Chinook salmon on their way to spawning, view from Ballard Locks in Seattle | photo by Wlodzimierz
Looking back, the big story of 2025 was the miraculous recovery of the Klamath River. Following the final removal of the four lower dams (Iron Gate, Copco 1 & 2, and J.C. Boyle) late last year, 2025 became the “Year of the Return.” Reports from California Trout and the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department confirmed what optimists hardly dared to hope: by late October 2025, over 7,700 fall-run Chinook had passed the former Iron Gate site, pushing into tributaries like the Williamson and Sprague rivers that haven’t seen anadromous fish in over a century. The images circulating on Instagram—silver kings holding in water that was a stagnant reservoir just 18 months ago—are nothing short of spiritual for the angling community.
However, the mood is starkly different in the Pacific Northwest’s Snake River basin. While the Klamath flows free, the fight to breach the lower Snake River dams hit a legislative concrete wall. In a sharp reversal of 2024’s momentum, the new political administration moved in June 2025 to rescind Biden-era agreements that paved the way for breaching. Forum chatter on local forums turned heated, with anglers debating the “energy vs. ecology” trade-off as salmon returns continue to flatline. This may remain the single most polarizing topic in the fly fishing zeitgeist as we move into 2026.
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