When a million kokanee were flushed out of Green Peter Reservoir in 2023, immediately killing tens of thousands of the fish , it was one of the first and most striking impacts of a controversial practice known as “deep drawdowns.”

The kokanee, a landlocked sockeye salmon popular for stocking in Oregon reservoirs, floated in mass numbers below the dam in early October of 2023. It was called a “mass die-off” by wildlife officials and it enraged anglers, horrified boaters and surprised fish biologists.

Yet not all the kokanee died.

Some of the kokanee survived the drawdown, migrated all the way to the ocean and survived for two years. This fall, 500 have returned to the base of Foster Dam transformed into crimson sockeye salmon.

"The journey that these fish took is a pretty incredible d

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