River Impossible | Outside Online

Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Feuds
River Impossible
Everybody loves the Klamath. Everybody wants a piece of it. And they're willing to go to war to get it. Editor's Note/Correction

By Patrick Symmes


	Photograph by Hugh Kretschmer

IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES
YOU'LL BE GLAD TO HEAR that all the problems of the Klamath River are easily comprehensible, that everyone involved knows the solution, and that the end of this crisis is preordained. Don't worry. On a geological time scale, this will only take a minute.

Dropping out of the southern-Oregon cloud veldt at 10,000 feet, you can see the whole rippling mass of the Cascades spread out below: the hulking menace of California's Mount Shasta to the south, the tectonic chaos of the Siskiyou Range and the Trinity Alps to the west. Nestled among the volcanic foothills is a string of small, table-flat swaths of prairie overlaid with precise squares of farmland, ruled by fences and combed by tractors. Hills are shorn into mathematical equations with road graders, lanes of blacktop meet at merciless right angles, and center-pivot irrigation systems carve unnaturally green, pi-perfect circles of grain from the arid sage. Starting in the late 1800s, the land of the Upper Klamath Basin—soft, high valleys sprawling on both sides of the Oregon-California state line—was gridded into 80-acre lots.

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These were sold to homesteaders or, eventually, given away in lotteries to soldiers returning from the two world wars. More than a century later, each valley is defined by the varying greens of alfalfa, potato leaves, and barley—80 acres of one, 80 acres of another, 80 acres of the next. It's a lovely, productive, and unsustainable project that has turned the landscape into an aerial map of agriculture's struggle with the dry, inhospitable West.

There isn't enough water.

This is the simple problem at the heart of a complex struggle. The upper part of the Klamath—the top third of the river, flowing 4,000 feet above sea level—gets only 12 to 18 inches of precipitation a year, and that water has been promised too many times for too many uses. It's needed to sustain the 210,000 acres of crops and pasture kept going by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation—the federal government's main dam and canal builder—as part of its massive Klamath Project irrigation system. It also must support the 100,000 salmon that swim up the river and its tributaries every fall; the Hoopa, Yurok, and Karuk Indian tribes who depend on the salmon; two endangered Upper Klamath Lake sucker species; and a fourth, upriver tribal group, the Klamath, who once lived off the sucker and want their sacred fish restored. Finally, it has to replenish the wetlands that host one of the world's great waterfowl migrations—millions of geese and grebes and pelicans, 80 percent of the birds on the Pacific Flyway.

The Klamath dispute encompasses all the mind-numbing elements that define western water fights in the modern era: economic pressures, endangered species, tribal obligations, and competing political constituencies that make compromise seem impossible. "This is your prototypical water war," says Glen Spain, a 53-year-old Eugene, Oregon-based environmentalist who has fought the Bureau of Reclamation for years over Klamath fish issues. "It's a disaster in the making."

Actually, disaster has already happened—twice. In 2001, with Clinton administration policies

The Klamath dispute encompasses all the mind-numbing elements of a classic western water fight: economic pressures, endangered species, tribal obligations, and huge, powerfull constituencies that are unwilling to bend.

still in effect, a multiyear drought prompted federal officials to cut off most of the irrigation water to farmers. (Lawsuits and a preponderance of scientific opinion convinced the feds to leave enough water in the river and lake to satisfy the threatened coho salmon, the suckers, and the tribes.) But when the land dried up and crops started dying, Klamath farmers launched a summer-long agro-rebellion. Some 15,000 people joined a bucket brigade to carry water from the river to parched irrigation ditches. The protests climaxed on the Fourth of July, when a few angry men put a blowtorch to the headgates at the Link River Dam, above Klamath Falls, Oregon, cutting the locks and letting the water flow.

In the long, dry spring and summer of 2002, the politics were reversed with almost perfect symbolism. In that second year of the Bush presidency, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton assured farmers that they would always have their water, and personally opened the headgates, restarting the traditional diversion of some 450,000 acre-feet per year into the canals. (That's roughly 146 billion gallons.) Just like in 96 of the previous 97 years, the farmers got first dibs.

Six months later and 220 miles downriver, where the Klamath meets the Pacific, 35,000 salmon went belly-up in the low water, one of the largest salmon kills ever recorded in the United States. Their carcasses rotted on the riverbanks for weeks, and when the Yurok and Hoopa tribes convinced FedEx to deliver 500 pounds of stinking fish to the Interior Department in October, the Klamath got Washington's full attention. The Bureau of Reclamation suddenly discovered that it had spare water to flush out the river, and an estimated 65,000 salmon surged upstream. Bush then convened the Klamath Basin Federal Working Group, giving Gale Norton 18 months to resolve one of the oldest water disputes in the country.

But is a resolution even possible? That's hard to say. Ask around on the Klamath and you'll find that farmers, Indians, environmentalists, fishermen, and paddlers all agree on two things. The first is that the solution is within easy reach and simply involves a careful, rational, and objective application of the facts.

The second, unfortunately, is this: The only relevant facts are ones that support each side's competing view of reality.

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Contributing editor Patrick Symmes wrote about the Amazon mahogany trade in October 2002.

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