The Elwha is the most famous dam removal in America. Two dams came out, 70 miles of river reopened, and the salmon came flooding back. It is, without question, a triumph.
It is also the most misused story in the salmon debate — held up as proof that we should tear out every dam we can reach. That's the wrong lesson. The Elwha doesn't prove "remove dams." It proves something more useful and more honest: match the fix to the dam. These were exactly the right dams to remove — and understanding why is what tells you which dams aren't.
Every feature that made the Elwha dams worth removing is a feature the biggest, most valuable dams don't share.
The Elwha Dam (1913) and Glines Canyon Dam (1927) were a century old and generated very little firm power — so removing them cost the grid almost nothing.
Neither dam had any way for fish to get past it. There was nothing to engineer or upgrade — they simply walled the salmon off, completely, for a hundred years.
Above them lay 70-plus miles of cold, protected, near-perfect spawning habitat, most of it inside Olympic National Park — a fortune in salmon country locked behind a little bit of power.
The dams came out in stages between 2011 and 2014, and the river answered fast. Within a few years, all the anadromous species were recolonizing the reopened watershed. Adult Chinook returns reached the highest levels since the late 1980s — more than 7,600 estimated in 2019. Summer steelhead, which had been driven to functional extinction, came back in real numbers. When the barrier fits that description — old, powerless, impassable, walling off pristine habitat — you take it out, and the fish do the rest.
Here's a detail the "just tear it out" version leaves out: removal alone wasn't the whole plan. The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe ran hatchery programs to carry the river's native stocks — especially the nearly-extinct summer steelhead — through the transition, so the genetics survived long enough to repopulate the newly opened miles. Even the flagship removal leaned on active production. Take out the right barrier and keep the fish going while the river heals: that's the pattern that works.
The reason the Elwha was an easy call is the reason most dams aren't. A big, modern, firm-power dam that keeps the lights on for a city — and that can be fitted with fish-safe turbines and passage that already move salmon at 98–100% survival — is a completely different equation. There the fish cost is solvable, and the clean power is real and worth keeping. Tearing it out doesn't make the demand disappear; it just shifts it to dirtier sources and hands the bill to the people who live there.
So we judge each dam on its own math. Where a dam is old, powerless, impassable, and blocking prime habitat — the Elwha — removal is the right answer. Where it's firm clean power that can be engineered salmon-safe, the right answer is to keep it and make the fish able to pass. Same principle, opposite conclusions, because the dams are different. See the rest of the record, or get involved.
Removal on this scale wasn't free or instant — it released decades of trapped sediment downstream, required years of careful management, and the runs are still rebuilding, not fully recovered. And the Elwha's payoff was possible partly because so much of the habitat above it was already protected and pristine; not every river has 70 miles of national park waiting upstream.
But none of that changes the core point. The Elwha proves that when the evidence says a dam should come out, taking it out works — and it proves, just as clearly, that the evidence has to say so first.
The figures on this page are drawn from public, authoritative records:
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