Cle Elum Lake sockeye salmon use first-of-its-kind ‘helix' to pass dam

CLE ELUM LAKE - Water cascaded round and round … and round and round the spiral waterslide with a thundering roar.

It was hard to tell exactly who was along for this wild ride. But inside the current were young sockeye salmon cruising to the next stop in their life's journey.

The first-of-its-kind fish passage contraption, called a "helix," was bored into the shore of Cle Elum Lake. It allows salmon to pass the nearly century-old dam that led to their extinction from this place.

Its completion this spring marked a step toward reconnecting the Yakima basin, and bringing back its once-abundant salmon returns in the Columbia. And it's just one piece of a sweeping blueprint for the future of water, people and fish in Yakima Valley.

The current collaboration between Yakama Nation, environmentalists, farmers and federal, state and local governments that birthed the Yakima Basin Integrated Plan has been heralded by advocates as a model for the future of drought and water conflicts in the West.

Meanwhile, climate change is marching on.

Snow - once relied upon to melt and sustain the basin through the hot and dry months - is visibly absent. Looming above full reservoirs and churning rivers are mostly barren craggy peaks. Water conservation efforts are already underway.

As the state faces an unprecedented fourth consecutive drought, projects across the basin are chugging along.

Yakima basin collaborators are expanding water storage at Cle Elum Lake and just tore out a causeway and reconnected the Yakima River delta where it meets the Columbia, removing a known, deadly bottleneck for salmon migration. Plans are also in motion for a new reservoir.

They are "working from the headwaters to the confluence right now, and trying to make the whole system better for the future, to make it like it was," said Brandon Parsons, director of river restoration at nonprofit American Rivers, a member of the collaborative.

The largest of the projects in this drought-plagued valley is here. The helix has been years in the making, costing $255 million in state and federal funding.

Jonathan Yoder, an economist and director of the Washington Water Research Center at Washington State University, analyzed projects in the basin and found in 2014 that fish-passage projects provided among the strongest net economic benefits.

These fish face a perilous journey. But it's easy to see the promise in this place, of salmon returning to these cool waters where tall ponderosas cast shade, oozing with a cinnamon fragrance in the sun, and kingfishers chitter and glide along the water's surface. And opening up cool freshwater refuge has helped salmon recovery elsewhere in the region.

"We're out there for future generations," said Joe Blodgett, enrolled member of the Yakama Nation and Yakima Klickitat Fisheries Project program manager. "And that's not just Yakama Nation future generations, it's the ecosystem, everybody's future."

Natural history of the Cle Elum River

Awakened by spring warmth, glacial melt replenishes four lakes and a wetland nestled in the eastern flank of the Cascades. Streams, rivers and creeks carry meltwater from these headwaters to the Yakima River, which eventually spills into the Columbia.

For millennia, Yakama Nation fisheries experts explain, these streams were teeming with salmon. Oral histories tell of salmon running so thick it was as if one could walk across their backs. The lakes acted as nurseries for sockeye, a salmon that relies upon freshwater lakes in its life cycle.

The Yakima River contributed the second-largest salmon returns in the Columbia Basin, with an estimated more than 200,000 adult sockeye returning here to spawn each year.

But in one generation, the construction of dams caused the extinction of sockeye in the Yakima River. All of the salmon and the steelhead and bull trout that belonged up there were blocked off from those headwaters. An estimated 800,000 to 1 million salmon and steelhead historically returned to spawn across the basin; today the 10-year average for adult salmon and steelhead returns is just over 11,000.

Dams impounded the lakes to store more water as this salmon country transitioned to an agricultural valley. There was no way for fish to get around them. Today, the Yakima Basin produces about $4.5 billion in annual agricultural value.

As climate change squeezes the water supply, restoring fish in the upper basin offers promise for all of the communities that rely on the basin.

Yakama Nation and the state, which co-manage fisheries in the basin, have been eyeing fish passage in the upper basin for decades, and Cle Elum Lake was the first to land on the docket, explained Mike Livingston, regional director for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Low flows, warm water and human-made barriers across the landscape have threatened the survival of resilient salmon. A 2024 heat wave caused a die-off of adult sockeye returning to spawn in the Yakima, just one example of the ongoing dangers they face today.

Now they need a boost from humans. As temperatures rise, as snow turns to rain, accessing the cool habitat above the dam is critical.

Sockeye are the first to return.

Efforts began in 2009, Blodgett explained, when Yakama Nation fisheries staff would collect adult sockeye destined for the upper Columbia River at Priest Rapids dam and truck them up to Cle Elum Lake. Interim fish passage (a plywood ramp) was installed to allow juvenile sockeye to leave the lake via the dam's flume and plunge into the Cle Elum River.

Just a few years into the reintroduction effort, cameras positioned at dams used for irrigation in the Prosser and Roza areas started picking up adult sockeye zipping by. They were finding their way back. Now, a few hundred return to the Yakima Basin each year on their own.

It's nowhere near what we need and want back, Blodgett said, but it gave fisheries managers optimism to keep plugging forward.

How the helix came to be

Since the sockeye reintroduction effort began, young sockeye have only been able to head downstream when the Cle Elum Lake reservoir was completely full. Some years, that never happened.

And the young fish didn't have a great chance of surviving the route. They could get injured or disoriented as they crashed down the plywood escape ramp, or bump into low flows and potentially deadly temperatures in the river.

A long-term solution needed to more closely mimic their natural migration. Ideally, it also wouldn't require additional water to be released downstream, threatening farmers' reliable supply in the summer.

That's where the "helix" comes in.

The Bureau of Reclamation built and tested multiple models at the agency's Colorado lab. Hot dogs and Nerf balls were among the first to go for a ride. When the facility was opened to live fish for a test run in 2024, biologists watched in awe as they saw fish orienting themselves backward and sailing tail-first, gills flared down the spiral. It was an emotional moment for many folks who had been involved, Blodgett said.

These baby fish evolved to ride the high spring flows this way, Blodgett said on a tour of the helix this spring.

The first cohort, an estimated 1 million sockeye, most about 1 year old, took a ride in the completed helix this spring.

And construction is nearly complete on a fish trap at Cle Elum Dam that will allow adult sockeye, and eventually other salmon species returning here, to spawn, to migrate to the bottom of the dam, get an elevator trip to a truck and then a ride to the lake.

Future runs

Just downstream, Simon Goudy was tossing handfuls of a rust-colored snack to thousands of young Chinook darting around a concrete pool at the Levi George fish hatchery. It's not a traditional hatchery but is intended to supplement the wild stocks. Wild spring Chinook are trapped at Roza Dam on the Yakima and brought in to be spawned, their offspring raised in human care for a year.

Generations of these offspring will hopefully one day make it above the dam, too. They currently spawn just downstream.

"The salmon was the very first one to say, 'I'll give my body to support these humans,' " said Goudy, a citizen of the Yakama Nation who has worked in fisheries for more than two decades. Spring Chinook return every year after a long, hard winter, bringing nutrients from their ocean journey, and are honored in a First Food ceremony as they begin to arrive.

If there are no fish, Goudy said, "if these go extinct, we are no more."

"That's why we're here," he continued, "so these guys don't collapse."

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