An old, unused dam was demolished last week along a tributary of the Applegate River in Josephine County, the latest barrier to fall in an ongoing, decades-long effort to improve fish passage along rivers and creeks across the Rogue River Basin.

Lovelace Dam, a 63-foot-wide, 6-foot-high structure located on Slate Creek near Wilderville, came down, busted up by Central Point stream restoration contractor M&M Services. The dam’s removal opened up an estimated 26 miles of salmon and steelhead spawning and rearing habitat that had been partially blocked by the dam, especially during times of low water flow.

“Slate Creek is now entirely free-flowing at the former dam site for the first time in at least a century,” said Jim McCarthy, Southern Oregon program director for WaterWatch of Oregon, an organization that uses a carrot-and-stick approach to encourage landowners to remove barriers.

The carrot is the offer to remove the structures at no cost to the property owner, mainly using public money. The stick can be the threat of litigation over water rights and barriers to the passage of fish protected under the Endangered Species Act.

“There’s definitely the threat of litigation in some cases,” McCarthy said in a telephone interview Thursday. “Essentially, it’s enforcement.”

The effort to remove barriers went prime time in 2009 with the removal of Savage Rapids Dam on the Rogue River east of Grants Pass. The 39-foot-high, 500-foot-wide dam, used for irrigation, was replaced with pumps.

That was followed the next year by the removal of Gold Ray Dam upstream of Gold Hill. Other structures came down, too, including a diversion dam near Gold Hill. This year, dams along the Klamath River are being removed.

In the Rogue Basin, the emphasis on barrier removal has now shifted from the mainstem of the river, according to McCarthy.

“The restoration work has moved to the tributaries,” he said. “There’s lots of restoration work going on here. There’s lots of protection work.”

“There’s hundreds of barriers in the Rogue alone.”

The effort to remove barriers — primarily culverts and dams on private property — involves a host of players, including government regulators, nonprofit conservation groups, private landowners and irrigation districts, among others. Key to the work is funding, including recent state funding to help offset the effects of drought and federal funding under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.

Funding from the infrastructure bill, $159,180, went toward the Lovelace Dam project, the first such project in the nation funded under that law, according to McCarthy. At least six other funding partners participated in the dam project.

The Lovelace Dam site is about 1.5 miles from where Slate Creek flows into the Applegate River, which in turn flows into the Rogue River, west of Grants Pass. The creek flows along Highway 199 for about six miles between Wilderville and Hayes Hill, with its tributaries reaching up into nearby U.S. Forest Service land.

McCarthy suspects that the dam served a sawmill long ago. A big sawdust pile and the remnants of structures remain. The dam held back waist-deep water for about a third of a mile. The structure no longer served a purpose, he said, other than as a swimming hole or floating pool.

The dam was listed as a “Group 2” priority removal project of the state, a relatively high rating. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife maintains a priority list of barriers that warrant removal. The list is currently undergoing updating, as part of a public process.

State and federal agencies have identified the creek as important to the recovery of salmon listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, according to McCarthy. In 2021, WaterWatch participated in a project that led to the removal of three other dams on the creek.

The owner of the Lovelace Dam property didn’t have a water right allowing the storage of water, according to McCarthy.

“It was totally unlawful,” he said. “We approached the landowner about relieving their liability. We made a deal.”

Prior to the demolition, biologists removed fish from a sectioned-off work area. They found juvenile coho salmon, juvenile steelhead and “a big ol’ cutthroat trout,” according to Pete Samarin, a fish biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Samarin said the removal of the dam and other barriers should improve the health and survivability of fish.

“So now you’ve opened up a whole lot of that system for fish just to be able to swim wherever they want to,” he said. “The fish couldn’t get past Lovelace.”

“In order for our fish to persist, we have to let them go where they need to go.”

Fish prefer cooler water that can be found in the upper reaches of tributaries, according to Samarin, who said that access to those tributaries is all the more important given the effects of drought and heat brought on by climate change.

“Fish need to move freely in order to ensure their survival,” he said. “We can’t trap them behind barriers and then have them boil. We can’t have fish being stopped a mile and a half up from the Applegate River.”

ODFW maintains a list of priority fish-barrier projects, with Pomeroy Dam on the Illinois River near Cave Junction the highest-rated project in the basin.

“We have an enormous list,” Samarin said. “I just added a couple [new barriers] to it. We have the largest list of priority barriers in the state. We’ve been told to keep it around 100.”

The list doesn’t include hundreds of culverts, he said.

“You just don’t have enough money to address everything.”

He said a colleague was currently working on removal of a 15-foot-high dam on a tributary of Deer Creek near Selma in Josephine County and was also was working on a U.S. Forest Service culvert.

Jay Doino, a contractor who coordinates a fish passage group for the Rogue Basin Partnership, said the removal of Lovelace Dam was a step in the right direction. The partnership helps to coordinate barrier-removal projects with the help of agencies, organizations and landowners.

“Great project,” Doino said of the Lovelace Dam project. “Benefits a variety of species. Opens up a bunch of habitat.”

According to Doino, momentum for the removal of barriers really started picking up with the removal of the dams on the mainstem of the Rogue River. Since 2017, his organization has been involved in the removal of 22 barriers, including those yet to be removed this year.

“Most of them were dam removals,” he said. “There’s plenty more that remain. We’ve got a decade or more of work ahead of us.”

Recently, work was done by the Rogue River Watershed Council to help remove six push-up dams on Salt Creek near Butte Falls, while the Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council has worked to improve fish passage and remove structures on Williams Creek near Provolt, the Little Applegate River near Ruch, Forest Creek near Ruch and Palmer Creek near Ruch.

Doino said that pumps and other structures can be installed to continue the flow of irrigation water when dams are removed.

“It’s important to say we’re not ripping these dams out and leaving people high and dry,” he said.

The work to remove barriers is being aided by recent increases in federal and state funding, according to Doino.

“There’s a variety of sources that are, in my experience, available almost every year,” he said. “In recent years, it seems there’s been a lot of money available.”

“Right now, it’s kind of a golden time for funding for fish passage. There’s money available right now. It’s competitive, but it’s out there.”

ODFW’s fish barrier priority list can be viewed online at dfw.state.or.us/fish/passage/inventories.asp. It was last updated in 2019, but is undergoing revision, with opportunity for public comment set for next year.