Based on studies, the project’s planners knew that the sediment would temporarily have a severe effect on water quality, causing a drop in the amount of oxygen in the water, Coffman said. To minimize potential harm to native fish, they chose to begin draining the reservoirs in the winter, after adult salmon had spawned and died. It’s also a time when newly hatched juvenile salmon remain in tributary streams to feed and grow.

Before the drawdown began, a crew of Karuk fisheries specialists waded into the river to net and trap as many young coho salmon as they could find, and moved them to holding ponds, where they are being kept until the water quality improves.

Other efforts haven’t worked out as planned. When workers from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife took 830,000 juvenile Chinook salmon from the newly built Fall Creek Fish Hatchery and released them into a tributary on Feb. 26, they found that the fish were dying as they passed through a tunnel beneath Iron Gate Dam. The dead salmon showed signs of gas bubble disease, which can occur when water is supersaturated with dissolved gases.

After that setback, state wildlife officials said they would instead release young salmon downstream of the dam until it’s removed. The hatchery still has millions of fish scheduled to be released later this year, and teams from the Karuk Tribe’s fisheries department have also been finding healthy wild salmon in the river.

The river’s water quality has been improving, but the restoration work will continue until vegetation is established and the water clarity has improved to normal conditions, Coffman said.

“This landscape will be restored,” he said. “But when it comes to revegetating a landscape of this scale, that’s a process that just takes time.”

Coffman stood by a dry boat ramp in the community of Copco Lake, where homes that used to have lakefront views and docks now face an expanse of mudflats. In the distance, the bare skeletons of trees that were drowned a century ago protruded from the lake bed.

“This still looks like a barren mudflat from this perspective,” Coffman said. Then, he squatted and pointed to sprouting seeds: “Those little green shoots are the first step in that process, that road to recovery.”

By planting several different types of vegetation in zones extending from the river to the uplands, he said, the crews are putting the watershed on a “positive ecological trajectory” to let nature take its course.

“We get it pointed in the right direction, and the environment does the rest,” Coffman said.

Driving on a road beside the drained reservoir, Coffman stopped at a small waterfall cascading down a hillside in a thick stand of trees. He said that springs like this send water flowing onto flats by the river, creating streams that offer an opportunity to restore a wetland that will attract birds and other wildlife.

“And where that little channel meets the Klamath River is going to be a nice, cool spot for fish to come,” he said. “Where there is water, there is life. And that’s what we’re going to see.”

River restoration advocates are optimistic. They say undamming the Klamath will demonstrate the potential for restoring free-flowing rivers elsewhere in California, and point to initial plans to remove two dams on the Eel River as another promising opportunity.

Ann Willis, California regional director for the environmentalist group American Rivers, said that when she’s rafted on the Klamath previously, the water downstream of the dams has been warm, green and smelly. At times, the algae blooms made it unsafe to get wet.

Willis said she hopes removing dams is “going to not just restore an ecosystem, but really restore access” for people who live along the Klamath to enjoy their river once again. She added that there are many unknowns about how the recovery of the river ecosystem will progress amid the extremes driven by climate change.

“I am still confident that whatever comes out of this is going to be something that benefits the entire community,” Willis said. “Rivers are living systems, and they create these beautiful worlds.”

In recent decades, major declines in salmon populations have negatively affected people’s health and wellbeing in communities along the river, including by hindering their fishing traditions, said Regina Chichizola, executive director of the organization Save California Salmon. Now, she said, the undamming of the river is bringing a new outlook for young Native people.

“For the first time, I’m hearing hope — young people feeling like there might be a future with salmon in it for them again,” she said.

When the removal of dams is complete, the Klamath River Renewal Corp. will turn over the land to California and Oregon. The Shasta Indian Nation, whose ancestral homeland lies along the river, has requested that some of these lands be returned to their people.

Hillman, of the Karuk Tribe, said that once the dams are gone, people will be able to return with nets to traditional fishing places that were sealed off long ago.

He walked to a rocky point overlooking the river. Beside him was the brick chimney of a house that burned down decades ago, and below was the concrete dam that had formed Copco Lake. Water was rushing through a tunnel at the base of the dam.

“I’ll be glad to see it gone,” Hillman said. “These dams being here — it was a huge mistake that continues to have impacts.”

Their construction, he said, compounded the struggles of the Klamath’s Native peoples, who also suffered systemic violence during the taking of their lands. On top of these injustices, he said, the surrounding forests are unhealthy and prone to intense fires because they have been deprived of traditional burning during more than a century of fire suppression.

“We have a lot more work to do to fix this place,” Hillman said.

That larger effort to regain the watershed’s natural balance, he said, is just beginning as the dams come down.

“What it represents to me,” he said, “is an opportunity to reclaim what’s been lost.”

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