BURST“In my lifetime I’ve seen extremely stable runs you could depend on every year. Now, everybody hopes that some salmon will come back.”
These opening words by former Skwlāx te Secwepemcúl̓ecw Kukpi7 (Chief) James Tomma set the tone for Ashes in the Current: hope and recovery in British Columbia’s most famous salmon river, a short film recently released on YouTube by the Pacific Salmon Foundation (PSF).
The film is about the Adams River, the impact the 2023 Bush Creek East wildfire had on it and, in turn its annual, famous sockeye salmon run, and a collaborative effort to restore some of the river’s natural channels used by salmon returning to spawn.
“What the river does naturally, is it braids out, usually it forms several channels but what’s been happening over the last two or three decades, is the river has been shifting from multiple channels to one channel and we’ve been losing a lot of spawning habitat for sockeye for chinook and for coho,” explains PSF chief program officer Jason Hwang in the film. “So the project that’s happening now in partnership with First Nations, DFO (Fisheries and Oceans Canada) and others, is trying to restore some of that natural channel complexity and let the river energy redistribute from one channel into many channels.”
Overhead camera shots of the river in 2022 and 2026 show the dramatic affect the fire had on the once lush green landscape.
“People who are used to coming to the Adams River, they’ll be shocked if they come here and see what it looks like now,” said Hwang. “We as a society need to think about how do we help salmon endure these changes, how do we help the river and habitat be more resilient to support that diversity of salmon arm?”
The devastation from the wildfire spurred a group of partners “set on tackling the impacts from the wildfire and historical changes to the river,” said the PSF in a news release.
“Led by local First Nation Skwlāx te Secwepemcúl̓ecw, along with DFO, BC Parks and Pacific Salmon Foundation, work began in March to restore the Adams’ natural channel complexity in time for the scheduled arrival of thousands of sockeye this fall.”
While thousands of sockeye are expected for the 2026 run, a dominant year in their four-year spawning cycle, the numbers are now expected to be in line with the downward trend seen since 2010.
Referring to the PSF’s own recently released numbers, Shuswap Environmental Action Society president and author Jim Cooperman said there’s not much to celebrate with this year’s run.
“The numbers are out on how many have gone into the Fraser River… as of October 2 there’s only been 313,000, that’s two-thirds what ends up in the Adams,” said Cooperman. “And it’s October 2 at the Fraser, so it takes a while for them to get up here. It’s unlikely we’re getting much more than 200,000 fish in this year’s run which is just a horrible crush.”
“It was meant to be a big year for Fraser sockeye. 2026 is a “dominant” cycle year, when high returns are expected. But their projected run size has been cut by 64% from an initial pre-season estimate of 7.7 million fish to 2.8 million as of today,” wrote the PSF in an Aug. 25 social media post, ahead of the Oct. 2 numbers
Cooperman said the decline has been steady, and that it’s due largely to rising ocean temperatures.
“We can’t change that,” said Cooperman. “We can do everything we can here where they’re breeding and where spending a year in the lake. We can do everything we can to protect them here, and they’re trying – they did all this restoration work in the river – but it doesn’t help if they can’t survive in the ocean.”
The annual Salute the Sockeye Celebration is currently underway at Tsútswecw Provincial Park in the North Shuswap. Run by the Adams River Salmon Society, the event runs to Oct. 25 with interpretive guided tours, cultural entertainment and education sessions, First Nations ceremonies and more. For more information, visit salmonsociety.com/salute-to-the-sockeye/event-details/.