In October 2024, the last of four dams came out of the Klamath River — the largest dam removal in United States history. Within weeks, Chinook salmon were spawning above the old dam sites for the first time in more than a century.
It was a genuine landmark, driven by the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath Tribes after decades of fighting for it. And like the Elwha before it, it will be waved around as proof that dams should simply come down. So it's worth being precise: the Klamath doesn't change our rule. It confirms it. These were the right dams to remove — and the reasons why are exactly the reasons the dams worth keeping are worth keeping.
The four Klamath dams weren't just blocking fish. They were actively poisoning the river — while barely earning their keep.
Old dams generating a relatively small amount of power, with no fish passage at all — so removing them opened the river without costing the grid much of anything.
Their warm, stagnant reservoirs bred toxic algae blooms and fueled a fish-killing disease downstream — the dams weren't neutral barriers, they were making the water lethal.
Above them lay more than 400 miles of habitat that salmon had been shut out of for generations — an enormous return for taking out a little bit of power.
The response stunned even the biologists. In the weeks after the final dam came out, more than 6,000 Chinook passed the former Iron Gate Dam site, and salmon reached above the old J.C. Boyle Dam for the first time in over a century. When you remove a barrier that was doing nothing but harm — blocking the fish and poisoning the water — and open 400 miles of habitat behind it, the fish don't need to be coaxed. They just go.
Two honest caveats keep this in perspective. First, removal wasn't the whole plan — a hatchery (Fall Creek) is carrying the runs through the transition, the same removal-plus-active-recovery pairing we saw on the Elwha. Second, it isn't an instant cure: the 2025 fall Chinook run came in at roughly 61% of the long-term average. The fish are back above the dams, which is historic — but the basin still faces hard fights over water, drought, and climate that no dam removal, by itself, resolves.
Read the Klamath and the Elwha together and the principle is unmistakable. Both were old, low-power, impassable dams — on the Klamath, ones that were actively toxifying the river — blocking huge stretches of habitat. Their fish cost vastly outweighed their power value, so removal was obviously right, and the fish proved it.
That is precisely the calculation that points the other way for a big, modern, firm-power dam that can be engineered salmon-safe with today's fish-friendly turbines and passage. Keeping those, and making the fish able to pass, keeps clean power on the grid and protects the families who depend on it. We are not for dams or against them. We're for the evidence — and the Klamath is what it looks like when the evidence says remove. Read our position on the dams worth keeping, see the rest of the record, or get involved.
The Klamath removal was contested for good reasons on all sides, and its full success will take years to measure — sediment, water quality, and the returning runs are all still settling out. And the upper basin's water conflicts, which pit agriculture, endangered suckers, and downstream flows against each other, are as fierce as ever. Removing the dams was necessary; it was never going to be sufficient.
But the headline holds: four of the right dams came out, and salmon returned to water they'd been locked out of for a hundred years. That's what a justified removal looks like — and why it takes justification.
The figures on this page are drawn from public, authoritative records:
Questions about our facts and figures? Contact us.