April 8, 2011 - The wild flowing Trinity River was dammed in the 60's to provide water to Whiskeytown Lake, and thence to Keswick Dam below Shasta Dam for power generation and to increase flows in the Sacramento River for downstream farmers.
No doubt about it, farming has increased with the availability of publicly subsidized water. However, the formerly abundant salmon and steelhead runs in the Trinity are now nearly nonexistent.
When I was a kid there in the 50's and 60's we depended on those fish for sustenance. The dam did a number of things to destroy the fishery: the lake covers and thus destroys all of the headwaters spawning grounds for these fish; the outflows are so low that the upper river no longer floods, so the river below the dam is now channelized and the spawning beds are scoured of their gravels, which salmon need for egg retention; the water temps in the river are altered from their natural pattern, stressing the fry and smolts. On any average day, the water flows as recorded by dam managers is such that only 1/3 of the water released from Trinity Lake actually flows into the Trinity, the rest goes to Whiskeytown and then down to Keswick and the Sacramento.
There are other factors contributing to the demise of this important resource, but the dam is the primary reason the fish are all but extinct. Recent research has shown that the former abundance of salmon is THE essential link in the abundance of heavy timber in the Pacific Northwest, providing the nutrient base for the forest.
Sure, we can build more dams, but at what cost?
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