Just to add to all the pleasant and educated comments in here.. I rafted through this section of the White Salmon in 2019 and it is as beautiful and wild as ever. You would never even know there used to be a dam.
Keep blowing 'em up. Keep freeing the rivers. It looks a little stark and ugly right now, but in a just a few years the vegetation will grow in and the salmon and steel-head will return to their native waters.
I actually watched the gates of the tellico dam close in the fall of 1982, backing up the little Tennessee river, in a bass boat you could see what is now tellico lake rising and covering the ag fields ,stumps,house foundations,old county roads,silos,it's a lake now,ugly with development . I don't have anything against a dam just put it where it belongs
Are people arguing about what it looks like now? in no shape or form should any river be dammed. We f-ed it up years ago and now giving the river a chance to fix itself, which it will 1000% better than we could. We dumped PCB's into the Hudson for 60+ years, it took 20+ years but the river cleansed itself. Smarten up.
elwha had a dam that choked the salmon run from 110+pound kings down to 60pound kings thats horrible the steelhead run has dwindled so much from what it was im glad they are doing this and the morse creek king transfer is weird but good all around its an improvement no matter what there would be silt from the lake. they weighed all options and this was the least harmful so im glad in their choice
Im not even going near that religious/bible stuff in other comments,,, But regarding the grand canyon for the most part the comments about it being carved out over a long time period are correct. Its more like it was carved as the land rose up... However at times there were dams formed by lava flows that would hold back the water until the water flowed over them and then erode them away but that process is not what you see when you look at the canyons today... Also really the "Grand Canyon" is just a part of that canyon system which is much larger then just that part... Check out Canyonlands and where the colorado and green rivers meet. Another interesting thing about the grand canyon is that if you follow the ages of the rocks from bottom to the rim there are millions of years that are missing. Because the sediments as they were built up would have periods the process reversed and it wore back down some before sedimentation resumed laying down the layers.... I can't explain in well in so few words, millions and millions of years of geologic process can't be described in a paragraph or two... But it was not created in a flood
+Dave Greaves also the glacier that covered mostly all of north america during the last ice age melting probably had something to do with it. definitely not from any "great flood" though
"But it was not created in a flood" you say. Okay smart guy prove it... Every Geologist I have ever asked directly regarding the formation of the Grand Canyon just shrugs his or her shoulders.. Since you are so much smarter than everyone else lets see your data .... I'm waiting.
Actually, the Grand Canyon WAS dammed at one time. A volcano sprung up at one end and completely spanned the canyon. In time the canyon filled and overflowed and over a long period of time, eroded away the volcano. (Nothing spectacular - just slow erosion.) You can see geological evidence of the volcano at a section of the Grand Canyon called "Lava Falls."
The cutting of the Grand Canyon is two very distinct processes. One excavated a wide canyon about 4,000 feet deep and 18 to 25 miles wide nearly 400 miles long. The other cut a notch canyon about 1,500 feet deep in the bottom. The only way water could cut the wide canyon is a super flood from above the canyon. This is not to say that was the process. But that is if water cut the big canyon. This would have taken days to do. The notch canyon was cut over a long time by the Colorado River. There are problems with the washout theory because the debris down stream is missing. What ever the answer for the big canyon is, it was cataclysm on a scale beyond belief.
Environmentalists get the credit. They insisted that the pigs at the power companies provide a fish ladder -- something that the pigs were not prepared to do. And so the dam was demolished -- one of the first among many to come.
It has been tried on other rivers, but the new pacific salmon fry do not survive well without the additional nutrients of the previous generation in the river system
+stereopolice Man at 1:08 was looking for gold nuggets but didn't find any. Then he felt hungry and tried to catch some freshly restored salmon but drowned in the rapids. The end :-(
+FrJcsc It's heavy sand, so it settled. The light brown silt continued for months. This video is closer to the mouth @ Columbia, some miles downstream from the dam.
+takeadayofff The first 35 seconds are from a point near the mouth of the White Salmon River. The remained of the video starts from just below the bridge which crossed over the White Salmon River to go to the parking area where the boats use to be launched into the former Northwestern Lake
Not to defend the dams, but the dam was keeping the dirt and sediment out of the downstream side of that dam. In effect helping to keep the stream cleaner down below. WIth the multi-year droughts upon us, bet you'll wish you had those millions of gallons of water stock piled behind that dam? It was a good thing to remove overall I guess if it was ready to break anyhow by needing repairs. Not complaining. Anyone find any big gold nuggets in that sediment? Get in there with detectors!
Ever heard of the incident at Three Mile Island? Or have you heard the news about what's going on with the storage facilities at Hanford? Nuclear is far worse than hydro. With hydro we loose fish, with nuclear we loose property, land, and lives.
Well Pastie, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You like muck filled canyons..........and I like beautiful lakes. Home for Swans, Geese, and ducks, along with the fish. Nothing wrong with that is there? Kind of like 1000's of giant windmills that don't begin to pay for themselves before they wear out, not to mention millions of beautiful birds that will be chopped up and fall to the ground to rot. The wonderful environmentalists, will they wreck the world while they try to help?
someone needs to claim responsibility for this and clean it up, looks to me, whether it was the power company or the hipies, like theyve really fucked up.
