A River Rises to Reclaim Its Past

As a gate lifted on the small concrete Lewiston Dam, about an hour's winding drive west of Redding, water spilled down an apron into the Trinity. Federal dam managers, who have spent the last 40 years sucking water from the river and sending most of its flow to the farm fields of the Central Valley, were letting the Trinity go.

The river ran frothy and aqua-green, knocking down willow trees along its banks, muscling over its sandy shoulders and roaring under bridges. It was fast. It was rambunctious. For four days, it was its old self.

The water release, which tapered over the weekend, is key to one of the most ambitious river restoration efforts in the West, intended to revive the Trinity's long-suffering salmon and steelhead runs.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the West's preeminent dam master, has increased flows on other rivers to protect endangered fish. But the agency says that it has never given back so much water to a single river for environmental restoration anywhere in the country.

"This is exciting. A lot of people have been working for this for a long time," Rod Wittler, senior scientist with the Trinity River Restoration Program, said as he watched the dam gate inch open. "I think of all the rivers in California, the plan for restoring this one can work. There's a real chance of success here."

The restoration, ordered by then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in 2000 but stalled by lawsuits until this year, allows about half the Trinity's volume to stay in the 130-mile-long river, which cuts through the Trinity Alps before veering west and joining the Klamath River on its way to the Pacific.

Up until now, 75% of the Trinity's water -- and at times as much as 90% -- has been piped through a mountain tunnel to the Sacramento River, which carries it south to the Delta and a federal aqueduct that feeds the Central Valley.

Babbitt's was the most sweeping order of several issued in the last 25 years to maintain flows for the river's steelhead, chinook and coho salmon populations, which have plunged to roughly one-fifth of what they were before the Trinity and Lewiston dams were completed in 1963, capturing the river's frigid headwaters.