Tomorrow evening, join Save Our Wild Salmon and Spokane Falls Trout Unlimited in welcoming journalist Lynda Mapes for a presentation on the restoration of the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula. With Seattle Times photographer Steve Ringman, Lynda recently completed Elwha: A River Reborn, documenting the historic restoration of the Elwha and it's salmon with the removal of two aging dams.

The removal of the Glines Canyon Dam on the river from September 14th through November 4th in 2011 was the largest dam removal project in the United States. It allowed the Elwha to flow freely for the first time in nearly 100 years. It also opened more than 70 miles of river and stream habitat to five species of Pacific salmon and steelhead. 

Here are the event details:

Tuesday, July 16th
7:00 pm, refreshments at 6:30
Community Building Lobby
35 W Main Avenue
Spokane WA  

From Sam Mace at Save Our Wild Salmon: The river runs forty-five miles from mountain headwaters to its mouth on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River Valley has been many things to many people over the past century—a power source for pioneer towns, a favored jaunt for national conservation luminaries like Robert F. Kennedy and Justice William O. Douglas, an area for Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe members to sustain a fish hatchery, a playground for steelhead enthusiasts. 

Once legendary for its pre-dam wild salmon runs and chinook weighing over 100 pounds, today the Elwha is being dramatically rethought as its two massive dams are torn down. With the start of the first dam blasts in September 2011 comes a chance for unprecedented environmental restoration and community renewal, and now the new book Elwha: A River Reborn takes readers behind the scenes, underwater, in the air, and all around the many sides of this monumental effort.

Hopefully, the success of this project will help determine the fate of future restoration projects around the country and the world.

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