Cash Crop Adam’s River Draws Huge Crowds To Watch The Sockeye Salmon Run

The Adam’s River sockeye salmon run is a nursery built by the dying among the dead. It is also the world’s largest such run in a single river.

The Adam’s is a stream by U.S. standards, in many braids scarcely wider than a two car driveway. But every four years up to 2 million fish swim up the Fraser and the Thompson rivers to jam its 6.8-mile length, spawn, and die. Last year was such a dominant run but estimates for the return fell to only 700,000 fish.

And with the salmon come the people, sometimes up to 500,000 in the middle 21 to 28 days of October. They come from around the world. They spend money. They leave. No economic studies on the value of salmon tourism alone have been done but in talking with various local and regional authorities estimates are staggering.

In 1990, more than 300,000 people visited the spawning grounds near Chase, B.C., as did more than 4 million fish. Initial expenditures ran from $50 to $150 per person for a total of $15 million to $45 million in less than a month. And that’s the most conservative estimate of them all coming from Fred Oakley, tourism manager for the City of Kamloops.

“Who knows what the extended value of the publicity and recycling of the money is,” said Oakley.

On the other end was the estimate made by a high-level government official who asked not to be identified. From his urban office far from the river he said that a half million visitors translated into a total impact that approached $350 million annually. His reluctance to be on record comes from pressures by commercial fishing interests who have a stake in the red fish, too.

“A study done more than 15 years ago indicated that the lower few kilometers of the river in total impact was the most valuable real estate in British Columbia because of the bounty it produced in both fish and tourism,” said Mark Hume, author of “Adam’s River: The Mystery of the Adam’s River Sockeye.”

“People love those salmon,” he said.

And love is the correct word. Every four years, the parking lot at Roderick Haig-Brown Provincial Park is cordoned off. A Salute to the Salmon celebration ensues and up to 50 school buses per day from all over Canada roll in. Private autos and tour buses choke the area. A temporary, modest, and respectful concession area also springs to life.

An extensive trail system follows the river and provides viewing opportunities unparalleled elsewhere. Even wheelchair users can make their way to within inches of the water and the fish, who seemingly could care less.

If this sounds like a circus, it’s not. Most people are so taken by the sight of a river teaming with bright-red, olive-headed salmon they rarely walk more than a few hundred yards before stopping, overwhelmed by the sight.

Equally as overwhelming is the stench of dead fish hanging heavy in the moist riparian area electrified by the fall colors of old-growth black cottonwoods and white birch contrasted by red cedars and Douglas firs. In places, the carcasses soon dressed in the white, fluffy fungus of decay measure four feet deep.

Gluttonous gulls, eagles, and ospreys pluck out only the eyes from the dead leaving behind an eerie hollow socket. Like ghosts of the run past and guardian angels of the generation to come, the fish rot and fertilize the lake below. At night, the big scavengers come. Bear, mink, coyotes, and otters take their share, too.

For solitude, the visitor need only walk a few kilometers beyond the masses. But so many people are unusually quiet. They stare. Rarely are children, well, children with all their accompanying noise. They marvel as the six to eight-pound males flash fangs on kype jaws and grab an intruder’s tail causing a boil in shallow water. Sometimes the intruder is injured. Sometimes the attacker breaks a jaw and is themselves then attacked. But always, the fish surge on.

The females will drop up to 4,000 eggs apiece. In places the river bottom is confluent with eggs. Big, resident rainbow trout gorge beneath the salmon and out in Shuswap Lake on the eggs left uncovered.

This year, the sub-dominant run may nearly equal the dominant run, a fact most people don’t realize. But thankfully, the celebration will be gone until 1998. Anglers can look forward to fishing egg patterns and weighted streamers in the lake to hook wall-hanger rainbows. This fall is the perfect time to go and see one of nature’s great spectacles.

What the Adam’s River has now, Idaho and Washington once had and could have again. For the moment and perhaps forever though, we’ve traded the riches of nature for short term profits among a few. Silly politicians discount salmon and what they mean to the Pacific Northwest and yet are too ignorant to realize they kill gold to make aluminum.

You see to me, the smell of rotting, spawned-out fish is not the smell of death— a sterile river bank is.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Getting there The Adam’s River , where it courses through Roderick Haig-Brown Provincial Park, is about 450 miles north of Spokane. The park is near Chase, British Columbia, about an hour northeast of Kamloops. The Chase-Kamloops-Shuswap region features travel facilities ranging from a world-class lodge to state-of-the-art RV parks and wilderness camping. Access to the salmon viewing is available for the physically challenged. For more information call: (604) 679-8432.