Bill McMillan's Wild Fish Soiree Keynote Address

When 15 years old, I helped an older gentleman I knew stagger out of his automobile.  He hit the end of a guardrail doing 50 mph.  The car windshield was shattered.  He held his forehead, bulging from the impact.  When I asked if he was alright he looked at me with surprising clarity, “I guess it takes a wreck once in awhile to wake you up.”  As we stood by his 1947 Chevy, a brown beer bottle rolled out the door and broke.  Two weeks later I stopped at the gas station he operated to put air in my bike tire.  His forehead was still black and blue.  I again asked if he was alright.  He said, “Yeah.  I quit drinkin.”  I asked, “How about your car?”  He pointed to a newer car and grumbled, “It really set me back.”  I learned that car wrecks can be a good thing, but they don’t come cheap.  Change costs.  Not changing would’ve cost the old man even more.

Change.  It’s what Wild Fish Conservancy is all about – 20 years of trying to fix the neglect of car wrecks about to happen.  But initiating change doesn’t come cheap.  That’s why we’re here.  Good food, good drink, good company, and our auctioneer with a vest that lights up each time we stimulate the Wild Fish economy.

Now, about that bear up on the screen.

How is Wild Fish Conservancy going to spend all that money you’re about to give.  The bear knows.  The bear knows about change.

I spent two months each fall in 1995 and 1996 on the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula with Russian scientists to study steelhead – a camp of a half dozen red yurts with nothing but 360 degrees of Nature, horizon to horizon.  Steelhead ascended the rivers from the sea in great schools pushing a wave 10” high; the gravel had continuous mounds and depressions from salmon spawning; the streamside tundra was lined by bear highways pounded three feet wide.  In some places the bear trails were 100s of years old, in others potentially 1000s.  Each morning the view of the expanse beyond the tent flap set the mind free from civilized concepts of time.  There was only sunrise and sunset in continuous sequences into infinity – past, present, future … whatever.  Time on a magnificent glacial scale.  Bears and salmon and silence … all on the same page, so to speak … all linked by the landscape and rivers.

The Wenatchee River once had prolific salmon abundance – the lower four miles of Icicle Creek among the most productive spawning grounds the Columbia Basin ever had.  Bull trout and steelhead ran to the Icicle headwaters, maybe spring chinook as well.  The lower creek once braided into channels where chinook and coho spawned midst willow and grass islands and juveniles reared in beaver ponds across the mile wide valley.  Bear highways three feet wide once lined the edges.  It was like Kamchatka, the mountains closer, the sea more distant, but otherwise a place of bears, salmon, and silence.  It came to an end shortly after completion of Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery in 1940 that included blocking dams and diversion of the creek from its historic channels.  The lower Icicle Creek spawning grounds were cut to half their former length – access to similar spawning grounds 15-30 miles upstream eliminated.

Thanks to the Icicle Fund and sources that include money made during these annual auctions, Wild Fish Conservancy proved wild fish were being denied upstream passage in a protracted legal chess game with Leavenworth Hatchery.  It has resulted in the reopening of the old historic channel, choked with brush and sediment from lack of water for nearly 70 years. We are now monitoring the rate of recolonization as it occurs which includes a 25 mile snorkel count toward the end of each summer.  The first species to reach the more upstream destinations have been wild bull trout.  Although spring chinook, coho, and steelhead have passed beyond the hatchery, they have yet to be found as far upstream.  Nevertheless, significant numbers of spring chinook spawned in the reopened historic channel last August.

I accompanied last year’s snorkel team through the historic channel marveling at the changes since the previous year.  The channel had increasingly cleared itself of sediments accumulated over decades without flushing flows.  The nearly two mile reach branched out in multiple channels of spawning gravel winding through willows and tall grasses, not a sound but rippling water.  I was transported to memories of Kamchatka where all the species of Pacific salmon and steelhead were first described – scientific names still carrying their Russian origins.  And then I noticed the bear highways, the prints of several bears of differing sizes in the dark mud.  Jubilant, I took photos.  In just two short years, not only had the salmon returned, but evidence of a recovering salmon-driven ecosystem – the top predator already back.

Prior to the next day’s surveys, Kurt Beardslee couldn’t sleep in the excitement of the bear trails.  Typical of his guiding leadership, at 4:00 am he quietly drove off to wait in the predawn for Icicle Creek bears … like a five-year-old waiting at the fireplace for Santa to pop out on Christmas Eve night.  As you can see from the photo on the screen, Kurt was not to be disappointed.  He followed the bear as it fished along the reopened historic channel, the two playing hide and seek in the hour before dawn.  Both Kurt and the bear had followed their instincts for opportunity.

Unlike Kamchatka, lower Icicle Creek is just outside one of the most heavily visited tourist towns in the Pacific Northwest.  Yet the historic channel now provides salmon habitat similar to 19^th century accounts.  Three years ago that habitat was not there.  Remove the dams and instant habitat, and nearly instant bears.  Wild salmon and modern humanity can coexist, but we have to make change happen.

There remains a problem.  The bear is wild, but the salmon in Icicle’s historic channel mostly aren’t.  In fact, each of those returning hatchery salmon presently costs taxpayers from $4,800 to $68,000 dollars each when caught by fishermen – that’s right, EACH – depending on differing limitations on survival from the Upper Columbia system.  This does not include costs of Columbia Basin dam operations to provide safer salmon passage.  The Icicle bear doesn’t know or care, but every hatchery salmon it eats represents thousands of dollars you paid for.  An Upper Columbia hatchery spring chinook purchased at market costs $15/pound on top of the thousands of bucks we already cumulatively paid.  It might be worth this if it was sustainable.  The bears need salmon; we want salmon.  But it is not sustainable.  There is good evidence that as hatchery production has increased, coast-wide, the fewer wild salmon come back.  The rate of return of hatchery salmon also goes down.  The result has been to plant still more in a vicious cycle of escalating costs and declining survival.  For 125 years we have refused to change this failed recovery vision.

Wild salmon and steelhead have recolonized Pacific Rim rivers after eradications over large areas during the Ice Age.  The repeated glacial outwashes of Lake Missoula were the greatest magnitude floods ever known.  They eradicated some salmon populations of the Columbia and Snake rivers and delayed recolonization until those 40 or more events ceased – the Columbia sometimes 800 feet higher than present.  And salmon have continually survived cataclysmic eruptions like those of Glacier Peak and Mt. St. Helens into modern times.

The modern impediment to wild salmon is that of us not getting out of their way.  Nature already knows how to work … sometimes with lightning speed such as the Icicle bears in their return to the historic channel.

What we fund tonight is change – the change to initiate the processes to let Nature work, as Icicle Creek demonstrates is possible with sometimes wondrous rapidity.  Without wild salmon, the bear photo is a temporary illusion.  With wild salmon the Icicle bear becomes a symbol that we’re en route to a sustainable future.  If a hatchery salmon caught can represent $68,000 worth of failure, lets set the auction goal at $100,000, less than the price of two hatchery salmon.  Wild Fish Conservancy knows how to turn that price of failure around with resulting salmon success.  Ask the bear.

Click here for the 2009 Wild Fish Soiree and Benefit Auction Wrap Up.