Klamath Salmon Pages

about this site

about the author

My name is Erika Meyer. I am a web designer in Portland, Oregon (seastorm.com). I grew up in Freshwater, California and lived most of my life in that area. My daughter is Yurok and Karuk. This is my personal site, and the views expressed belong to me.

I built these Salmon Pages first in September 2002 in order to process, and to inform the world-at-large about the massive fish kill I had just witnessed on the Klamath river. At the time, I did not know how much publicity this event and associated issues would garner. I continue to maintain the site because the problems that led to the 2002 fish kill have not gone away. I want the world to know that the Klamath river ecosystem is too important to throw away.

The purpose of The Salmon Pages site is to bear witness, to assist further research, and to share my corner of this story.

2002 fish kill

In September of 2002 my daughter and I travelled to Klamath, California to visit our family. The town of Klamath lies on Highway 101, at the mouth of the river. To get there we departed Highway 199 and drove along the river from Happy Camp down to Weitchpec, where we noticed the Trinity river (Klamath's major tributary) barely trickling into the Klamath. We then travelled to Pecwan, and to Klamath/Requa over the Bald Hills. The sun was hot. The moon was full. The forest fires were burning down.

I had borrowed a video camera, and was taking footage so that my daughter could show her Portland friends something about where her family lives.

At Requa we slept until late morning. Then we walked down the hillside to the Klamath mouth. As we walked along the river lips, dead and dying salmon began to appear. "The fish are sick," someone said.

I kept taking video footage. It soon became clear that something terrible was taking place. Our moods darkened until numb with disbelief. Because as Barry McCovey so succinctly put it "For the Yurok, salmon is everything."

salmon is everything

The Klamath river has always been famous for its abundance. Yurok, Karuk, and Hupa are all interconnected with the river and everything it provides. These tribes, and the tribes of the upper basin, have been part of this river since time immemorial.

Anthropological evidence says villages along the Klamath have been inhabited for 10,000-15,000 years. For all this time, the people were able to live off the river's abundance. But things began to change 100 years ago, and elders will tell that the river is nothing like what it was even 50-60 short years ago. In such a brief period of time, in just two short generations, the river has gone from from healthy and abundant to sick and endangered.

Although the Klamath has suffered in recent years, the beautiful and stubborn salmon continue to be the physical and cultural lifeblood a people who still hunt, gather, and fish for themselves. The destruction of the these wild salmon is unthinkable.

Where the salmon go, we all will follow. That is what I know.