Opinion By Tess McEnroe
March 13, 2026
I’ve been reading rivers my whole adult life and have spent 22 years guiding around the west, mostly in Idaho on the Salmon River.
The way water moves around a boulder, the way a current bends through a canyon, the way a riffle gives way to a pool — guides understand what the river is saying. Rivers are the lifeblood of the planet, the freshwater veins of the Earth connecting ecosystems, people, and economies. Right now, the Snake River is telling us we’re running out of time.
The recent court ruling granting emergency measures for Snake and Columbia River salmon is a genuine victory — for the fish, for the Northwest, and frankly, for anyone who believes this region still has a soul worth protecting. I’ve watched a lot of well-intentioned efforts come and go on this river and have seen fish declines first hand from my boat.
These emergency measures are necessary, but let’s be clear — they are not sufficient.
The best science tells us that if we truly want to bring salmon back to healthy and abundant levels, we need to restore the lower Snake River. That means removing the four lower Snake River dams. I’ve spent over two decades watching these fish runs decline where once there were too many to count. I’ve communicated the science enough to know what the biologists are telling us. Incremental measures alone like increasing spills will not get us or the salmon where we need to go.
The stakes go well beyond livelihoods, though they include that too. Think about what salmon mean to this region. They are central to our identity — woven into the culture, spirituality, and sovereignty of the Tribes who have fished these rivers since time immemorial. They feed the forests. They anchor an outdoor economy that generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually and supports thousands of jobs, many of them in rural communities along the coast and deep in Idaho and Oregon. The commercial and recreational fishing industries that depend on healthy runs are not an abstraction to me. They’re my neighbors. They’re my clients. They’re the economy of places that tend to get forgotten in policy debates.
I am not naive about what recovery requires. It requires investment in communities that currently depend on the dams for power and irrigation, in our energy grid, in the transition toward solutions that don’t come at the cost of the fish. It requires the kind of holistic, stakeholder-driven process that takes time and political will. It requires our elected leaders in the Northwest to step up, work in genuine partnership with the Tribes, and craft solutions that honor all of these needs at once.
I’ve also watched thousands of people from all over the country come to this river — people who have never been to Idaho in their lives — and the moment they see a wild Chinook digging her redd, spawning on a gravel bed, something changes in them. They go quiet. There is something in these fish that speaks to people at a level that goes beyond policy or economics.
Are the people who are making these decisions to keep the dams — have they ever seen a wild, healthy Chinook deep in the heart of the Idaho backcountry? Have they listened to the Nimipuu stories of fishing who no longer have their share? Have they seen the toxic algae blooms at the beach with their children?
That’s what’s at stake. Not just a species. Not just an industry. Something that belongs to all of us, and that we are close to losing for good.
We can either continue to drain deadbeat dams, or we can create a legacy and be a part of the biggest river restoration in modern history, ensuring that a keystone species survives so that the next generation can also know what salmon are and mean to so many.
The river is talking. The fish need us to listen.
Tess McEnroe is a river guide and conservationist living in Missoula, Montana. She has seen salmon populations decline in the pristine fish habitat in North America on the Main and Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho for over 20 years directly from her boat.
Idaho Statesman Opinion: Running out of time: Breach the Snake River dams not to save salmon
