OLYMPIC PENINSULA, WA—Good news streaming in from the Elwha River restoration project team. After dam removals commenced last fall, scientists recently discovered the first wild, adult male steelhead—about 35 inches long—arriving to spawn in a tributary upstream from the old Elwha Dam site, where the river now flows free. The $325 million federal project has been engineered to revive the river, its wilderness watershed, and its legendary salmonid runs. Elwha Dam has already been removed. Glines Canyon Dam, about eight miles upriver, is slated to be gone by this time next year.
Via The Seattle Times: “As the river is freed, it is rinsing out sediment stuck behind Elwha Dam for a century, shaping and reshaping a fantastic landscape of terraces and badlands. The river also is opening a window into a lost world as the Elwha exposes the valley bottom logged more than a century ago before Lake Aldwell was filled.”
Tom Bie is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Drake. He started the magazine in 1998 as an annual newsprint publication based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He then moved it to Steamboat, Colorado (1999), Boulder, Colorado (2001), and San Clemente, California (2004), as he took jobs as managing editor at Paddler, Senior Editor at Skiing, and Editor-in-Chief at Powder, respectively. Tom and The Drake are now both based in Denver, Colorado, where The Drake is finally all grows up(Swingers, 1996) to a quarterly magazine.