Dams Go Down, Uncorking Rivers for Kayakers

Dams Go Down, Uncorking Rivers for Kayakers

By MATTHEW PREUSCH
Published: August 9, 2009, New York Times


IT was a warm May afternoon, and the blue water of the Sandy River in northern Oregon was frothing into white peaks and swirling eddies. Above this roiling current, Paul Kuthe, a kayaking instructor from Portland, steered his yellow kayak past the bleached stump of a fir embedded in the pebbly bank.

Not long ago, Mr. Kuthe said, this was all underwater, hidden under a two-mile-long reservoir created by the Marmot Dam, a hydroelectric plant that once hummed in the foothills east of Portland. Then two years ago, the 47-foot-tall concrete dam was dynamited away, and the Sandy River flowed freely from Mount Hood to the Columbia River for the first time in nearly a century.

Ever since, nature has come rushing back. Salmon have been spotted swimming upriver. The tender shoots of alder and cedar have begun to recover their turf. Meanwhile, kayakers like Mr. Kuthe make frequent trips downstream to see how the river is reclaiming its old bed — and to discover new whitewater rapids that may have formed.

“It looks so different, even from just a few months ago,” he said, as he eased his plastic kayak near a concrete wall that once anchored the dam.

A lot of rivers are starting to look different. In the 1950s and ’60s, a dam went up in the United States every six minutes to generate electricity, provide irrigation water and protect against floods, according to the United States Forest Service. As a result, there are an estimated 75,000 aging dams blocking rivers large and small today.

Read the full article here - http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/travel/09explorer.html?hpw