NARRATOR: High in the Central Idaho Mountains, one of nature’s great travelers has come home.

After years at sea, this sockeye salmon fought its way up three river systems to reach these spawning grounds before it dies.

An Idaho sockeye’s final journey is one of the most grueling faced by any spawning fish. Nine hundred miles inland, over six thousand feet in elevation.

Exhausted and just short of their life’s destination…

…they are scooped from the river, weighed and measured, and taken for a ride…

…140 miles, to a warehouse outside Boise, Idaho

…where they are gathered with others of their kind, remnants of a population teetering on the brink of extinction.

Between 1985 and 2007, an average of only 18 sockeye returned to Idaho each year.

Fisheries biologists now carefully control the reproduction of what was once an icon of abundance.

Instead of spawning naturally, each new generation begins life in an incubator of plastic bags… and PVC piping.

These are not the farm-raised salmon on menus everywhere. A year from now, they will be released to the river and the ocean, where they’ll live like fish born in the wild.

But when they return to the Columbia, their heroic climb will return them… here.

Across the Pacific Northwest, fish hatcheries have become surrogates for rivers and streams, incubating all six species of salmon, including Idaho’s endangered sockeye.

“Protecting” salmon has come to mean “producing” them. More than a hundred million are released into the Columbia and its tributaries each year.

Yet, clearly something’s not working. Many Columbia Basin salmon populations are already extinct and thirteen more are listed as endangered or threatened.

From one perspective, hatcheries are evidence of our willingness and capacity to help an animal in trouble. From another, they’re evidence of just how much trouble this animal is in.

Over millennia, the annual migration of tens of millions of salmon became a defining event for all manner of life in the Pacific Northwest.

Now, it’s their absence that’s shaping the region.

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