The Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Central Idaho is the heart of the largest roadless area in the lower 48.

There are no dams blocking streams, no chainsaws felling trees, no active mine shafts puncturing rock.

Humans haven’t left much of a mark here. But salmon have.

Rancher and river guide Jerry Myers lives on the edge of this vast wilderness, near the Salmon River.

JERRY MYERS: I was born on a small farm and ranch in central Idaho; grew up lovin’ the outdoors of course and workin’ in the outdoors. I’ve lived on salmon streams my whole life. You understand by living out here that things are connected. This little creek’s called Cabin Creek and it runs through my back yard. This water comes from these big mountains. Snow melts, soaks into the mountains, it slowly comes out in the form of springs that keep these little creeks running year round. This water’s pure enough I could drink it but it really doesn’t hold much in the way of nutrients because it runs through granite and fairly sterile soils. Life here needed a kickstart. And that kickstart was provided by salmon. For thousands of years, the biggest component of the food base for this area was salmon, and it tied the rich nutrients of the Pacific Ocean, to these mountains in Idaho. It’s probably easier to name the organisms that aren’t directly affected by salmon than it is to name the ones that are, because everything’s affected.

Even salmon that escape predators nourish life.

Dead adult salmon provide food for small invertebrates that in turn feed newborn salmon.

The benefits of hundreds of millions of pounds of marine nutrients swimming upriver every year aren’t confined to the edges of rivers and streams… or even to animals.

MYERS: Bears will come down and eat that carcass, and then bears will go up into the woods, and do what bears do in the woods. And by that mechanism, they actually spread nutrient up these mountains. So you can find salmon-generated marine nutrients in these big ponderosa trees around here that are way away from the streambed. But they were spread up there by animals.

Throughout the Northwest, wild salmon have been the currency of biological richness.

And now, that wealth is slipping, or already gone.

MYERS: The rancher that used to have this ranch said he would lay awake at night, kept awake by the splashing salmon that were down in the creek. My wife and I have been here for nine years and we’ve yet to see a salmon.

For most Northwesterners, wild salmon are either a memory or a story. Neither feeds the land.

DUNCAN: Wild salmon are not snail darters. Salmon are this unbelievably charismatic and biologically necessary creature. And salmon are in trouble – as much as any species of plant and animal in the Pacific Northwest. If this creature is removed from the tapestry, the tapestry will unravel.

The completion of the three-dam Hells Canyon complex in 1967 eliminated salmon from thousands of miles of streams in the Upper Snake River Watershed, ending the flow of nutrients from the sea.

SERVHEEN: We’re looking at what those adult salmon, these swimming fertilizer sacks that came back up into these systems did for these entire ecosystems. We’re testing carcasses because we believe they’re the closest to the natural returning spawning salmon, as well as a manufactured product that simulates those carcasses.

For three years, the team will track how quickly the marine nitrogen carried by salmon moves through the system.

They’ll look for it in plants…

In the bugs they catch on sticky tape…

In animals such as the area’s bug-eating bats.

SERVHEEN: It takes a tremendous effort to try and replace those nutrients that these salmon just naturally brought back over thousands of years. And they did it all without pay or recompense of any sort.

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