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Entry bubble The Climbing Chinook at the Bonneville Dam

By: Stephanie | July 18, 2008 | Category: Travel

Bonneville Dam fish ladderHere's a ladder that you can't use to paint your kitchen or screw in that hard-to-reach lightbulb. It's reserved for use by Oncorhynchus tshawytscha and Acipenser transmontanus. That's chinook salmon and white sturgeon, for short. At the Bonneville Dam in Cascade Locks, Oregon, venerable fish such as these swim up "fish ladders" made just for them. The ladders, which are used across the U.S., allow fish to bypass dams and natural barriers, usually on their way upstream to spawn.

As my husband and I stopped in to the Bonneville Dam's visitor's center awhile back, Woody Guthrie's "Roll On Columbia" played in my head. While we were interested in seeing the historic dam, who knew that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could make watching fish swim a truly captivating endeavor?

Outside the visitor's center, I could clearly see the fish ladder coming from the Columbia River. Designed to simulate a set of rapids, it has helped an average of more than one million salmon and other fish migrate past the dam each year. Inside the center, we were greeted by huge windows that surprised us with an underwater view into the fish ladder itself. Schools of steelheads and jacks swam by in the cloudy water as we ran to the windows like little kids to get a better look. We also were lucky enough to spot a lone lamprey, which stopped to rest on the glass with its suction-cup mouth before it continued its fight against the current.

Bonneville Dam fish counter in her office

And file this under "cool government job." We met one of the fish counters at the dam—a very nice woman who sits in an office with a huge window for hours at a time, counting and identifying the various fish that swim past her window through the ladder, for conservation and other purposes.

If you want to see a murky view of what the fish counters see in real time, visit the Bonneville Dam's Fishcam. It sure beats watching an aquarium screen saver any day.

Have you been to an interesting government visitors center?

| View Comments [5] | envelope E-mail This Entry | Tags: bonneville_dam   columbia_river   fish_ladder   government_job   salmon   stephanie   visitors_center  

Comments (5):

blue comment bubble Posted by Citizen Jmaximus on July 18, 2008 at 12:59 PM EDT

Here in the great lakes we don't worry too much about fish ladders, but we are very concerned about invasive species, like the Snakehead Fish.

http://www.michigan.gov/deq/0,1607,7-135-3308_3579-76072--,00.html#Frankenfish

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blue comment bubble Posted by JR on July 18, 2008 at 01:49 PM EDT

Now that's cool.

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blue comment bubble Posted by Debbie on July 21, 2008 at 04:05 PM EDT

Your link to the fishcam does not work.

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blue comment bubble Posted by stephanie on July 21, 2008 at 08:04 PM EDT

Hi Debbie, I'm not sure why the link doesn't work for you (it works on my end). If you can't see the fishcam, try waiting several seconds for the view to reload. Or you might try viewing the fishcam at low speed, at https://www.nwp.usace.army.mil/op/b/fishcamls.asp.

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blue comment bubble Posted by GC on July 22, 2008 at 08:20 AM EDT

The link works for me. But the same image of fishcam has reloaded again and again. For the hight speed, it is dated "Tue Jul 22 5:12.32" and for low speed, it is "Tue Jul 22 5:15.33". It looks like some kind of problem on https://www.nwp.usace.army.mil/op/b/fishcamls.asp page.

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