Rewilding in action along Washington’s Elwha River

Photo by Ryan Talbott

This fall, WildEarth Guardians joined the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe (LEKT) and Clallam Conservation District to plant hundreds of trees along the Elwha River just north of Olympic National Park. LEKT expects to plant a total of 10,000 trees in the coming months to benefit native fish habitat and drinking water quality for the City of Port Angeles.

The site was previously flooded when the Elwha Dam was constructed in 1913, which blocked passage for fish, including salmon and steelhead. Another dam, Glines Canyon Dam, was constructed upstream in 1927.Together, these dams cut off about 90% of the watershed for migrating salmon. A watershed that once supported salmon runs of 400,000 adults was reduced to just 4,000 by the early 2000s.

LEKT and others led efforts to remove these dams and restore the watershed and the salmon populations, which are culturally important to the Elwha and other Coast Salish Indigenous tribes. Congress approved the dam removals in 1992 but it would be another 20 years before demolition began. The demolition of the Elwha Dam was completed in 2012 and the demolition of the Glines Canyon Dam was completed in 2014. Finally, the Elwha River was free-flowing once again and fish could migrate up and down the river unimpeded. Today, fish populations are slowly rebounding.

“It was really cool to witness a river finding its course after being impounded for a century. When we walked onto the floodplain, you could see the huge stumps of the old-growth trees that were cut when the Elwha Dam was constructed over a century ago. It’s a reminder of the forests that were once here and hopefully someday will be again.” – Ryan Talbott, Pacific Northwest Conservation Advocate

Ryan Talbott, Pacific Northwest Conservation Advocate. Photo by Kevin Merrigan/Clallam Conservation District.

Over the past decade, LEKT has been engaged in long-term restoration efforts, including riparian tree plantings such as the one this past weekend. Partial funding for this planting was provided by the Drinking Water Providers Partnership (DWPP).

DWPP is a unique partnership that connects habitat restoration with clean public drinking water. DWPP is a collaboration of the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Natural Resource Conservation Service, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, Washington Department of DEQ, Washington Department of Health, Geos Institute, The Freshwater Trust, and WildEarth Guardians. Each year, DWPP holds a competitive grant solicitation for watershed restoration projects in municipal watersheds in the Pacific Northwest. This tree planting was one of the projects DWPP funded in 2024. Additional funding for this and other Elwha watershed restoration efforts have been provided by LEKT, Olympic National Park, Salmon Recovery Funding Board, Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office, Washington Department of Ecology, Bureau of Indian Affairs, EPA, and the Strait Ecosystem Recovery Network.

Guardians’ participation in the Elwha restoration advances our ReWilding Initiative, a healing effort to erase the scars from misuse of national forest lands and to restore connected wild places and waters for wildlife and people. Learn more about ReWilding here.

For more information of LEKT’s restoration efforts, check out their website.