(river rushing) (bird singing) (gentle orchestral music) - [Man] This is what our people have called forever (speaks in foreign language) and (speaks in foreign language) if you do a little translation of it is, my wealth water.

This basin just provides everything that you could possibly need to build a strong society.

(gentle chiming music) - [Conservationist] The salmon, they're part of this valley.

They're part of who we are.

- [Woman] The Chehalis River historically has been one of the most significant producers of salmon in Washington state.

- [Man] There is a population that's in really tough straits and that's the spring chinook run.

We could be facing a situation where it's going extinct.

(rhythmic orchestral music) - [Woman] Over the last several decades the problems have accelerated here in our basin.

The last 30 years have seen five of the most significant floods on record in the Chehalis Basin.

- [Man] And I know now they're looking at our water retention which is supposed to help.

And that's very controversial.

[Conservationist] We're actually taking dams out these days.

The idea of proposing to build one, at a time when we're spending an awful lotta money on salmon recovery?

It's really backyard America facing the impacts of climate change.

We know that flood is gonna get worse.

We know that it's gonna get hotter.

And we know that the fisheries are going away.

- [Woman] One wrong decision can have such broad impacts to not only everyone in this generation, but for everyone for generations ahead.

(traffic humming) - [Tim] You know what happens in this corridor is driving.

A lot of what the future might be for the Chehalis.

The I-5 corridor doesn't really give you a fair representation of what is out in the Chehalis Basin.

Yet the vast majority of people, that's what they're seeing as they drive through.

You see a pretty simplified entrance channel.

And it tarnished my view of what an incredible place the Chehalis was in the past, and still is.

(gentle orchestral music) It's the largest watershed that's entirely within the state of Washington that also flows all the way to the sea.

- [David] One of the unusual characteristics of the Chehalis River is that it was the drainage outlet for this massive wall of ice that existed during the last ice age.

Once the ice melted back, the valley was actually oversized, relative to the river that was flowing through it.

And this is a recipe for creating terrain in the valley bottom that is actually flood prone.

- [Tim] You know it's a large basin with a diverse range of ecosystems.

(gentle music) (river rushing) (horns smacking) - [Mara] So the Chehalis River has large numbers of salmon and steelhead, compared to other coastal rivers.

Part of it is due to it's size.

And some of it is due to it's characteristics.

- [Colleen] Salmon is a keystone species.

You can judge the health of a entire ecosystem by how well it is that the salmon are thriving.

- Chehalis salmon are critically important to orca, the southern resident killer whales that come and feed off the Washington coast.

- [Man] The salmon evolved right along with the landscape that we know today.

And it should not be a big mystery as to why they're so exquisitely adapted to this dynamic and somewhat dangerous environment of the Northwest.

- [Leif] When you go out and you see our rivers and you see our streams in the Northwest.

You're gonna see them and some of them are really great and really pristine, but what you need to realize is they're dramatically different then they were 200 years ago.

(gentle music) - [Man] Imagine we go back to 1850.

We're surrounded by this cathedral forest of old growth.

- [Larry] A lot of salmon heaven.

Salmon heaven is the place where it's basically as good as it gets for salmon.

- [Man] Salmon evolved to these conditions that were here before this area was settled.

The watersheds were messy where there's lots of wood in our systems.

(gentle music) - [Conservationist] Grand total, if you took all the species and added them together, there would have been years where there would have been a million plus fish.

(fish splashing) (gently dramatic music) - [Man] If you're talking about Chehalis people, they're inextricably linked to this water.

Some of these village sites along the basin have been carbon dated to back 11,000, 12,000 years is kinda what they tagged as the occupancy in our area.

But we have stories that are Tulalip and our ancestors, those that went before us tell us that go far beyond what an eGo tag could tell you.

- [Dan] We have stories about the glacier being here.

- [Man] Our people were here at what at that time would have been basically the northernmost expanse of North America, we have more stories, flood stories about the actual land being transformed overnight.

These are stories that have been passed on.

- And so this environment was just so abundant in resources, where we could just produce and produce and give away.

And then also trade.

This was like the hub, from the coast to the bottom of the sound, down to the Columbia, to the other side of the mountains.

All that trade came through this area so and our ancestors were merchants, and had access to so many things.

- [Man] We're a Chehalis tribe now, like we're a unified Chehalis tribe, but that confederacy expands from the beach to the headwaters.

We're talking an expanse of 1,500 square miles.

Which over the course of few executive actions, that one time reduced our reservation down to 21 acres.

So essentially the size of seven baseball fields.

We're a non-treaty tribe, we're very proud of being a non-treaty tribe.

Because we've never relinquished any of our rights to this river or the land surrounding this river.

- [Dan] Our people's rights to hunt and fish in our usual and accustomed grounds were not secured, though they were never relinquished.

(melancholic music) (chanting music) - [Fawn] We have a relationship with the Chehalis Basin that goes back centuries.

Our usual and accustomed area extends into the basin, out into the ocean.

Our ancestors over a 150 years ago, secured this area by treaty.

While we may have relinquished our property ownership to that basin and to those areas.

We've never relinquished our spiritual connection.

We've never relinquished those ancestral homelands.

- [Tyson] The Quinault Treaty of 1855 established our usual and accustomed territory all throughout Grays Harbor and all of the watersheds that empty within it, which include the Chehalis Basin.

(gentle music) - [Ed] Treaties with the United States, the supreme law of the land.

What we retained was the right to have fish.

Salmon, everything that all tribes and all these regions relied on.

(motorboat buzzing) To take fishnets there had to be a right to have fish.

That's who we are, that's what we're all about.

We're salmon people.

(gulls screeching) (nets scrapping) - [Woman] We're experiencing incredible shortfalls in our fisheries over the last 40 years.

We've seen a very sharp decline.

- [Man] You're affecting my treaty right.

(gulls drown out man speaking) - He's got her.

(man sings) (gulls screeching) (motorboat humming) (solemn music) (waves lapping) - [Dan] When Captain Gray was coming up the coast, he met a group of people out near Tsihalis.

Say what, Chehalis?

And we said no, no, it's Tsihalis.

And he said okay, yeah don't worry I'll write it down, Chehalis.

And that's what it was.

(gently upbeat music) - [Tim] First Europeans started to move into the Chehalis Basin, they noted what a paradise this area was.

The beautiful timbre, the abundant fish and game.

Numerous land owners here who are homesteaders, talked about how frequently this area flooded.

In fact some called it an inland sea just because there was so much water here every winter.

And one of the things they'd write about is how important the native people were in helping them in crossing rivers, on navigating the landscape.

But then as more and more people came, and more industrial interests came and realized the bounty of natural resources in this region.

Things began to change much more rapidly.

- [David] In the early settling of Europeans in the Northwest, one of the first things that would happen is that the valley bottoms would be cleared.

Flat ground is the best farming land, but it had all these big trees.

Trees were cut down and a lotta that land was converted.

The rivers were also cleaned up of their woody debris.

Imagine how you would get around a landscape, back in the 19th century.

The rivers were kinda like the highways.

They were the ways you could get from the coast to the interior.

And opening the rivers up was actually a major piece of early development around the Northwest.

- There were very large commercial fisheries that were occurring in the harbor.

They were using traps, similar to what was going on in the Columbia.

The harvest rates were pretty high.

The next really big thing on the scene was the advent of logging.

They tried to cut it all.

From the harbor all the way to the headwaters.

They used a technique called splash damming to create like a series of floods.

Essentially removing the cut logs down to the harbor.

- [David] Imagine the effects that blasting a load full of logs would have, down through a river.

Who could scour out the gravel and convert rivers that had been good fish habitat, into fairly bare bedrock rivers.

- [Man] Most of the splash dams in one way or the other were barriers to migrant salmon.

(melancholic music) There were two dams, two large dams that were built in the basin.

One was Skookumchuck Dam.

That dam was built without any passage for upstream migrating salmon, second dam's in the Wynoochee that was built in about 1970.

When they built that dam there was still a remnant spring chinook run in the upper Wynoochee.

Well it's gone now, it's long gone.

(gentle orchestral music) - [Man] Other than really the sides of Wynoochee, the stuff around the national forest, the national parks, it's private timber lands and some agriculture.

(motor purring) Traditionally you had the fishing community, that's suffering.

- [Steve M.] The Chehalis system is the primary fishery in the state on the Westside for salmon steelhead and we're at a tipping point we're walking the fine line right now.

The fishers, the loggers, the farmers, this valley is a working valley.

(cheerful music) - [Jay] Yeah you can see my empty cow barn.

It's the first time I've been able to stick machinery in a barn in a long time, keep it outta the rain, from rotting.

This farm's been in my family since 1872.

I'm sixth generation, my kids are seventh generation here.

We have about 600 acres.

I still have the homestead deed signed by Ulysses Grant.

Next year we start on year 149.

We're hoping to make to a 150, then we'll re-evaluate the investment.

Other then my neighbor's five cows, we are enjoying a respite from having bovines at the moment.

For the first time in over a 100 years.

A lotta the farmers that are in my community, they've been farming generations and years and they're all getting older and long in the tooth like I am, and hoping their kids will come back.

Or not hoping their kids will come back, which is kinda the conundrum in agriculture in the United States right now, is working really, really hard and losing money.

Sometimes entice the kids to go do something different.

It just was the floods really starting in the early '90s, through the '07 and '09 flood.

Where all of a sudden houses that had never been flooded, been here for a 100 years, were flooded.

- [Susan] We do flood and that flooding actually does enhance our soil quite a bit, actually.

So it's a win for farmers but we also have to contend with what flooding can bring.

All the greens.

We are certified organic and we are growing about a 100 different varieties of vegetables, fruits and flowers and herbs.

So in '07, we had eight feet of water in our barn and I ended up with a foot of water in my home.

And our house is one of the oldest homes in the valley and had never had water in it up until this flood.

So since then we've raised our house five feet.

And you'll see Betsie's house, she raised her house after '96 and had water in it in '07.

She'll tell you that whole story.

- So the first time it was raised, we put in 32 inches, so four cinder blocks.

So after the '07 flood we raised, we added four more concrete blocks.

Look at that, there you go.

See the flood level?

That's the silt, that's not dust, that's flood silt.

This goes on and on.

So here's the mark, it says flood 12/04/07, right there.

(gentle music) - [Dave] The day before I was actually plowing and it was snowing lightly and I quit about noon and came in the house and it started raining harder.

And it was a hard rain but the river was fairly low.

I slept well that night, it didn't wake me up or anything.

Usually if you have a real downpour it'll wake you up sometimes, but it didn't have that.

'Cause a nervous fire chief called to see how high it was gonna get and I went with the flashlight.

Called him back and said it's gonna be the highest ever.

And it was.

- [Steve] So we had people in the field when this actually started going on.

But I think they were a little bit taken off guard at how fast things started to happen.

And they were seeing things that had never happened before.

And the rain had moved from the coast toward new Willapa Hills, was torrential.

And I think they called it a typhoon.

We experienced anywhere from, depending who you talked to, 16 to 20 inches of rain in a very, very short amount of time.

And that had never happened before that any was aware of.

And as the water began to rise and debris started hitting the bridges, and building up and couldn't get under it.

Just the shaking, the grinding the pounding and then that kaboom, and there goes the bridge.

And it's pushing it down to the next bridge.

And the next bridge is maybe not as clogged up as this one was, but it will be shortly.

And here it comes, and it hits that.

- As each of these broke it increased the power behind it.

- [Man] This is where the bridge in front of our house used to be, it is officially gone.

- [Older Man] And when it broke through finally in the Leudinghaus Road Bridge and that water hit the levee at the airport and actually breached the levee and so that really caused flooding across the freeway.

- You could see some of the residences with no lights, but the water.

And I said to myself and to my friend, we gotta do something about this.

This is really tough for all of us.

- [Rescuer] We had almost 500 rescues.

And of those rescues, there were probably about a 100, almost a 170 were air rescues.

And we were picking people outta trees, off their rooftops, out of the water.

(helicopter chuffing) (looming music) - [Man] Refrigerators, washer dryer, one of the TVs, cabinets.

- And thousands of families' homes and schools and churches, small businesses were damaged as well as closing I-5 for five days.

- [Resident] We had 29 dairy farms at the time in the valley, and of those I think I counted about 16 that were flooded in one way or another.

We had five farms that were essentially wiped out.

Two of them lost all of their cows.

- Flooding is the number one cost to the federal government in disasters.

- [David] There was two aspects to flood hazards.

One is where's the water gonna go?

How much water will go where, how fast?

And the other of course is well what's there when water gets there?

And that's the question about do you essentially manage the human dimension of the equation in terms of where we build things.

How we develop, what kind of infrastructure we put at risk.

- [Vander Stoep] After one of these catastrophic storms everybody has a theory.

(laughs) Everybody has a theory on why this happened.

- About a third of that field was covered with logs and various debris and the silt in some places was about two feet deep.

When I was about six or eight, Longbell finished logging in that area, the old growth, and without replanting.

When it rained hard the river would go up rapidly and down rapidly.

And as things grew back and grew up, there was a difference and the river would not go up as fast and it would stay higher for a longer period of time and stay medium for a much longer period of time.

Basically in the last 30 years they've re-logged everything Longbell logged over however many years.

And the river again is going up and down faster than it used to.

People would probably tell me I'm wrong, but I look at the river about every day.

- [David] Something like 1,700 landslides were documented in that one event.

That's a lot of timber and sediment getting into the rivers.

And it's no mystery that that caused flooding issues downstream.

If you take a glass of water and you fill it up to just shy of the top.

And then you dump a fistful of dirt into it, what's gonna happen?

Well the water's gonna flow out over the top of the glass.

A river's no different.

- [Man] There's still some conversation to be had on what is the flow that came from up there?

- [David] What you have in the Willapa Hills areas is an area that is naturally very prone to landsliding because it has very deeply weathered rock.

So there's no longer strength in the rock itself.

So one of the reasons why we have seen so many landslides in that area was the changes in the root strength on the hillsides, through aggressively harvesting timber off most of the watershed, over about a 10 or 15 year period.

In my research group around the Northwest we've basically found a roughly three to ninefold increase in the rate of landsliding as a result of timber harvesting.

(gentle music) (water rushing) - [Ted] People can point to a number of different areas as far as what contributed.

But the main thing was the water.

It really is kinda almost off the charts for what we thought could happen.

In that 1990 to 2009 timeframe, we saw floods of record, primarily in Western Washington.

- [Steve] Well I'm not gonna get into whether there's global warming or anything, but it's factual.

If you look at the storms, at the systems.

The severity across this country of the natural events that are occurring.

They are more frequent.

- So for the folks that say, ah it's a myth, okay fine.

Here's the data.

In the Chehalis Basin, those five floods that are outside the 100 year flood, are real hard numbers.

Governor Inslee asked me this, he said how come when I talk to all you farmers about climate change you all do this?

And I said, Governor, I don't get up in the morning and start my tractor and go oh shoot, I might've just killed a polar bear 10 years from now.

I can't get too wrapped up in whose to blame.

- [Guillaume] The biggest increases in the country are in the Northwest and in the Northeast.

There's very few places that show a decrease.

Basically everything that is saying more rain in the future.

What we know of as a 100 year event today, is going to happen more often.

It's just that warmer air holds more water.

It's warmer in the future so we can pull more water into those storms, even if they're the same exact storms we've seen in the past.

By the end of the century it's gonna be about 5 1/2 to nine degrees warmer then what we were seeing in the 1980s.

- Chehalis Basin, it's rain-fed and what that means is that we have lots of water in the winter and very little water in the summer.

This river, already warm, planning to get warmer.

(gentle music) - [Man] There's been two big fish kills since the '07 storm from low flows, high temperature.

- [Mara] Our summer flows may get a whole lot lower.

Our winter flows may get a whole lot bigger.

- Well there's really three factors that climate change influences to make flooding worse in the future.

One is sea level rise, the other is snowpack.

The warmer temperatures means less snow.

When you got a storm event, more that's following is rain.

And more of it's ending up in the river.

So really the third that drives flooding in the Chehalis which is the change in the intensity of heavy rain events.

The range is in the 20% increase by the end of the century.

(locomotive rumbling) (train horn blaring) - [Edna] When you think about global warming, and other issues that are in front of us, we've gotta do something.

We just cannot let this happen again.

- [Vander Stoep] So the Army Corps of Engineers started looking in the Chehalis Basin at water retention, back in the 1930s.

- They've been talking about it since the flood of the '30s.

The Corps did a bunch of studies and didn't do anything.

- [Vander Stoep] There have been more than a dozen sites that have been assessed at one time or another.

All of those have not panned out because they couldn't pass a cost benefit test.

The site that does, is the site that's currently under evaluation above Pe Ell.

- I think there's been over 800 studies on the Chehalis River since 1933.

- [Dave] There was a group formed in Chehalis, that's called One Voice, and it was people that wanted a solution to flooding.

Basically supporting a dam.

- They go together, their very first option to stop the flooding was build a dam.

- [Vander Stoep] They reacted to say, we've got a fishery in decline and now you're talking about a dam on the river and that will make the fish problem even worse.

- Finally the governor and legislators came together and said you know what guys, this isn't working.

We need to bring those two together and try to find the solution that satisfies all parties involved.

- The governor established a more formal work group which clearly identified our relationship and recognized our legal status as a treaty tribe to the region.

- The idea was to bring interests from a variety of different perspectives.

- And our job is to think about this valley for everybody in it, don't dump on the guy downstream.

- [Ron] One of the first things that they did to get the tribes to participate in that and to say we will spend and equal amount on aquatic species restorations so it'll be dual project.

- [Andrea] So the Chehalis based in strategy refers to an approach that is really a suite of several different types of actions.

And since we're focused primarily on reducing flood damage and improving habitat for aquatic species, we really break those suites of actions down into those two large buckets.

On the flood damage reduction side it is a suite of actions that range from the very small, up to the very large.

Things like levee improvements, on up to the largest proposed action in the strategy is a proposed flood retention structure that would hold back 65,000 acre feet of flood waters.

(cheerful music) - [Don] It's a logging community.

There's a people that, generational, that live here and work here as loggers.

There's people that grew up here and leave, never come back.

And then there's retirees that comes here.

I'm a lucky man to live here.

By building the dam, and it breeching, then it would flood Pe Ell.

So it's the only time that Pe Ell would have damage would be from putting that dam in here.

Otherwise the only flooding that occurs is from Stowe Creek.

We've been told all the years that they're gonna make it so much greater, we're gonna have a reservoir and we can have recreation.

We have the recreation here already.

This is one of the last free flowing rivers in the state and it needs to stay that way.

(blues jazz guitar music) ♪ I'm gonna stay and they're gonna give it away ♪ ♪ That's gonna keep until judgment day ♪ - [Vince] It's being proposed because after the two 2007 flood, people in Lewis County wanted something to happen, anything.

If you stacked them up end to end you're gonna be between five and 10 feet of technical documents.

And that's very difficult for the general public to understand.

The county has this culture of fighting outside interference, they don't want big government telling them where a flood plain is.

Because what that basically does then is it reduces property value.

You want to see the land valued as much as possible to get the maximum possible property tax from it.

♪ What you did and what to say ♪ ♪ She told me not to say ♪ - [Bobby] To control water is a good thing.

We've seen in Chehalis what happens every day when we have floods.

And they keep building up, building up, building up and all they're doing is shoving the water one way or the other.

Well if we can control that water, we're all of us are much better off.

- [Alan] I'm not a fan of the dam, because I think it's temporary fix and we're the only river around here without a dam on it.

And we've got some native beautiful fish in this country.

And these steelhead are native and their shoulders are three times wider then a hatchery and salmon come up and we can't even catch the chinook salmon now and they got it closed off down, I think it's closed completely now.

Get our fishery back and they're starting to come back.

And now they're gonna take it away again.

- [Vince] Inbound on marker one, here we're going around the corner and you have to imagine a truck coming round the corner.

(radio chattering) In January of 2018 the road to our right down here, the hillside slid down, of the east end of the dam is gonna be right here on this spot, you're looking at it here.

It goes across the river to my corner of my property over that way.

So we're now on the Panesko Tree Farm.

(solemn music) My father bought the property in 1937.

I inherited the property when my father passed away.

I took over, yeah I've been attached to the property for 80 years.

There's a lotta memories here.

When you get older, the memories start fading and it's more the work you put in.

I wanna be able to pass this tree farm on to my children and grandchildren.

In Lewis County people that own tree farms, they have that opportunity to work in the woods on their own property and have that as a legacy to pass on to their family.

(gentle music) The dam will be a 45 degree angle from this west point, over to the northeast point on that hill.

So this would be under 200 feet of water here, where we're standing right now.

But we're hoping that the dam won't be built here.

- [Erik] So this project is the Chehalis River Flood Reduction Project, and it's comprised of two major components.

One is a water retention facility, the other piece of this project is the airport levee improvements in which the airport levee would need to be raised to protect not only the airport, but some of the Chehalis area that will be protected by that levee, and the freeway.

From an economic standpoint, yes the target definitely is the Twin Cities area.

And they derive the most benefit from it.

That with this facility and the levee, we would have about a 10 foot gauge reduction in the Doty, Dryad area.

And then a little over one foot down in Mellen Street, Centralia, Chehalis area.

And a one foot reduction in an inundation makes a huge difference in damage avoided.

- [Vince] When you've lived in Chehalis like I have, and have had your house flooded with three feet of water, lowering it to a foot and a half of water in your house doesn't accomplish a whole heck of a lot.

Your house is still flooded.

There's houses in Centralia that were flooded with eight feet of water.

- It's not gonna eliminate flooding but it will take the top off and move it.

A week, two weeks, let it out slow after the flood is gone.

- [Erik] I think a lotta people come into this with a preconceived notion of what a dam is.

Which is why I keep saying water retention facility.

- A flood retention expandable, it's not a dam.

And so well, if it's a big wall of concrete in the middle of a river, that to me suggests dam.

- We call it a water retention (laughs) facility because of the opposition to dams.

- So this is much more like what you'd see as a concrete culvert or bridge.

There are openings in the bottom of the facility that the river runs right through most of the time.

Inside the facility there are flood gates that would then restrict the flow as needed which would build a reservoir behind it during a flood operation.

It's about a 30 day duration between the time when the flood gates would actually engage, and the time that the full reservoir would be drawn down.

- And the proposal is that it be used for only floods above what the hydrologists model as the 10 year flood.

(gentle music) - It is also potentially an expandable version too.

Because if floods get worse and we need to keep more water back, we would have to make it higher.

- [Man] The foundation itself would be built big enough that this could be raised in the future if need be.

And again that has a lot to do with climate change.

- [Ted] As the world changes, (laughs) you have to adapt to it.

But dams are complex and they usually come with a lotta costs.

- [Susan] I don't see the value in actually spending that much money.

I think there's many other things we could spend money on in the county.

- There's an open question at this point as to where the money will come from to construct and operate that facility.

- So we've been talking to our federal partners about can you help us out with this?

And maintenance can be funded through a tax of those folks who are benefiting from it.

(gentle music) - The vegetation behind the structure in the eventual reservoir area probably wouldn't be so green and lush all the time.

- There's gonna be a pretty substantial change to the riparian, the trees on the sides of the rivers here.

(gently dramatic music) The trees are really important for shade in the summer.

And so you take away that natural ability of the river to cool itself.

- If you change the vegetation on the hillsides, you can change the rate landslides are happening off the terrain.

There can be responses downstream, to the transport of that sediment.

- Right now it's really hard to imagine how the proposed dam could mitigate for impacts.

Fish and dams don't coexist, it doesn't happen.

The runs significantly decline, the impacts are just too great.

- This down here is a trap and hold fish passage facility so when the gates would restrict fish passage.

Fish could be collected here and actually driven around and put into the reservoir.

- [Man] Here's a prime example of why we don't wanna have dams in this system.

We need to place these fish to spawn, and the sanctuary to be left alone.

- But the run on the river design is as sensitive as you could possibly be, given a dam.

The old saying about what does a fish say when it comes up river and hits a big piece of concrete?

Dam.

- What would I do?

I'd win the lottery and build a dam up here.

(laughs) - The stance of the Chehalis Tribe today is that we disagree with the solution of a dam or any kind of retention project in the headwaters.

- [Dan] Every time I come up here, I see this basalt rock and I see this deep channel.

And I think about how much time it would take for a river to do that.

And I think about how long my ancestors lived and walked, probably right along this same place.

I might not be the owner of this land, I feel very deeply connected to it.

That I come from it.

(solemn music) - [Man] People really wanna make this purely an environmental or purely a fish issue, and for us it's so much more then just a fish issue.

This Basin and the history of it and the stories, the sort of parables really, of Qoneqone who is what the academics would call like a changer figure.

He was a dominant supernatural force that came through the river.

Really important lessons have come from this being that came all through this river.

And when I see this dam proposal, and specifically where they want to put it, like of all the places you could put it, it's at a place where Qoneqone pushed the land together and pulled it apart.

And he dictated where the fish would go, either north or south to set the patterns of spawning and life that would feed the people.

And to think of that being, exploded with dynamite ... (gentle music) - [Mara] Well probably 200 yards upstream of where the proposed dam will go in.

But if we come in and alter the habitat so significantly and to build a dam.

I think it's important to know what the consequences of doing that are and really the only way to do that is to come out here and look at what's happening.

(gentle music) - As awful as the floods have been, it has definitely spurred a massive movement in data collection.

Temperature is one of the best ways to determine the health of a river.

I currently have 17 temperature monitors throughout the Basin to look at the changes in temperature over the changes of landscape.

- [Jason] Just to be up in the upper watershed is almost a spiritual experience for me being a tribal member.

This is where the river begins and it's just the place where it all starts for us as a tribe.

Our origin story even originates from up in this area.

So it's just an area that our tribal members don't have as much access to as we did at one point in time.

And hopefully one day we'll have more access up here and be able to experience everything that this region does have to offer.

- [Colleen] We're making it a point to work with estate agencies to gather all of this information together.

So there had to have been a whole lotta focus in this part of the basin.

And so in 2013 when the Departments of Fish and Wildlife Science Program started getting involved with the proposed dam, this is where we came.

We wanted to know what salmon and steelhead are spawning up here.

What parts of the habitat they were using.

- [Nick] This area, it's not a whole lot of the overall habitat in the basin and gets a lot of the fish.

(gentle music) - [Colleen] One of the things that stood out as to what we've learned over the last six years has to do with the winter steelhead.

- [Nick] 15% of all the steelhead in the Chehalis Basin are coming out of this 4% habitat up here.

(gentle music) - [Colleen] So not only do we have solid numbers here, but we have unique genetics, unique part of the overall diversity of winter steelhead.

But it's the spawning in this very part of the basin.

(gentle music) In addition the cooler water in the headwaters, that's the summer rearing habitat for these juvenile salmon and steelhead.

So while you might have a 2,600 square mile river basin, a very limited portion of that river basin is suitable during the summertime for salmon and steelhead to rear.

- [Nick] The lower part of the main stem, more or less first falls to the proposed dam site, we have some really heavy chinook spawning.

A lot more fall chinook then it has spring chinook.

- [Colleen] Spring chinook have the lowest numbers of fish returning to the Chehalis, of any of the salmon species.

Historically the upper Chehalis supported a fair number of spring chinook.

We don't see that many here today.

To rebuild a run I think it's always helpful to know where they've been before.

Because it tells you that there's something right about this area.

(musical chanting) - [Dan] That spring run that comes through Tsihalis, that's how we'd say it in our language, was the first one to come after the winter.

And it was the one that was going to ensure that the people could live and carry on.

There was rejoicing and there was a celebration.

And there's a particular way that it is to be cut and then returned to the water, facing out so that way it can go out and tell all the other fish that these people are still living correctly.

These people are still honoring the teachings.

These people are still taking care of us here.

It's good to return.

(musical chanting) There was just a real abandonment of many traditional practices.

Traditional spiritual practices where illegal until 1970s.

How much we lost we can never know.

All we can do is make sure we take care of what we have left.

- We know that in the future this ceremony will continue to live and breathe long after we're gone.

That's why we're teaching our young ones today these parts of our history.

This is who we are, this is what we do.

- [Man] And to see you start at such a young age and take on this important role.

It makes my heart feel really good.

So don't forget this.

No matter where life takes you.

- But we really need to protect the salmon because they're native fish and we're native people.

So when the native salmon are gone, that's when we struggle.

(musical chanting) - [Todd] In order to be responsible stewards we were literally, should we even go out for that one fish?

But it's something that we needed to do as a spiritual ceremony.

I think what we're discussing now is where can we go buy fish from other tribes and that's something I've never encountered before.

(slow drumming) The spring chinook is the heart and soul of our fishery but it's our job to protect it now, basically because it's been so depleted.

(melancholic music) - [Larry] This is very clearly a bad situation.

Just project this out a few years and we're likely extinct.

- [Fawn] With the collapse of one species it could trigger a domino effect on many other species.

- [Jess] A listing under the Endangered Species Act could be in our very near future.

- And then we would be under federal regulations which would be far more stringent then we are now.

- [Ed] You know extinction is not an option.

That's just the way it is, we have to do what we can to retain those populations.

There is real panacea about accepting a dam, it means that you're accepting the perpetuity of these fish stocks.

You're making it even more problematic.

- I'm gonna do everything I can to make sure that our future generations have something to look forward to.

- [Larry] Climate effects are likely involved in this, as probably a part of this, but what I think is happening primarily is what happening with the salmon runs all along the west coast wherever you see declining trends.

And it's not due to one factor or another factor.

It's due to the accumulative effect of many factors.

And that's what we have to look forward to without a restoration plan.

(gentle music) - [Leif] The potential for restoration of the Chehalis is huge.

The current land uses within the basin are really conducive to restoring the watershed to a healthy state.

If we have a healthy forest, if we have a healthy watershed, the effects of climate change are muted.

(gentle music) - [Jess] One of the most significant limiting factors for salmon in the Chehalis are rising water temperatures.

The coldest waters predicted to occur for salmon and steelhead into the future are upstream of the proposed dam site and upstream of two existing facilities on the Wynoochee and the Skookumchuck.

If we wanna be really serious about salmon recovery in the basin, discussions of removing the Skookumchuck and Wynoochee dams needs to be on the table.

We'd need to focus our efforts on protection and restoration on those areas of cold water infusoria because they don't exist equally throughout the basin.

- [Steve M.] If you have older forests, you get more water in the summertime.

The water's cooler.

We may have to look at places that are set aside or a longer rotation forestry.

- One of the big changes in the rivers in the Northwest historically has been a reduction in the load of large woody debris which is science-speak for logs and log jams.

- [Tim] When these big trees fell into these streams, they had a huge effect on the hydraulics of the channel.

- [Mara] As it traps gravel, water that flows into that gravel cools, and temperature's a huge issue in this river.

- [Man] If you have a big log, that can create a pool that's a great home for a fish.

- [Conservationist] And now we can go to many parts of the Chehalis where there isn't anymore wood and we see channels that have actually cut right through whatever gravel they might have had once.

They're down to bedrock in places.

And obviously you aren't gonna have any salmon where you don't have gravel.

- [Emelie] We have a tremendous opportunity in front of us to engage one of the largest watershed scale restoration efforts ever completed.

The Chehalis Basin holds great promise when compared to other regions of the state, where more degradation and Endangered Species Act listings.

And some on it have already occurred.

Opportunity really exists here in the Chehalis.

- This plan is ambitious, we're talking about up to 450 fish passage barriers, 5,000 acres of floodplain habitat, 15,000 acres of riparian habitat and 450 miles of in-stream wood.

Scientists tell us that this is the amount of restoration that is needed to move the dial for salmon and for other aquatic species.

This right now, is this river's time.

The momentum built around such a large scale restoration plan will come once in our lifetime.

(gentle music) (machinery clattering) - [Tim] There's no simple or inexpensive way to put this back together when we look at over a 100 years of accumulative damages done.

It's gonna take heavy equipment, it's gonna take the resources needed to put these back together.

- We know out on the Washington coast that restoration means business.

And it puts so many of our neighbors back to work, restoring the very systems that they have worked and lived among for most of their lives.

- We've had a lot of success using things like engineered log jams, reconnecting the old floodplains for water storage purposes.

(motor rumbling) - [Tim] Sometimes I tell myself we're the river doctors.

Diagnosing and helping understand what's going on and how to help fix it is the core.

- We really are aiming for a long term recovery of those natural functions that sustain habitat.

Historically we know that this system would have been much more sinuous then it is now, like bigger bends.

Probably would have had multiple channels active at the same time.

Streams have cut down because they lost a lot of the natural resistance.

- [Leif] And so it routes flood waters very efficiently from the upper watershed into the central watershed where there's a lot of flooding issues.

And if we reverse some of those processes and got the upper watershed to actually store a bunch of that water.

The idea was we could look for ways to attenuate flows naturally.

- [Conservationist] A restorative approach could triple the amount of water stored on the floodplains, compared to what currently is.

- We were able to show in effect from the restorative approach in the upper watershed, but not nearly on the magnitude of building a dam.

- [Tyson] But there were a lot of components of it that we're still using and implementing throughout the aquatic species plan and local flooding projects as well.

- There's actually some really great opportunities to use the bioengineering techniques to reduce flood water in ways that also provides great benefit for fish habitat.

- [David] The idea of a distributed network of projects that can improve lots of different areas that together add up to a substantial impact on the flooding issue.

It could be a very attractive way to look at and think about but it runs against the bureaucratic mindset that favors big projects, big ticket items.

- None of the current proposed alternatives eliminate flood risk.

We're still gonna be dealing with it into the future.

(gentle rhythmic music) - [Tyson] If we're really gonna make a difference for all the communities in an equitable way, we have to look basin-wide which goes beyond the scope of what a dam would do.

- If the dam comes back and it just says if all of a sudden the cost benefit ratio starts to go really upside down, and it may.

We now have a great plan beyond the flood site.

(gently dramatic music) - [David] The best way to build resilience to flood hazards into a landscape, is to essentially not put critical infrastructure at risk in potentially flooded areas, it would be rethink floodplain development.

- [Vince] You're allowed to build today in a floodplain, as long as you're higher then the highest previous flood.

We know that climate change is suggesting 20% increase of flooding over the next 100 years.

- [Man] Lot's of studies have been done across the U.S. and the world in terms of the benefit costs and the long term return of just getting people out of harm's way.

Meaning actively pursuing and buyouts for properties and developments within a floodplain.

A green way or a corridor as an area of the watershed where flooding, channel migration, erosion can occur.

Then outside of that corridor human development and private property can exist at a much lower risk.

- [Jason] So the tribe bought this property several years back, this was a old dairy.

This whole field up here will be planted with a 150 foot buffer of three to five year old trees.

We'd like to lead by example as far as converting some of these properties back into a healthy ecosystem.

- [Man] We want to choose to put our enterprises in places where they're gonna be immune from catastrophes.

Like a vast flood.

Do you just move entire communities out of harm's way?

Or do you build infrastructure?

- We will need to flood-proof critical infrastructure.

Increase levee heights or construction of flood walls.

- The higher you build and the more away from the river you can show yourself, cheaper your insurance rate's going to be.

- [Susan] You have to take responsibility for where you live and that's why I carry flood insurance and that's why I move all my equipment.

And after what you've seen happen, you do that hopefully.

- [Steve] A lotta the people that work and live here in Lewis County are very, very independent, very independent.

My message is, if you are relying on government to do the things that you as an individual should be doing for yourself and your family.

And your neighbors and your community, then you're gonna be very, very disappointed.

Not so much because government's inept, but because there's not enough of us.

And that's not what we're here for anyway.

(gentle music) - [Steve M.] So the Chehalis Basin is a little bit of a high wire act.

We really have no idea if it's gonna be politically or technically feasible to build a dam.

We don't know if Washington and Olympia will support spending hundreds of millions of dollars on aquatic species restoration.

- [Andrea] We've all bought into the idea that no one's gonna get everything they want or need through this process.

But if we come together and we work together we're all gonna get more than we ever could do on our own.

- [Vander Stoep] We don't have a final fish plan, we don't have a final flood plan that's agreed but we've agreed to the next steps going forward.

- Regardless of what projects get built or don't built, I think that Chehalis Basin has a strong future ahead because of the fact that people are working together.

- It's when we take the time to talk to people that we can make these connections and find our shared humanity.

- [David] We have an opportunity to use what we do know about how this landscape works to try and further both our human goals and our environmental goals.

- [Mara] Planning for the future under a climate change it's gonna be solved by looking at the landscape and people coming together across that landscape to intentionally make changes.

- [Jess] Some of these decisions will have impacts that are forever.

Extinction, it lasts forever.

- [Jason] It could be a flourishing river with good salmon runs and the floodplain can be connected again.

I think that has to do with how willing land owners are going to be about being good stewards of the land.

- [Susan] As a farmer, we feel all we have is adaptation.

- [Fawn] We're not gonna be able to innovate our way out of these problems, they're not gonna self-heal.

It's gonna require collective action.

- [Jay] In some ways this is a little bit of a test of what's the rest of the country gonna do?

What's the rest of the planet gonna do?

- [Man] Philosophically there are those two options where it's like do you want to control your environment or like the second option which is to be resilient and adapt to what the earth is giving you?

And I don't think the second option has ever really been given a chance here.

(gently dramatic music) (gentle music)