Klamath River

About

Klamath River, California Oregon — 1905 Klamath Project, 2024 Dam Removal 420-mi, 1918 Iron Gate, Yurok. Paddlers reading the gauge should know the Klamath's numbers. USGS station 11530500 runs an average of about 4,200 CFS, with historic flow near 3,800, and the river reads best between 1,000 and 6,000 CFS. Its whitewater ranges Class I–IV across three distinct reaches: the Upper Klamath from Iron Gate to Happy Camp, a former dam reach of Class I–III; Ishi Pishi Falls to Weitchpec, Class III–IV through Yurok territory; and the Lower Klamath to the Pacific, Class I–II through the estuary. The river is the second-largest in California.

The canyon's isolation bred singular life. The passage through the Cascades supports abundant fish and wildlife, including a genetically unique population of rainbow trout adapted to survive the river's naturally high temperatures and acidity. The Klamath once ran thick with salmon, its runs ranking as the third-largest in the nation — though decades of obstruction and decline reduced them to just eight percent of their historic numbers.

The Klamath is the ancestral homeland of the Yurok, Karuk, and Hoopa Valley Tribes, and salmon were, and remain, the center of tribal culture, spirituality, and subsistence. The tribes fought for decades to remove the dams and restore their runs. In 1986, the Yurok Tribe's fishing rights were restored — a defining event — and the tribe still considers the Klamath the center of its cultural and spiritual life.

The modern era took shape earlier, and not in the river's favor. The 1905 Klamath Reclamation Project and the 1918 Iron Gate Dam defined a century of engineered water. Four dams — Iron Gate, Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, and J.C. Boyle — were built between 1908 and 1962. Before that, from the 1830s through the 1920s, the watershed was logged to feed the regional timber industry and railroad expansion; local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators until the 1910 exhaustion of old-growth stands, the 1915 start of state forestry conservation, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale cutting. Beginning in the 1870s, USGS surveys, gauging stations, and later Clean Water Act assessments documented the accumulated impacts.

Recognition of the river's worth came gradually. In 1994, the stretch from the J.C. Boyle Powerhouse to the Oregon-California state line earned federal Wild and Scenic designation, shielding the canyon's outstanding values from further development. Three decades later, the 2024 removals reopened over 400 miles of salmon and steelhead habitat — 420 miles per NOAA Fisheries — and tribal nations celebrated the return of free-flowing water for the first time in over a century. Today the Klamath supports the Klamath Falls, Yreka, and Happy Camp economies and stands as a national symbol of renewal, its waters reopening to the fish that defined it.