Day 2

Day 2

Today our morning started with breakfast and my group had dishes duty. We also packed our lunches and started preparing our backpacks for the day. We left the Chaparral campsite and headed out and unfortunately we ended up getting a little lost but 2 hours later we made it to 

Jeanette Burkhardt – Watershed Planner for YN Fisheries. Jeanette mentioned many different topics but I was mainly interested in Fish Accords. Fish accords are agreements that tribes go into that provides funding for their fisheries programs, in return tribes agree to not sue the state or the federal government for a certain period of time. These Fish Accords expire and are addressed every 10-5 years. Jeanette also mentioned that Husum falls is a German name and we laughed about how that was typical of settlers to come to Native homelands and give traditional sites European names. Jeanette than led us to Husum Falls and we took photos and hoped rafters would give us a show but they didn’t go past us. Condit Dam Removal was also very interesting to learn about. The video that I was able to pull up from Youtube was from National Geographic and it showed the dynamite blast that destroyed the Condit Dam. The Dam was basically destroyed because it was losing efficiency, sediment built up behind the dam. We visited the site where the Condit Dam was removed and I mentioned to Jeanette that it was almost impossible to imagine that a Dam was once there. While we visited a coffer dam was also explained – it is a structure that is wooden on the outside that contains boulders inside of it. Condit dam could not be recycled so the concrete ruble was placed along the hillside and soil and plants covered the ruble. Also we had the honor of visiting Chief Johnny Jackson at the White Salmon In-Lieu site and he discussed various aspects of Yakama history and tribal fishing. He went into detail about court battles he had won and lost. He talked about eating dry fish and how it was prepared on dry sheds and then it’s placed on individual sticks for further drying. He said that the pavement discouraged native people from creating these dry sheds. Johnny discussed the changes within his lifetime and this made a lot of my classmates sad they discussed with me how they had taken classes at HU and learned how Native people lost so much more than Chief Johnny Jackson had mentioned. And I think a lot of people were surprised to hear about how tribal fisherman frown upon all the wind surfing that takes place on the Columbia River. Wind Surfing discourages fish from entering the White Salmon In-Lieu site and other sites all along the river. Underwood Navigation and Restoration site was also very neat to visit, it made me happy to see plants returning to an area that had gone through so much change. Finally, I navigated and we headed back to the Chaparral water hole campsite.