Sockeye Make ‘Miracle’ Return To River

An estimated 30,000 sockeye salmon are returning to the Upper Adams River this fall, filling spawning beds that have been empty for 88 years.

“I’m really excited about this,” said Ian Williams, a freshwater biologist at the federal Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo. “It’s something of a miracle, really.”

With a return of 30,000 salmon, the Fisheries Department has achieved a critical mass, he said.

“Now that we’ve reached that level, it’s possible to double it and double it again,” he said. “I believe we can see 6 to 10 million salmon returning to that river.”

The Upper Adams stock was wiped out in 1908 when a logging company built a dam at the outlet to the Lower Adams River.

When the dam was opened, it sent a flood of water downriver to flush log jams to mills far downstream.

The floods blew away millions of spawning salmon while the logs, grinding and digging into the gravel beds, killed many more.

The logging company ceased operation in 1922 and in 1945, the dam was finally removed.

Sockeye survived in the Lower Adams, eventually building up to support runs of 10 million salmon, but the Upper Adams fish seemed gone forever.

The Fisheries Department began trying in 1950 to reintroduce sockeye from other systems. But although millions of salmon fry were released, only a handful ever returned and by 1980, the run stood at just 560 fish.

Williams said that in 1984, biologists tried using sockeye that had reestablished in the Momich-Cayenne system on East Adams Lake.

Four years later, 7,169 sockeye returned to the Upper Adams.

The run fell to a few thousand in 1992, probably because of over-fishing on the coast, Williams said.

This year, Canadian and American commercial fishermen as well as Indian fishing groups let the Adams run pass, he said.

The result has been a flood of fish that have spread to spawning beds unused since the dam was built in 1908.