CHILOQUIN, Ore. (CN) --- At the pristine headwaters of the Wood River, the water is so clear the turquoise rocks along the bottom glow through. On a spring morning, Klamath tribal biologist Alex Gonyaw scooped the clear, cold water into a glass beaker and held it up in the sunlight.
Nearby, a family of square-headed ducks called hooded Mergansers swam. Gonyaw said the tribes have tested the water at that spot and found that it exceeds the quality standards of the water that flows out of his own kitchen tap.
Would he drink it?
“Oh, absolutely,” Gonyaw said.
Less than a mile downstream, the Wood River flows through a cattle ranch. Here, the willows and red alders lining the banks at the headwaters are gone. That’s because the rancher hasn’t installed fences to keep cows from eating the vegetation along the streams, trampling the banks and wading right into the river.
“As soon as you start getting close to the ranch, the water quality completely changes,” Klamath Tribal Council Member Willa Powless said.
It’s not an isolated example.
“On all the tributaries it’s pretty evident that uncontrolled or unregulated cattle grazing has had a big impact on the streams,” Klamath Tribal Chairman Don Gentry said.
But the problem goes way beyond grazing. Dozens of tributaries and hundreds of springs feed Upper Klamath Lake, supplying plenty of good, clean water. A century of mismanagement has caused erosion of high phosphorus soils that accumulate in the bottom of Upper Klamath Lake. Now, annual algae blooms kill entire generations of young endangered fish every year.
For millennia, tribes in high elevation marshes of the Klamath Basin thrived on a diet heavy on c’waam and koptu, two species of sucker fish that live here and nowhere else. The fish have been here since an inland sea covered this land, before Mount Mazama exploded to create Crater Lake. According to Klamath Tribes’ oral history, the fish arrived after the people, in an answer to their prayers.
Then white settlers got here. They cut down the trees lining the lakes, removing the roots that hold sediment out of the water. They straightened streams and rivers so they would act like drains, editing vast shallow lakes out of the valley to clear the way for agriculture. And they plopped cows onto the vast meadows, allowing them to wade right into the rivers and streams that feed Upper Klamath Lake.
The government created a massive irrigation project that ignored its treaty obligations to the tribes who ceded this land. By the time it began to honor the treaties, the government had already handed the water rights necessary to protect tribal resources over to farmers and ranchers. And in the era of climate change, there’s less than ever to go around.
In March, Oregon Governor Kate Brown declared a drought emergency in Klamath County. Then she said the Oregon Water Resources Department would approve emergency permits allowing farmers and ranchers to use wells that can’t be used under normal circumstances, and to pull more than twice the amount of water from them than has been allowed during previous drought emergencies.
In May, the U.S. Department of Reclamation announced it would halt irrigation from the lake in order to preserve enough water to prevent the extinction of c’waam and koptu. Every spring, the fish spawn and release tens of millions of eggs. Those hatch into tiny larvae, only to die in dwindling lake water laced with neurotoxins from algae blooms. The adults survive the toxic conditions that kill their offspring by finding pockets of cold, clean water where they wait until water quality improves with the fall rains.