Yurok Tribe will mark first year of dam-free Klamath River at annual festival

Teenagers and young adults from Klamath Basin tribes in south-central Oregon and Northern California earned international applause this summer paddling neon-colored kayaks 310 miles on the newly free-flowing Klamath River .

The 30-day journey, dubbed “source to sea,” started at the river’s headwaters, Oregon’s Upper Klamath Lake east of the Cascade Range, and ended at the Yurok Reservation’s Requa Village beach in California, where the river meets the Pacific Ocean.

The successful kayak crossing celebrated the completion of the world’s largest dam removal project . For more than a century, four hydroelectric dams altered the ecology, disrupted salmon runs, degraded the water quality and impacted Indigenous communities ‘ ancestral land.

The kayak trip also put a global spotlight on