Snake River

Hauling truckloads of hitchhiking juvenile salmon around dams is one silly way to save a species. And it doesn't work either. As four dams were built along the lower Snake River in southeastern Washington from the late 1950s to early 1970s, it took only a few years for the river's healthy salmon populations to plummet. By the mid-1990s, the populations of four types of salmon had been declared endangered or threatened. The federal expenditure of $8 billion since then for fish ladders, hatcheries, habitat restoration and, yes, trucks and barges to transport the salmon around the dams has not restored the fish.

A raft that was part of a scenic float trip on the Snake River overturned Friday in Grand Teton National Park. Three people drowned; 10 others who were in the raft were rescued, park officials said. Park spokeswoman Joan Anzelmo said two women and a man died. She declined to release their names or hometowns, saying the park service was still trying to notify their families. She said the victims were not locals. Thirteen people, including the boatman from Grand Teton Lodge Co.

Nearly everything about "Snake River," the centerpiece of an absorbing but frustrating show at the Gallery at REDCAT, involves a split, a duality. The two-channel video was made by two artists, Charles Gaines and Edgar Arceneaux, both based in Los Angeles. It was supported and exhibited through the joint effort of two institutions, REDCAT and the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, and is accompanied by a two-volume catalog due out in November.

For years, the federal government has struggled to find a way to operate the massive hydropower system on the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Pacific Northwest and still recover the endangered salmon that all too frequently are slaughtered at the massive dams as they make their way up and down the river.

The river workhorse begins here in the northern Idaho farm belt, slicing a canyon through the rolling grasslands of the most productive wheat fields in the nation. Here, the Snake River takes 722,000 tons a year of wheat and barley on its back and carries it down through the confluence with the Columbia River and on to the sea--465 miles of what was once the wildest river system in the West.

Lifting a long-handled net out of the Madison River, David Richards studied the mesh, inspecting little black dots. "The first time I looked, I saw gravel," said Richards, an aquatic ecologist in Yellowstone National Park. "Then I said: 'That's not gravel. It's moving. It's snails.' " More specifically, a species of New Zealand snail that invaded the Snake River in Idaho in the mid-1980s and, more recently, prime fishing waters in Yellowstone National Park.

And now, the White House assures us, the \o7 real\f7 white water story. It's about the boiling rapids of the Snake River here, not the land deal gone sour in the Ozarks. It's about the First Family enjoying the splendor of the mountain West, which is accessible to millions of American families, not the inside dealing of financial and political speculators in Washington.

In the still waters of a lake suspended 6,500 feet up and more than 900 miles from the sea in the Sawtooth Mountains, the sockeye salmon each year complete their primordial underwater ballet. Answering a call from somewhere deep inside, the sockeye make their way from the sea into the Columbia River and swim relentlessly up through Oregon, Washington and Idaho--finally showering their red eggs in the old gravel of Redfish Lake before they die.