weather extremes and changing power markets have planners scrambling to satisfy competing needs.
The Seattle Times sought this story over hundreds of miles, by boat, on foot and with dam operators, Native American tribes, farmers, fishermen, sport fishing guides and wildlife professionals, to explore the Columbia at a crossroads.
Chapter 1: Origins
In tribal teachings animals are relatives, and First Foods, including salmon, are essential to the community’s culture and spiritual health. The Nez Perce Tribe reserved the right to fish, hunt and gather forever in their traditional places, including the Columbia and Snake rivers, in their treaty with the United States signed in 1855.
The Nez Perce were some of the first people in all of North America to inhabit this land and its waters — yet today they struggle to hang on to their traditions in the places that have always sustained them.
For the Oatman family, the Columbia and its gifts are at the heart of the Nez Perce people: salmon, eaten in every season; a sweat on a cold winter night from steaming lava rocks heated by fire; the presence of animals sustained by a living river.
Wes Oatman, an enrolled member of the Nez Perce tribe, leaves his mother Judy Oatman’s store From the Heart, named in reference to the Heart of the Monster, in Kamiah, Idaho. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Wes Oatman, an enrolled member of the Nez Perce tribe, leaves his mother Judy Oatman’s store From the Heart, named in reference to the Heart… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Wes Oatman spots elk with Jaigger Oatman, 11, above their home near Kamiah, Idaho. “My family is my world,” says Wes. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Wes Oatman spots elk with Jaigger Oatman, 11, above their home near Kamiah, Idaho. “My family is my world,”… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Elk traverse a ridge at sunset above Kamiah, Idaho. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Elk traverse a ridge at sunset above Kamiah,… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
At his home in Kamiah, Idaho, longtime fisherman Carl “Bo” Oatman talks about how his father and grandfather fished Celilo Falls before The Dalles Dam flooded one of the most important Indigenous fishing sites and gathering places in North America. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
At his home in Kamiah, Idaho, longtime fisherman Carl “Bo” Oatman talks about how his father and grandfather fished Celilo Falls before The… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
The Heart of the Monster monument is not far from their home.
It is the Nez Perce people’s creation site. There, according to their teachings, Coyote rescued the people by vanquishing a monster that was devouring the animals of the land. Coyote, ever the trickster, gets the Monster to inhale him, and once inside cuts his way out, allowing the animals to escape. The blood from the Monster’s heart, dropped onto the ground, became The People, who have forever since lived in community with the animals.
In other Nez Perce teachings, it was on a hillside that the animals got their names from the Creator. Salmon was the first among them to stand up to help The People, creating a covenant between the Nez Perce and Salmon. The People must now stand up, as Salmon stood up for them.
This is the unwritten law of this land, where The People have always lived. The oldest documented site of human habitation in North America is a Nez Perce camp near the confluence of the Snake and Salmon rivers, dating back more than 16,500 years.
Today, The People struggle to hang on in their homeland. Their community fish locker is nearly empty. Some tributaries in their territory see 50 or fewer salmon come back to spawn.
Appaloosas greet Nakia Williamson-Cloud, cultural resources program director for the Nez Perce Tribe, near his home in Lapwai, Idaho. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Appaloosas greet Nakia Williamson-Cloud, cultural resources program director for the Nez Perce Tribe, near his home in Lapwai,… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
In a cold late winter rain, Nakia Williamson-Cloud, cultural resources program director for the Nez Perce Tribe, shows the markers for mass graves, today the resting place for hundreds of ancestors of this tribe displaced from their burial grounds by construction of the Lower Snake River Dams. “They dug up our ancestors, says Williamson-Cloud. “That is the human side people don’t talk about.” (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
In a cold late winter rain, Nakia Williamson-Cloud, cultural resources program director for the Nez Perce Tribe, shows the markers for mass… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe, attends a recent meeting with tribal fisher near Lapwai, Idaho. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe, attends a recent meeting with tribal fisher near Lapwai,… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Lights illuminate the water at dusk at Little Goose Lock and Dam, one of the four Lower Snake River dams. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Lights illuminate the water at dusk at Little Goose Lock and Dam, one of the four Lower Snake River… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
The tribe today is still fighting for the promises made by the U.S. government under the Treaty of 1855, including the guaranteed right to fish in their territory. Among the wealthiest, most powerful tribes in the region before colonization, thousands of warriors rode into the treaty council at Walla Walla on Appaloosa horses. War ponies, specially bred by their people.
But The People have already lost so much, especially to the construction of the Lower Snake River dams. Even the resting places of their ancestors were uprooted to make way for the dams, and reburied in mass graves.
Chapter 2: Cataclysm
Understanding how this land was formed over millennia opens a panoramic window into the past and the spectacular forces that shaped and supercharged the power of the mighty Columbia.
Smooth cobbles in a roadcut miles from where the river flows today are evidence.
“The Columbia River we know today is just the most recent version of a river that has a much older history than anything else,” said Nick Zentner, who teaches geology at Central Washington University.
The ancient forces that shaped the Columbia can still be seen in the landscape today. River rocks stud the ground where the river used to be millions of years ago, before lava flows shoved it aside. Basalt formations decorated with brilliant lichen and festooned with waterfalls are reminders of a river basin shaped by fire and ice.
He loves surprising people who think they know the river well — showing them, for instance, these rocks that prove the river used to flow right by Granger, Yakima County, until lava flows shoved it aside.
“Everyone knows what a river cobble looks like, and there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of these beautiful river cobbles. And there is not a river here,” Zentner said, palming a smooth, gold-hued rock.
Chapter 3: Dams
When it was built, Grand Coulee Dam was a pinnacle of human engineering. Yet climate change and exploding energy demand are stressing the nation’s most abundant supply of hydropower.
Grand Coulee Dam was a cornerstone of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. It brought thousands of jobs, hydropower and irrigation to transform sagebrush to farms. Grand Coulee ever since has been the workhouse of the federal Columbia River Power System, with four powerhouses and a dam nearly a mile long and 550 feet high.
Outside the dam’s powerhouses, electricity sizzles and snaps up wires carrying it to eight Western states and British Columbia.
The Grand Coulee Dam is the crown jewel of an interconnected system of hydropower dams throughout the Northwest. The dam raises the river level 350 feet and creates a reservoir more than 150 miles long. Construction began in 1933 and employed more than 11,000 workers. In all, 81 workers lost their lives building the dam during various stages of construction. No other hydropower dam in the U.S. produces more power.
Grand Coulee irrigates more than 670,000 acres and generates enough electricity to power about 2 million homes for a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dam.
The energy from the dams is sold by the federal Bonneville Power Administration to utility customers large and small, and is moved over nearly 16,000 miles of transmission lines, interconnecting the region in a public power pool of clean energy that is the envy of the country.
The Columbia drops 2 feet per mile over its 1,243-mile run to the sea. Yet even this superpower is confronting more volatility. Climate change is gradually shifting runoff patterns and amounts and driving temperature spikes, hot and cold, challenging power managers.
Water supplies were at 77% of normal in the Columbia Basin in fiscal year 2024. A four-day cold snap in January 2024 forced BPA to spend $300 million to buy power from outside the region to keep the lights on, a loss the agency was able to make up with power sales later in the year, but which underscored what the power managers all over the region are now dealing with.
To adjust to this new normal, BPA has switched to using the most recent 30 years of data for its forecasts of power supplies and revenue, replacing a measure that included data dating back to the 1930s.
Even on the mighty Columbia and its tributaries, a changing climate — and electricity-hogging data centers and other competing demands — are pushing the river to the brink.
While its economic and quality-of-life benefits to the region are immense, industrialization of the Columbia and its tributaries across the basin also has come at tremendous environmental cost — including blocking more than 40% of the original spawning and rearing habitat for salmon and steelhead.
Some of the worst salmon declines are in Washington.
The dams built on the Columbia and Snake transformed the region, bringing power, irrigation and deep draft navigation. In just 40 years the aggressive construction campaign transformed the wild river to a chain of dammed reservoirs, run like a machine to make power, water crops and ship goods.
Chapter 4: Unraveling
Slackwater: When a cold, fast-running river is remade by dams into a connected chain of warm, slow lakes, it becomes home to pond fish. Salmon, marvels of cool, swift water, suffer.
The Tucannon River doesn’t look like a picture of extinction.
It runs from the Blue Mountains cold and clear, through lightly populated agricultural land. This is not the Green River, not the White, nor the Puyallup or Duwamish in the mostly diked, drained, dredged and leveed rivers of densely populated central Puget Sound.
And yet the Chinook here are barely hanging on — after more than $20 million spent over the years to improve the habitat.
The problem, though, mostly isn’t in the Tucannon, it’s in the reservoirs created by the Lower Snake River dams. Baby fish coming out of the Tucannon land right between Little Goose and Lower Monumental dams. The slackwater backs up all the way into the river’s mouth. There, walleye feast on baby salmon that never even make it to the mainstem river to migrate to the sea.
As a last-ditch effort, fish managers at the Nez Perce Tribe and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife this year, for the first time, are taking Tucannon spring/summer Chinook out of the river altogether for a human-mediated try at replicating the salmon life cycle.
As sport fishers enjoy bass, walleye and other invasives gone wild, it’s been a generation since families practicing treaty-protected fishing rights in their traditional territory could rely on the Tucannon for salmon, notes Joe Oatman, manager of the tribe’s Department of Fisheries Resources Management. That severs a vital connection to their territory.
“ … Trying to understand what that actually means, you go to a place, with your grandparents, your parents, your extended family, all for the purpose of going out, staying on a river, camping, socializing, getting a visit, being able to recount stories of past years,” Oatman said. “When you can’t really bring youth to those places any longer, you can’t share those types of stories, that type of history that a family may have at that particular place. … That’s a pretty deep, irreparable harm.”
WDFW biologist Mike Herr shows off fat baby Chinook raised at the Tucannon Hatchery — half of this batch, held back just in case. The other half were trucked to the Kalama Falls Hatchery below Bonneville Dam for release, in hopes that will save this run. “Failure is not an option,” Herr said. “This is the only spring Chinook, the last genetics of this Snake River group.”
If all goes as hoped, the ocean will be kind, and some of the adults from this brood will be back in two years at the Kalama hatchery, where workers will pick them up in a truck and bring them back to the Tucannon for another round of human-assisted propagation. It’s not natural, but anymore on this river, what is?
Herr likes a good walleye as much as anybody, and he has a favorite recipe with potatoes sliced thin and placed like scales along the fish’s plump, meaty sides. But he is worried about this salmon run that has become so fragile by its altered environment that it depends on a fleet of hatcheries and trucks for its survival.
“We have tried everything,” Herr said. “Now we are trying something totally off the wall.”
Fish managers know it’s a desperate measure, but it’s what they are left with as the Columbia has been vivisectioned into reservoirs from headwaters to mouth as climate change stokes temperatures, predators and disease.
“It’s kind of a crazy story. If the Kalama thing doesn’t work, we are in real trouble,” said Chris Donley, WDFW fish program manager for the Tucannon region. “What we were doing on the Tucannon was the definition of insanity, just keep doing the same thing and hoping for a different result.”
As salmon slide toward extinction in the Snake, some people are eager for the region to take steps, to be prepared for whatever comes in a long-running fight over the Lower Snake River dams.
Don Schwerin walked the sweeps of his farm in Waitsburg, Walla Walla County, speaking softly about his love of this land where he grew up. Over the decades, he has farmed wheat and garbanzos here, and watched seedlings he has planted grow into oaks, shagbark hickories and walnuts, greening the draw between his fields.
Deep draft navigation on the Lower Snake River all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, provides transportation for grain and other products to global markets. The four Lower Snake River dams never turned Lewiston into the boomtown boosters had hoped. Farmers use a combination of rail, roads and barges today to get their crops to market. The Lower Snake River navigation channel is one of the most lightly used in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers system of locks nationwide.
At 77, he loves the deep quiet and the seasons of his life here on this land. To protect that investment and stability, Schwerin said, he can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to move ahead with replacement services for the Lower Snake River dams. What would there be to lose, he reasons, and there would be so much to gain, including jobs and investment in the region — and security in case litigation over the dams were to upend the status quo.
“This thing could turn on a dime, and the region needs to have a plan in place,” Schwerin said. “Just pounding the table and saying ‘no’ long enough isn’t going to do it. You can be great fans of the dams, and still say, ‘I need a plan B.’ ”
Chapter 5: Reset
Fighting for the promises of the treaty, the Nez Perce uphold their ancestors’ teachings of caretaking one another and this place.
On the Nez Perce reservation, realizing a new vision is underway.
From a hill above a tidy neighborhood of tribal housing on the reservation in Lapwai, Idaho, an alternative future gleams from rooftops, fitted with solar panels. With help from Washington’s Climate Commitment Act, which has collected billions of dollars from major polluters of greenhouse gases, the tribe has converted all of its tribal housing, the community center, senior housing and wastewater treatment plant operations to solar power.
Using both roof-mounted and free-standing panels, combined with utility-grade batteries, the tribe’s solar warriors, as they call the team at Nimipuu Energy, have brought power from the sun to the rez. And it’s just getting started; the tribe’s goal is to be energy neutral, gathering enough solar power to offset all energy use on the reservation, said Catherine Ryczek, an expert from the U.S. Department of Energy helping with the work.
The tribe envisions creation of more solar power by joining with tribes from this region and beyond to put enough electricity onto the grid to replace the power of the dams on the Lower Snake.
At a meeting last winter with tribal fishers, Shannon Wheeler, the Nez Perce chairman, was grilled over the state of the fishery in the coming season that today does not provide a living, or even subsistence, for Nez Perce families. The community’s freezer of fish for funerals and other gatherings was nearly empty.
Tribal leaders at Nez Perce are seeking a way forward for the salmon and their people by working to replace services provided by the Lower Snake River dams, in preparation for dam removal. From left are Nakia Williamson-Cloud, cultural resources program director for the Nez Perce Tribe; James Paddlety, a journeyman electrician for the tribe; and Dr. Kim Hartwig, a Nez Perce physician.
Wheeler reminded the gathering it was the Nez Perce who rode into the treaty grounds with thousands of warriors — and took notes on the treaty proceedings.
They knew what they signed, he said of the tribe’s ancestors. “These are the things we fought for,” Wheeler said. “ … and I know this fight will continue.”
Lois Oatman hugs Duane Miller III, left, as Skylin Picard hugs her mother, Lorilynn Picard, during a sendoff for the girls Idaho state basketball tournament. Oatman and Picard are part of the Nimiipuu Youth Salmon Protectors group, a youth leadership cohort focused on finding solutions for salmon restoration and recovery. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Lois Oatman hugs Duane Miller III, left, as Skylin Picard hugs her mother,… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Ella Payne, second from right, and Cavell Samuels, center, are part of the Nimiipuu Youth Salmon Protectors group. Some students – carrying on their grandparents’ legacies of defending water and treaty fishing rights – planned to go to Washington, D.C., to meet with Northwest representatives. Organizer Danielle Scott says the group creates a sense of belonging, purpose and cultural connection. “The mission of group is to ultimately save our salmon for future generations,” she says. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Ella Payne, second from right, and Cavell Samuels, center, are part of the… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
The boys basketball team plays on their home court in Lapwai, Idaho. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
The boys basketball team plays on their home court in Lapwai,… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Community is everything on the Nez Perce reservation, and sports are a big part of daily life. Darlene Greene, left, and son Paris Leighton cheer on the Lapwai boys basketball team. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Community is everything on the Nez Perce reservation, and sports are a big… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Epilogue
In spring the Columbia comes alive with Chinook, the most prized fish in the river. The annual gathering of families to fish where their people always have is a joyful reunion. And it’s a chance to practice a tradition that carries great honor: feeding their people with the foods that have always sustained them. Spring Chinook are threatened with extinction throughout their range in the Columbia Basin despite more than $9 billion spent over the past 40 years to save salmon and steelhead.
On a recent spring morning, as the swallows dipped and swung over the Columbia, Wes Oatman was pulling the net into his boat, fishing spring Chinook at the westernmost end of their treaty fishing area in the pool above Bonneville Dam, where the returning fish are still their brightest and fattiest, fresh from years at sea.
They are chrome bright, gigantic, their golden eyes still shining with all they have seen. Oatman wrestled them from the water, just five precious spring Chinook on this set of the net.
He hammered the boat over the wind-whipped waves, rushing the fish back to the dock at a camp along the river. In minutes, he joined relatives cutting up their catch, tossing the deep red fish hearts to a cat alert to their every move.
Still bright from the sea and rich with fat, these spring Chinook are the most prized fish of the Columbia and first fresh food of the year, cherished for generations uncounted. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Still bright from the sea and rich with fat, these spring Chinook are the most prized fish of the Columbia and first fresh food of the year,… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Jim “Tre” Nelson Aleck, an enrolled member of the Yakama Tribe, loads a fishing boat on the Columbia River near the town of Stevenson. Aleck was fishing for several weeks for spring Chinook for ceremonial and subsistence purposes. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Jim “Tre” Nelson Aleck, an enrolled member of the Yakama Tribe, loads a fishing boat on the Columbia River near the town of Stevenson. Aleck… (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Oatman packed the fish, iced and gleaming, the river’s life still shining in their silver scales, into a tote in the back of his truck to take back to the reservation: fulfillment of a sacred obligation.
This is the food that will nourish grieving families gathered at funerals, that will be on the tables to celebrate name-givings and other traditional ceremonies, Oatman said. “There is no greater honor,” he said of this work, providing for his people.
Asked what he wishes for the future of this river, his answer is simple, direct.
“That we take care of it,” he said. “So this will go on forever.”
This story was supported in part by a grant from the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University’s School of Humanities and Sciences, which selected Lynda Mapes as the 2025 Bill Lane Center Western Media Fellow.
