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1. A reckoning

It’s a blustery day in the autumn of 2023, and I’m standing in a roadside pullout in Northern California, looking at the past and future of the Klamath River.

Immediately upstream I see Iron Gate Dam—17 stories tall, nearly four times as wide— completely blocking its red-rock canyon. There are four such dams, with Iron Gate as the first and largest, in 60 kilometers of river rising to the northeast. It’s a stretch sometimes called Reservoir Reach, and it has shut salmon out of hundreds of kilometers of potential habitat in the Upper Klamath Basin for more than a century.

The dams are the river’s past.