The partnership between Sammy Gensaw, a Yurok fisherman, and Craig Tucker, a scientist who turned to activism, was forged in the wake of a catastrophe. In the late summer heat of 2002, the river had grown stagnant and warm, leading to a bacterial outbreak that claimed the lives of perhaps 70,000 fish. This loss was not merely an ecological statistic; for the Yurok Tribe, it was a threat to a food culture and a way of life that had endured for millennia. The struggle that followed lasted twenty years, moving from the banks of the river to the high-pressure boardrooms of PacifiCorp.
What emerged from these decades of friction was a shift in the very nature of American governance. Gensaw and Tucker helped navigate a path toward co-equal decision-making, where tribal nations and federal agencies sat as peers. It was determined that the cost of retrofitting the aging hydroelectric facilities with mandatory fish ladders outweighed the cost of their removal. The four dams—Iron Gate, Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, and J.C. Boyle—were finally marked for demolition.
As the reservoirs drained, a new landscape appeared—vast stretches of sediment that had not seen the sun in several generations. To heal this raw earth, crews undertook a task of immense patience, scattering 17 billion seeds that had been painstakingly collected by hand over several years. This act of care ensured that when the rains returned, the banks would be held firm by native grasses rather than invasive weeds.
The return of the fish was almost immediate. Chinook salmon have already been documented navigating the newly free-flowing stretches of the river, pushing past the former sites of the concrete walls into cold, high-altitude waters. For the men who spent their lives chasing this moment, the significance is found in the sensory reality of the water. The mechanical hum of the dams has been replaced by the sound of the river running through its old bed, a sound that Gensaw describes as a literal watershed for his people.