The Fish That Got Away
draft 4.0
12/30/25 

 

Take it from 98- year-old biologist Bill Platts, who has had salmon on his mind longer than most of us have been alive. Idaho’s iconic fish is going extinct.

It won’t happen in his lifetime, but it will happen. He’s convinced of that.  And like most things we come to regret in our own lives, the signs were there. We just chose to ignore them.

“In the 1950’s I saw more fish in one pool than now occupy the whole Middle Fork of the Salmon River,” he told me and my cell phone recorder in 2025.

Bill and I knew each other but had never met. Even though I had “retired” several years earlier, I figured this eleven-time world record holder in the USA Masters track and Field championships was worth meeting in person. Bill told me that once he turned 100, he’d likely collect even more world records.

Bill’s employment with Idaho’s Fish & Game Department and later the U.S. Forest Service gave him a thorough understanding of how Idaho’s mountainous landscape affects the journey of one of the world’s most extraordinary creatures.

In fact, Bill was the first to blow the whistle, in the mid-1960s, on the drilling in the White Cloud Mountains by the Arizona-based American Smelting and Refining Company. Bill was doing water-quality surveys of the White Cloud Lakes for the Forest Service when he stumbled upon ASARCO’s mining operation at the base of Castle Peak.

Bill’s chief concern, as he told anyone who would listen, was that the proposed open-pit mine deep in the mountains would destroy much of the salmon run to the ocean and back.  

The threat is different today, he said. “It’s the politics that will kill the salmon. It’s not going to be logging or mining. It’s going to be politics that causes them to go extinct.”

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In my work on Outdoor Idaho I’d seen B&W photos of salmon so thick that you could almost believe a person could walk across a stream on their backs. Not so today. In 1992 only one sockeye salmon returned to the Sawtooth Valley. It was quickly dubbed “Lonesome Larry” by a hatchery worker’s daughter.

The fish had swum 900 miles upstream, from Pacific Ocean to Redfish Lake, climbing 6,500 feet in elevation. That’s further than all other salmon species. Most of us assumed it was the end of the line for the creature that had given Redfish Lake its name.

But one thing these fish have going for them is their refusal to give up. Idaho’s sockeye salmon currently number in the hundreds. Not great, but a vast improvement over the 1990s.

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Salmon don’t ask for permission. Whenever small dams are breached and rivers returned to their natural state, the fish come racing back, literally within months, to claim territory denied them for a century. This was true in the state of Washington with the removal of the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams, in 2011 and 2014 respectively.

And it was true when the four dams along the main stem of the Klamath River came down in 2024. That was the largest restoration project in American history, propelled primarily by native tribes. Again, within the year, thousands of fish arrived to reclaim the new territory. It was as if they couldn’t wait to renew the world taken from them more than a century earlier.

 

 

“This is not some crybaby species,” reporter Lynda Mapes of the Seattle Times opined to us when we interviewed her in 2021. “These animals have radiated since the Pleistocene into every single possible usable habitat. And you can be absolutely sure that if you provide habitat for them, they will utilize it.

Life finds a way.”

 

That means, however, that into the 21^st century, salmon continue to be perceived as a problem for irrigators, wheat farmers, data farms, consumers, and recreationists. It’s hard to eliminate pesky creatures who refuse to give up. Nevertheless, after thousands of years, it’s happening to Idaho’s salmon.

“Salmon Reckoning” is the one show I felt compelled to produce before I retired. It was the first show of our 39^th season, and it was filled with some topnotch people.

Not all of them supported the return of the salmon, but that was precisely why we interviewed them. My main goal was to produce a program that showed the difficulties of returning salmon to their homeland.

I wanted people who might watch our show to understand why this issue has been such a difficult lift for western politicians, and that there are smart, thoughtful individuals on all sides of the debate. 

 

There were certainly enough angles and complications to justify an hour. But even half an hour would be a stretch for some viewers expecting stories on bear captures or wild horse roundups, elk hunting or problem mountain lions, whitewater river runners, or wolverines co-existing with snow machines.

 

 

 

“Salmon Reckoning” was, instead, about the politics and roadblocks surrounding a fish that spent most of its life in the Pacific Ocean and when it did return to Idaho, looking like it had been in a fight with a big cat.

 

There was some talk of making the program our December 2021 “Pledge Special.” But the station’s fund-raisers weren’t interested. “A fish will not make the phones ring,” they said.

Nothing good could come from a potentially controversial Outdoor Idaho topic more complicated than a Rubic’s Cube, they said. “Bury the show in the September or the October schedule,” I was told. Reluctantly, I obliged.

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I guess I just looked at the world differently. What other animal so closely defines “hero,” in the classic sense of the word?

In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, author Joseph Campbell used the ancient Greek warrior, Odysseus, as the archetypal hero. His long journey involved leaving against his will and facing difficult challenges that threaten to end his quest. Along the way, the adventurer experienced growth and transformation as he struggled to return home to his place of birth.

This hero’s cycle applies not just to Odysseus, but to all who depart, who must overcome challenges, and then who eventually return home.

It can even apply to a fish.

The salmon starts life as a tiny orange egg in a mile-high, crystal-clear Idaho stream. It’s a nice hangout for a year or so, but eventually something in its tiny 4” body says it’s time for an adventure: to be propelled tail-first by the fast current, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and to do it in a matter of days.

Odysseus would be impressed at the daunting challenges the tiny fish must face. They are every bit as difficult as his battle with the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, the six-headed Scylla, the whirlpool Chrybdis, and the cannibalistic Laestrygonians.

Towering concrete dams, ravenous seals, predatory birds, dangerous fish species – these are just some of the threats the tiny salmon smolt must face. Even the water itself becomes an enemy. The warming slack-water behind the dams turns a journey of days into a month-long trek.

And before it reaches the ocean, the fish must transform itself into something that can live in saltwater. That’s a nice trick in itself.

Once it enters the Pacific Ocean, the tiny traveler will clock several thousand miles, toward the nutritious waters near Alaska. Depending upon the salmon species, the creature will travel the ocean from two to six years.

Eventually, something causes it to begin the 850-mile trek back up the Columbia and Snake rivers, to face other challenges, including orcas, sea lions, bears and eagles, and of course the eight large concrete dams.

 

Again, this creature of the sea must make a radical adjustment. It must become a freshwater fish again, deserving of the term “anadromous”: migrating up rivers from the sea to spawn.

The healthy fish starts out plump and energetic. When they reach the Salmon River, some species are the length of an angler’s leg and bigger than his dog Max.

But something dramatic occurs as the fish begins its journey to the exact stream where it was born. The fish stops eating, exhibiting a single-minded pursuit of reproduction. The male develops a hooked nose. The fish changes color. Muscles weaken; organs start to fail. Splotched patches of deterioration appear on its sides.

The haggard appearance signals that death is imminent. Those of us along the banks of the river can see the change as the exhausted fish begins its final dance: the laying of eggs by the female and the fertilizing of them by the male.

After that, there is nothing more to be done, except to offer up its decomposing, nutrient-rich body to the river. In this way the salmon links the ocean to the hungry plants and animals of the forest.

 

 

So why would an animal make that treacherous journey back to Idaho, to spawn and then, within days, to die? That’s a good question. We all have our reasons for returning to Idaho. For some it’s the lure of outdoor adventure, or the low cost of living, or perhaps the return to family and friends that brings people back to the state. Somehow a salmon knows that its only chance to perpetuate the species lies in Idaho’s mountains.

A return to one’s roots: deep in our hearts, we can relate to that pull.

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Would we have tackled the plight of the salmon if Republican Congressman Mike Simpson had not entered the fray? Probably not. We had already covered the remarkable story of Idaho’s fish in more than a dozen segments. In 2008 Outdoor Idaho devoted an entire show to “Idaho’s Salmon.”

For some of us, the salmon story had become a broken record. We knew the primary cause of the salmon’s decline and were sure that no politician had the stomach to call for the removal of even one of the offending structures.

Concerned citizens had pretty much resigned themselves to losing one of the miracles of the animal kingdom.

 

 Once the Outdoor Idaho production staff had determined that Congressman Simpson was offering the nation something different – a comprehensive plan that considered all the various players in the dam removal scenario – we decided to tackle the issue once again, but in a different manner.

We would front-load the introduction to “Salmon Reckoning” with our most interesting, hard-hitting comments. If we couldn’t hook viewers in the first three or four minutes, I figured the TV remotes in public TV land would be clicking away to something more comprehensible and palatable, like “Baking with Julia,” or “Call the Midwife,” or maybe “The Joy of Painting.” 

 

A comment from the northwest’s long-time environmental reporter Lynda Mapes made it into that introduction.  “All of a sudden onto the scene comes somebody named Mike Simpson. I never heard of Mike Simpson. I had to keep looking up his name. Is it Tom? Is it Pete? Some one-syllable-named guy? Who is he? Mike Simpson, Republican out of Idaho? Whoever would have thunk it?”

The thing that struck Lynda as a reporter was how little had changed over the many years she had followed the story. “Seventeen billion dollars have been spent on hatchery operations and habitat fixes and a lot of changes in the dams,” she told us. “But the fact is, these fish are still headed for extinction. And now so are the orcas.”

 

Others who made the show’s first minutes were probably not folks you would invite to the same party. A fight would definitely break out. None of them pulled any punches for our show.

Steve Hartgen, a former newspaper publisher and retired Idaho legislator from Twin Falls put it this way: “Salmon were here before we got here, but that doesn't mean they have to stay here. So were mastodons. And so were large herds of bison. And so were Dodo birds.”

Contrast that to businessman, sportsman and water-color artist Link Jackson: “The thing is, we’re human. We make mistakes. Take the dams out. It was the wrong idea. They don't generate much good for humanity and they're killing the most magnificent run of salmon on the planet. We need to get rid of them. Pronto.”

In the state of Washington, along the Columbia River, the argument was that we just don’t know enough, according to David Reeploeg, a member of the Tri-City Development Council: “Removing the dams would be like throwing a Hail Mary pass in a football game when you don’t even really know the score.”

 

Ed Chaney, the unapologetic founder of the group “Save Our Salmon,” was not one to back down from a fight: “Those dams don't even pay for their own maintenance.  Idaho is losing hundreds of millions of dollars. They're zombie, money‑losing dams.  The extinction train is rolling down the tracks. And if we don’t do something, it’s over.”

 

If the salmon do continue to hang on, it will likely be because of the native tribes.  Their way of life depends upon the fish that appear every year at the same time. The 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek and a handful of other treaties from that era, written and signed by the U.S. government and ratified by the tribes, reserved the tribes’ rights to fish in their “usual and accustomed” fishing grounds.

 

“Without the salmon, it’s a pretty lonely world,” Coeur d’Alene tribal member Hemene James said. “Not just for us, the human beings in our country, but the waters, they’re not whole. The riparian zones, they’re not whole. The birds that fly, that used to feed on the fish, they’re not whole, and they never will be, until those salmon are returned.”

We let Congressman Mike Simpson wrap up our “Salmon Reckoning” introduction. We had interviewed him in 2021 and were also at the Washington State Salmon and Orca Summit where he was the keynote speaker. “Twenty-five years ago, when I was in the state legislature, it was the first time that anybody had ever come to me and said, you know, we ought to breach these lower Snake River dams. I started to laugh when they said that, because I thought that was the craziest idea I've ever heard.

“I said, you’ve got to do everything else you can to save salmon before you go to that extreme. Well, guess what? We've tried everything else, and nothing's worked. I don’t think we should ever let a species go extinct if we can prevent it. Especially when it’s going extinct because of actions we’ve taken.

“To me the science is clear. You've got to remove the dams.”

His final words to the gathering of native tribes were emotionally presented. “We will never, never, never give up.” No wonder Native Americans love this man.

Taken together, I thought it was the strongest introduction of any Outdoor Idaho program we had produced... for all the good it did.

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Simpson’s plan was a real whopper, a Hail Mary pass to be sure, with almost no chance of success, even though a major part of the plan was to keep economically whole all those affected by the dams’ removal, to the tune of 33.5 billion dollars. His plan would essentially revamp the northwest’s power grid and agricultural product transportation network.

The rest of the Idaho congressional delegation was having none of it. It was much easier to kick the proverbial can down the road for another generation to contemplate. 

But a lot of Idahoans agreed with Congressman Simpson. Give the salmon a fighting chance. Help them get past all that flat water behind the dams. And on the return trip back up the Columbia and the Snake, with each dam taking a toll on their numbers, make it easier for these heroes to return home, to Idaho.   

After “Salmon Reckoning” aired in the autumn of 2021, I received one of those handwritten notes that convince a guy it may have been worth the effort. “You have done many wonderful Outdoor Idaho programs over the years. ‘Salmon Reckoning’ is likely the most important. Thank you. Fred.”                       
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No Idaho politician has challenged independent voters as much as Congressman Mike Simpson. The closer I got to understanding what went into his work on the historic White Clouds wilderness bill, the more convinced I became that no one else could have done what he did.

He had exhibited all the qualities we should want in our political leaders: a dogged determination to find a bipartisan Idaho solution; a perseverance that stretched over 15 years and ten different wilderness bills; an ability to work with his congressional colleagues in Washington, D.C., building bridges to all sides of the political divide.

 

And while he didn’t succeed with his salmon plan, this was not and never will be solely an Idaho issue. The political leadership in Oregon and Washington, representing each side of the Columbia River, chose not to play ball. Besides, taking out a dam that supplies clean energy seemed counter-productive, with all the talk about a warming planet. 

What the congressman and his staff did accomplish, however, was to present a comprehensive plan that proves there are other ways to accomplish the same thing, without destroying the salmon runs.

But it does take a willingness to think outside the box. Instead of using barges to haul grain, bring back the trains. Rely upon technology to significantly improve battery capacity, helping to replace the loss of hydropower.

It also takes a belief that a healthy salmon run in Idaho is worth all the effort.  I personally believe it is.

As of this writing Mike is the only congressman in Washington, D.C., who has openly advocated for the removal of all four lower Snake River dams.

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Salmon recovery has never been a big issue for eastern Idaho farmers. Many of them wondered why the congressman was wasting his time on a fish that had never gotten past the Snake River’s 212- foot- tall Shoshone Falls, the “Niagara of the West,” located in the middle of the state. Shouldn’t the congressman be working on more pressing issues that impact farming in eastern Idaho?

The congressman could explain to them that each year Idaho is legally bound to flush 487,000-acre feet of water downriver, just to improve the tiny salmon’s chances of making it to the ocean.  “But the one thing it's not doing,” he told us, “is recovering salmon. And that's the reason we flush.”

Maybe he convinced some eastern Idaho irrigators with that argument. Maybe not. He could certainly have taken a pass on the entire salmon debate and played it safe. Most of his constituents would have understood that it’s not his issue. But, as he told us in our last interview with him on this topic, he’s in Congress to make a difference and to tackle the hard issues.

And yet, among many not beholden to any major political party, there’s a feeling of unease, a belief that a maverick so respected for his work on the salmon conundrum and the White Clouds legislation should be pushing back much harder against the coarseness that is coming out of Washington, D.C.

The man certainly knows how to tackle tough, politically fraught issues. Stepping onto the national stage with a message that resonates with voters from all political parties, including independent voters, would be a most welcome gift to the nation.

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If American politics is best described as a swinging pendulum, perhaps one day a younger generation will see the benefits of befriending the gift that keeps on giving.

At least they now have a blueprint if they choose to save our ocean-going fish.

 

Retired biologist 98 year old Bill Platts believes it may already be too late. As he put it to me, the loss of Idaho’s salmon runs will be the result of “nibbling to death by ducks. It won’t be sudden, but it’s going to keep happening. Death by nibbling, by ducks.”

Virgil Moore may not have studied salmon as long as Bill, but his 40 years in the field, as fisheries bureau chief and eight years as Idaho’s Fish & Game director, has convinced him what the problem is.

 “There is very little uncertainty about the fact that we can’t get functional recovery with these dams in place,” he told us in an interview for “Salmon Reckoning.”

 

The models he’s seen give the fish another twenty to forty years, as long as those four dams on the lower Snake River remain unchanged. That’s just one more generation. That’s not much time.

 

 And yet, Virgil told us, “The survey results are very clear. The vast majority of Idahoans desire us to do the right thing.”

 

But, he said, it will take the political will of our leaders, which right now seems sadly lacking.

 

“If we know anything in natural resources today,” said Virgil, “the only way to move forward is with these huge collaborative efforts that bring everybody to the table to sit down and talk.”

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Idaho’s salmon are true American heroes. They migrate further than almost any other animal on the planet, and with precious little help from humans.

Each year salmon swim a gauntlet to bring spiritual and economic revival to our rural Idaho towns and nutrients to our forests, streams, and wildlife.

This sacred spark of life is an important symbol to native Americans and a marvel to those who study its complex life cycle.

And it’s a reminder that home does matter, that some things are worth the journey.

They deserve our respect, they deserve our assistance, and they certainly deserve our thanks.

Thank you.

                                                    -30-