After decades of talk and planning and debate, the $744,000 project by a Vancouver, Wash.,
contractor is the first work on the Elwha River in the dam-removal project. It's intended to get the river
pointed in the right direction once the two dams start to come down about a year from now.

And with that, officials expect, the prized but threatened chinook salmon population also will head
in the right direction — upriver by the tens of thousands. About 750 dams have been taken out around the country.
But the Elwha dams are the largest ever; Glines Canyon stands more than 200 feet tall. The dam removal is intended
to allow salmon and steelhead to recolonize more than 70 miles of pristine habitat within
Olympic National Park and restore the natural functioning of the ecosystem, from headwaters to the mouth
of the river at the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Chinook are coming back to the Elwha in record low numbers this season, with fewer than 500 adults
counted. Mike McHenry, fish-habitat manager for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, sees a deadly combination of
forces taking a toll — from the dams, which confine the fish to the lower five miles of the river and don't
allow them to get to traditional spawning grounds, to state hatchery practices and bad flooding in 2006
that affected the number of fish coming back this year.

"It's not good," said McHenry, who sees 2,000 chinook come back in a typical year.
Scientists hope fish populations will rebound
when the dams are out, with as many as 20,000 to 30,000 chinook returning each year. The fish are listed
for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

To start the dam-removal project, a 12-person crew this month started working 12-hour days with
equipment barged to the south end of Lake Mills, about 16 miles upriver. They're clearing a 37-acre
forest grown up on a delta of sediment behind Glines Canyon Dam, the uppermost of the dams.

Soon, they will begin excavating a 1,100-foot-long, 50-foot-wide, 6-foot-deep channel in the middle of
the delta, running north and south, toward the dam. The channel is important because it will help the
sediment caught behind the dam flow evenly downriver. Modeling experiments have shown that without the channel,
as much as 80 percent of the sediment could be left behind when the dam comes down.

One of the goals of the $350 million dam-removal
project is to end up with a natural-looking landscape. The channel will help limit the potential that
hunks and pillars of sediment could be left behind as unstable ground that couldn't support vegetation.
"The pilot channel is like a surgical tool, to just get things started in the right place,"
said Tim Randle in the Bureau of Reclamation's Denver office. "We thought that if we don't get it started in the
right spot, you could have a lot of trouble later."

An estimated 20 million cubic yards of sediment, or 1 million dump trucks' worth, is locked up behind
the dams. That sediment, once rinsed downriver, is expected to replenish spawning gravel needed by
fish in the river, as well as beaches and clam beds long since starved for material impounded by the dams,
which have been in place for nearly 100 years. Dredging the material was ruled out because it would
take an estimated 10 years of continuous truck traffic and cost too much, Randle said.
Work on the pilot channel is expected to be finished by early October. Crews are expected to begin taking
the dams down next September, removing them gradually over more than two years.