The river as power

Monte Richards, a retired official with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, watched Idaho's salmon runs decline in the 1960s and 1970s as dams blocked their path. He stands by the Boise River in Boise's Ann Morrison Park.

For power users, it's a river of gold

The "City of Trees," situated on the Boise River, is the center of life in Idaho. At Boise's heart is Ann Morrison Park, 153 grassy acres along the river and the end point of the most popular river float trip in a state that offers unparalleled river recreation.

Monte Richards wanted to talk at Ann Morrison Park. He couldn't be convinced to meet at the Snake River, about 30 miles east at Marsing.

Historically, Snake salmon migrated all the way to the impassable Shoshone Falls, about 370 miles upstream of today's Hells Canyon Dam.

The first power plant on the Snake River ended that.

When Trade Dollar Mining Co. erected Swan Falls Dam in 1901, it cut off 170 miles of the main-stem Snake. And the small town of Marsing below the dam became the center of the fall chinook salmon fishery.

But now, Richards said, there is no point in going to Marsing - salmon haven't been there in decades, ever since the Hells Canyon hydropower complex plugged the river far downstream.

So instead of being able to boast about world-famous fish, Marsing's promotional material touts wines and a rock formation that looks like a lizard.

Marsing residents, however, didn't come up empty. Like other Idaho Power consumers, they pay the second-lowest electricity rates in the West - rates that could soon jump to pay for saving fish.

BOISE - It's not hard to guess that Monte Richards loves fish - or at least loves to go fishing.

The retired Idaho fisheries chief pulls into Ann Morrison Park in a small white Ford pickup with a rowboat on top.

Earlier in the week, the 75-year-old had rummaged through his garage to find a tan leather briefcase covered in cobwebs.

He brushed it off and unlocked a handful of key documents from his 30-year career with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

Richards is one of the old-timers who watched salmon runs decline in Idaho as hydropower dams destroyed them.

Even though the congenial Richards is no longer connected to the agency, his training as a biologist shows through. He rarely ventures into the realm of opinion, opting instead to tell what he saw.

"The Hells Canyon Dam complex was completed in 1968," Richards said in an undated historical review of salmon and steelhead in the Snake. "By 1971, the runs of fall chinook, spring chinook and steelhead destined for the Snake River drainage above Hells Canyon were no more."

Shortly after graduating from Oregon State University in 1953, Richards was hired by the Oregon Fish Commission to do a groundbreaking Snake River salmon and steelhead study.

His goal was to determine how many fish might be affected by the lower Snake dams, which were still in the planning stages.

Among other things, his work would be used for determining the size of fish ladders designed to provide upstream passage at the dams.

Richards estimated 55,000 wild chinook and 48,000 wild steelhead passed Clarkston to spawn in the Weiser, the Grande Ronde, the Lostine and other upstream rivers. By comparison, the average of wild steelhead returns at Lower Granite in the late 1990s was only about 9,100.

During his Clarkston study, Richards knew the lower Snake dams were imminent.

"In those days," he said, "you didn't think all that much about it because nobody knew for sure what the problems were going to be."

"We'd much rather not had them, of course, because all dams affect fish one way or another," he said. "But ... dams were sacred. They built them, that's what it amounted to. You may not want them and you might be concerned, but it really made no difference."

In 1959, Snake salmon faced a bigger problem than the as-yet-unbuilt dams between Pasco and Lewiston - Brownlee Dam. Four years earlier, Idaho Power Co. won a national debate that gave it the right to develop a three-dam complex in Hells Canyon.

It became the workhorse of Idaho's power system, with the capacity to produce two-thirds of the company's electricity.

Opponents of the investor-owned company said the federal government should construct one "high dam" like Grand Coulee as a public power project. Their last appeal to Congress was rejected just months before Brownlee construction was done.

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A few blocks from Ann Morrison Park, Craig Jones and Lewis Wardle manage the Hells Canyon relicensing program in Idaho Power's smartly landscaped high-rise.

It's no easy job. The 50-year federal license for the Hells Canyon Project expires in 2005. Relicensing mandates are popping up all over the West in the next few years, but Hells Canyon is one of the largest private projects to face the complicated review.

"It's about how you make tradeoffs," Jones said. "It's not about right and wrong. It's about what is important and what is the best use of the resource. ...

"It comes down to what you value as a society."

Society's values already rule the Snake.

For only two weeks a year does Idaho Power have full control of its operations.

Otherwise, flood control, recreation and salmon protection script most of its moves, filtered through more than 20 state and federal agencies.

In other words, if the government demands changes in Idaho Power's operations, it will come at the expense of some other social benefit.

Because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gets few chances to shape hydro projects, each review is massive.

Often, reviews bring controversy as environmental groups press for reforms of decades-old projects.

Much has changed since Hells Canyon was plugged. For instance, the dams were built for $278 million - about two-thirds of what the Bonneville Power Administration now spends in a single year to boost dam-harmed fish populations.

Not surprisingly, salmon and all the factors that affect them - water temperatures, flows, velocity and timing - will shape the future of Idaho Power.

The power company's horde of biologists is doing more than 90 environmental studies in the canyon.

"We've got people kicking over rocks and counting snakes and scorpions," Jones said. "You name it, we're looking at it."

Among the questions is the viability of re-introducing salmon above Hells Canyon. Also, company biologists are trying to figure out just how much the reservoir water helps or hurts fish on the lower Snake.

Adding to the complexity are questions about the role of federal projects that surround Idaho Power's dams. For instance, the Corps of Engineers operates the four lower Snake dams and the Bureau of Reclamation runs the Minidoka power plant downstream of Hells Canyon.

Relicensing already has cost Idaho Power five years and $20 million. With most studies still not completed, there's no telling the company's final cost.

"Obviously," said Jones, "we are concerned about the economic viability of the project. ...

"Relicensing is an expensive undertaking," he said. "It requires the same scrutiny, even more in some cases, as constructing a new project."

But cost is not the driving factor now.

"First, our focus at this point in the process is on ... (determining) the impacts of project operations on the affected environment and what can be done to offset them," Jones said. "We don't want decisions to be based on assumption, fear or hyperbole."

Idaho Power serves roughly 700,000 people in Idaho, Eastern Oregon and Northern Nevada, mostly from 17 hydropower projects on the Snake.

Its water power is cheap. A business that pays $5,150 a month for power in Boise would pay about $22,000 in Long Beach, Calif., or New York.

But the Snake is totally tapped.

A recent Idaho Power report said the company predicts that by 2004, its transmission capacity will be exhausted. During peak winter and summer use times, Idaho Power may not have enough juice to serve an estimated 55,000 customers. Now it's looking for other sources.

***

In the 1950s, environmental concerns were just a fraction of those Idaho Power now faces.

"Development was the goal," recalled Richards. "Nobody even thought about the fish."

Perhaps more accurately, fish were usually an afterthought.

As Brownlee Dam neared completion, biologists such as Richards developed a plan to get salmon upstream - a task they had "no previous experience" to draw on for such a massive impediment.

At 395 feet high, Brownlee is among the world's highest rock-filled dams, and too high for a fish ladder. Instead, it relied on a trap-and-haul system that was abandoned within a few years.

The plan was to collect upstream-bound and downstream-bound fish at the dam and truck them past the concrete blockade.

"The dam was there, so this was an effort to maintain the run," said Richards, who had been promoted to Idaho's regional biologist with a goal of keeping salmon moving through the canyon.

Richards minces no words today about the downstream net-collection plan - it failed. Migrating juveniles hit the 58-mile reservoir and stopped. Many of them died in the still, hot pool for which their genetic code wasn't prepared.

In simple terms, the fish didn't know what to do when their river turned into a lake.

To make matters worse, "If they did make it to the collection facilities," Richards said as he cited a variety of problems, "the collection facilities didn't work."

The upstream hauling program wasn't as bad. "It killed a lot of fish, but it did work," Richards said.

The next attempt to save the salmon included a fall chinook hatchery to replace the young fish that didn't make it past the dam. Since fall chinook primarily spawn in the main stems of rivers, slack water is particularly dangerous for them.

"The hatchery operation didn't work," said Richards. "Basically, that was the end of the fall chinook, at least the fall chinook in the Snake River above Hells Canyon Dam."

By 1964, the power company was building two more dams downstream of Brownlee and fish agents were trying to salvage remaining runs.

Biologists trapped spring chinook and steelhead in Hells Canyon and trucked them to the Salmon River drainage, which isn't blocked by the canyon's dams. Eggs were distributed to "mitigation hatcheries" around the basin.

About the time Hells Canyon construction was ending, Richards was moved to a post where he reviewed all water projects that would affect Idaho's fish. Most of his time was spent on the lower Snake River investigating the same thing he had a decade before - fish passage between Pasco and Lewiston.

At the time, he said, nobody knew what the effects of the dams would be, so he wasn't mourning the imminent end of wild runs. But in hindsight, the trend was clear.

"The big decline (in salmon) started when they put the last lower Snake dam in," said Richards, echoing Reed Burkholder. "We've still got all kinds of good spawning habitat ... that is unutilized. There are no fish to get there."

He wants the lower Snake dams removed. Everything else - habitat programs, hatchery upgrades and the like - is just whistling an old tune in the face of disaster, he says.

"All these programs they have come up with are exactly the same programs I worked on 40 years ago and they obviously haven't worked."

In 1901, Swan Falls Dam near Kuna, Idaho, was the first power plant built on the Snake River. The Trade Dollar Mining Co. harnessed the river to power the mining town of Silver City, Idaho, and Idaho Power acquired the plant in 1916.