The salmon of North Creek
A coho salmon spawning on the Salmon River • Photo by the Bureau of Land Management
By Michael Edwards
For the TODAY
In the cold expanse of the eastern Pacific, as they have for the previous five summers, a school of Chinook salmon swims its daily marathon and gobbles up squid. The following morning, the school’s half-decade-long routine shifts. The great fish reorient themselves away from the Korean Peninsula and towards North America’s continental shelf, beginning their final journey to the natal waters of North Creek on Oregon’s Central Coast.
Professor of fisheries and wildlife at Oregon State University, David Noakes, hypothesizes that during its adult life, a typical Chinook salmon swims thousands of miles out to sea and returns to the exact freshwater pool of its birth by utilizing “microscopic crystals of magnetite in its tissues both as a map and compass and navigates via the Earth’s magnetic field.”
When the adult Chinook reaches fresh water, it switches from using its biological map and compass to employing its olfactory organs to smell its way home. As the salmon swims from brackish to fresh water, its skin darkens from silver to brown. Males develop kypes, or hooked jaws, that they use to intimidate rivals and to showcase their fitness to females. As the Chinook battles the rain-swollen current, the once-rapacious eater becomes an ascetic; its stomach atrophies. Guts once packed full of fish protein and bustling with digestive enzymes become incubators for thousands of eggs in females and sperm in males.
For thousands of years, salmon spawned and died in North Creek’s cobbled stream beds. Bears and eagles fed on the fishes’ flesh, and salmon carcasses transported nutrients gathered from the sea into Oregon’s self-generating temperate rainforest. Generations of Coastal Indians relied on abundant seasonal salmon runs as a food source.
With the construction of Forest Road 1790 in 1958, sixteen miles of prime salmon spawning habitat was blocked. In order to keep the January rains from breaking the road into pieces and dissolving it into the Pacific, the Forest Service tunneled a pipe underneath FR 1790. The pipe allowed the floodwaters to flow, but it did not allow salmon to pass.
Female Chinook construct their “redds” by flipping aside softball-sized cobble and laying their eggs. Male salmon fertilize the eggs and, for protection, the fish then cover the eggs with cobble. The space between the stones allows oxygenated water to flow through the nursery.
Winter’s firehose-like water pressure now blasted away both the woody debris and the stones needed to regenerate complex spawning habitat.
Scientists once thought that fish blocked from entering one stream could spawn elsewhere, but it turns out that the salmon’s infraspecific diversity means that each run is uniquely adapted to the limnology, or the biological, chemical and physical features of a specific body of fresh water, of their natal waters. Though they look the same, the genetic strengths and weaknesses of a Chinook salmon spawning in the cool nearshore waters of Oregon’s misty hills differs from those of a Chinook spawning in an icy mountain lake in the Idaho Sawtooths.
In the 2019 Patagonia documentary, “Artifishal,” a fisheries biologist states that rearing genetically similar salmon in hatcheries and releasing them into watersheds throughout out the Pacific Northwest is akin to replacing “Mozart, Beethoven and Bach” with “Yani, Yani and Yani.”
Evidently, the good scientist has never heard Yani play his 300-year-old Armenian flute, but with that caveat, his point is taken.
Salmon and their spawning grounds are not interchangeable.
Coastal coho salmon seldom stray far from their natal waters, and unlike Chinook, prefer spawning in tributaries rather than in the main stem rivers that their larger cousins prefer. Coho are a threatened species, but according to Tim Elder of The Wild Salmon Center, if their populations could recover anywhere, it’s in places like the Late Successional Reserve of the Siuslaw National Forest. The organization promotes defending healthy salmon “strongholds” like the Siuslaw from development, and funds restoration projects in prime salmon spawning habitats.
A few miles east of Lincoln City, in the weeping forests of Drift Creek Camp, the “stronghold” vision of salmon recovery is on public display.
In 2015, the Midcoast Watershed Council, Trout Unlimited, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the Native Fish Society, collaborated with the Forest Service and the state of Oregon to build a 50-foot-wide, 15-foot-high culvert underneath Forest Road 1790. The $900,000 structure was completed in 2019, and today, the 16 miles of spawning habitat is, after a 62-year hiatus, open to fish passage.
Peering into the tea-colored waters of North Creek, you’ll spot what looks like a vein of quartz running along the spine of a brown boulder, but as you follow that vein downstream, you’ll glimpse the flick of a caudal fin, and the splash of a Chinook disappearing into the dark waters of the culvert.