For three straight years, you could not fish for fall-run Chinook on the Sacramento River - California closed the season entirely while the salmon that define the river struggled to hold their numbers. This month, the river reopened to anglers, with a careful two-fish daily limit and a season running through the end of December [1].
A reopening under a strict limit is the honest kind of good news: not a declaration of victory, but a monitored judgment that the run has come back far enough to sustain a modest harvest again [1]. Officials credit the turnaround to a mix of habitat restoration, upgrades at the hatcheries, and the 2024 removal of four dams on the Klamath River - the largest dam-removal project in US history, which reopened hundreds of miles of cold-water spawning grounds [1].
The Sacramento's Chinook still have a long way to go, and a two-fish limit is a measure of caution as much as recovery [1]. Even so, a river that was closed for three years is open again because the fish returned - and the dams that came down in 2024 are, this summer, part of the reason [1].
