Dams on the Columbia River

 Dams are complicated.  What we get is pretty green, pretty affordable power.  What we loose is wild rivers.
The Columbia River is a mighty powerhouse of a water way.  It is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest.  The Columbia and its tributaries have been central to the region's culture and economy for thousands of years. They have been used for transportation since ancient times, linking the region's many cultural groups.  It is the pathway that Lewis and Clark took once they left the Missouri River and went westward to the Pacific Ocean.
Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the Grand Coulee dam, and in Bob Dylan's tribute to Woody, he also mentioned it.  We did not get up that far on the Columbia on our last trip to Oregon, but we did see the Dalles Dam.

Humans have inhabited the Columbia's watershed for more than 15,000 years, with a transition to a sedentary lifestyle based mainly on salmon starting about 3,500 years ago.  So when damming the river, the legacy of the salmon as both a food source as well as a cultural icon needed to be preserved.I hadn't thought about fish ladders in a very long time.  Here is the fish ladder around the dam.  It is possible to watch very young fish through a glassed window making their way up the ladder--which is remarkably difficult to manage, it turns out.