We swung to the north, hugging the descending foothills. Dark waves of cedar and spruce ran past under the clear bubble of our craft for the first few miles, but soon the ancient rain forest was broken by logging and road construction. These broad, geometric areas of bare earth and debris grew larger and more numerous until we rolled high over a shimmering grove of cottonwoods and dropped into the canyon of trees bordering the river itself.

Braiding back and forth between green pools and clear, racing riffles, the Queets led into the mountains. I leaned out the open door of the helicopter and scanned the river. Off to our right, an immaculately forested hillock jutted up from the valley floor where Tshletshy Creek's long glacial canyon meets that of the Queets. Beyond, where the valley seemed to vanish between the rock walls of Kitma Peak and Mount Pelton, the upper valley began, and the best modern maps became fuzzy.

The Queets River, which rushes from the highest mountains of the Olympic Peninsula to the Pacific Ocean in less than fifty miles, was first traversed in 1890, the year that the American frontier was officially pronounced closed. At that time the Queets valley was alive with tremendous trees and large quantities of game such as elk, ducks, and seals. Here, as elsewhere along the North Pacific coast, however, the most conspicuous natural marvel was the salmon.

Early chroniclers were amazed by the numbers of these fish found in the rivers of the West. The Lewis and Clark expedition noted "great quants. of salmon" when it passed along the Columbia River in the fall of 1805. In 1854, zoologist George Suckley wrote that the salmon were "one of the striking wonders of the region ... These fish ... astonish by number, and confuse with variety." As late as 1899, Richard Rathbun of the Smithsonian Institution said simply, "the quantities of salmon which frequent these waters is beyond calculation, and seems to be so great as to challenge human ingenuity to affect it in any way."

A century later, I was speeding to test the current condition of both the salmon and "human ingenuity." The destination was a gravel bar on the upper Queets midway between Hee Haw Creek and an unnamed stream. There I would be dropped off to join a Quinault tribal salmon survey crew that was going to search for wild salmon in the upper Queets. Salmon surveys like this are now conducted annually by federal, state, and tribal governments on major salmon rivers throughout the West. Our plan was to travel light and fast, in the manner inadvertently pioneered by Private Harry Fisher, the first man to explore the river from the headwaters to its mouth.

It is one of history's gentler ironies that Fisher feared at first that he might starve to death on the Queets. Alone, lost and hungry after becoming separated from the U. S. Army survey party that made the first ascent of Mount Olympus, Fisher soon found he could throw away his meager store of flour and bacon. "Eagles and ravens were quite numerous today, and dog salmon running lively," he wrote in his journal for September 24, 1890. "At noontime I waded out into water deep and swift and speared a large salmon, and in the scuffle I lost my balance upon the slippery stones and was washed down with the current, losing spear and salmon, but retained my staff. I had one other barb, and used it to better effect."

Fisher came to savor salmon meat and the sport in catching the fish, but he soon found that their presence posed certain unexpected problems. "Although warm and comfortable," he wrote of the night of September 25, "I might as well have selected a camp in Barnum's Menagerie so far as sleep was concerned. Located near a shoal in the stream, great salmon threshed the water all night long, in their effort to ascend the stream. Wild animals which I could not see snapped the bushes in all directions, traveling up and down in search of fish."

The salmon that fed Fisher and so many other creatures on the Queets that fall were members of a race of Chinook or king salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha. Known to weigh as much as 125 pounds and measure more than five feet in length, Chinook are the largest and-by many accounts-the finest of the Pacific salmon. In their prime they resemble a burnished blade whose upper edge has been darkened with a delicate tracing of black spots. At other times, they may display a sootiness that gives them two more of their many local names: black salmon and blackmouth. Their tails are exceptionally broad and straight, their backs strong and sleek, their heads bulletlike with clear, unblinking eyes.

Like the other four species of Pacific salmon-coho (or silver), sockeye (or red), pink (or humpy), chum (or dog) - Chinook are exceptional swimmers. The Kwakiutl Indians, who venerated the salmon, addressed their prayers and offerings: "O Supernatural Ones, O Swimmers." Salmon can accelerate faster than a car over short distances, or glide without apparent effort on unseen currents and drifts. Motion is central to their lives. They feed by it, communicate by it, and, one has to suspect, enjoy it too. It is only late in life when their bodies have been deformed by the spawning process that they lose their mastery of water.

Spawning males often develop a humpback and hooked snout with a wicked set of canine teeth, while the females' tails may fray to stumps of bare bone as they dig their nests in the riverbed. Life begins for the salmon within the gravel bowl of that nest. At the climax of protracted and passionate mating rituals, male(s) and female simultaneously release sperm and eggs into the bottom of the nest, where they are buried by further nest excavation. Two months later the eggs hatch tiny alevins that live in the gravel until the yolk sacs attached to their stomachs diminish. Of the 5,000 eggs that might be laid by a Chinook female, the majority will not live this long.

Those that do, however, are recognizable as fish for the first time. As fingerlings, they can live in the river of their birth for as long as a year before going through the silvery transformation known as smoltification. This allows them to survive in salt water and immediately precedes their migration to the sea. Following the prevailing North Pacific currents in thousand-milelong gyres, the young salmon grow rapidly on zooplankton, squid and small fishes. Many Chinook live four years in the ocean, traveling 10,000 miles or more during the course of several circuits around the great oceanic grazing grounds. Then at the height of their strength and beauty, they return homeward, seeking out their natal streams to spawn the next generation. Once they reenter fresh water, Pacific salmon will not eat, and within a few weeks of spawning they all die.

I continued to study the river as we passed through the bend into the upper valley, but saw no sign of either the fish or the more obvious nests (known as redds) they dig where the water is swift. Finally, a little after 3 P.M., we tilted toward a gravel bar where I could see two figures standing by the edge of the river. My pilot, a silver-haired man with a leg brace showing below the cuff of his pants, eased us back around and set the machine down in a cyclone of fine gravel and jet fumes. Once the copter was on the ground, I shook hands with the pilot, grabbed my gear and bent double like an ape, dashed toward the two men I had spotted from the air. By the time I reached them, the helicopter had disappeared down the valley and the only sound was the roar of the river.

Larry Lestelle, a fisheries biologist for the Quinault Indian Nation, and Dino Blackburn, a member of the Quinault Tribe, were finishing a candy bar when I joined them. We had already reviewed the basics of salmon nest identification before leaving the village of Queets that morning, and so after a few moments of gear adjustment and slightly embarrassed banter, we took the plunge. Lestelle led the way across a swirling, thigh-deep eddy to the faster but shallower water on the riffle beyond. Both he and Blackburn were wearing the preferred attire of Quinault salmon surveyors: T-shirts, gym shorts, long underwear bottoms, brightly striped athletic socks and tennis shoes. The idea, Lestelle explained cheerfully as the icy water lapped the backs of his knees, was to combine wet warmth with quick drying. I felt somewhat frumpy in my blue jeans, but discovered that after numbness killed the pain, the sultry September afternoon made the snowmelt river seem like an ideal place for a stroll.

Blackburn, Lestelle and I skirted Kilkelley Rapids, the worst on the Queets, by way of an animal trail that gamboled over boulders, logs and bushes. Above us towered a forest of oldgrowth conifers that looked as though a Christmas tree flocking machine had run amok in its upper reaches. Everything was covered with green growing matter, and yet the understory of salmonberry had a trim, almost tidy look. Shafts of sunlight plunged at intervals to the mossy forest floor where we found chanterelle mushrooms and a cluster of cloudberries in a nook by the side of the trail. This deep red fruit was a favorite of the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands until deer introduced by whites destroyed it as a food source, but it has apparently always been rare on the Olympic Peninsula.

Lestelle called a brief halt on the other side of the rapids, partially to let me catch up, and partially to let him relace his brand new high-topped tennis shoes. A tall man with a boyish, clean-shaven face, he had a great deal of trouble with his ankles and knees the last time he walked the Queets, and the new shoes were part of his precautions to avoid a repeat performance. "Relax, Larry, the weak-kneed shall inherit the earth," I said as he sat on a big, round rock adjusting his elastic knee supports. He laughed good-naturedly, but in fact both religion and fish are a very serious matter to him.

Lestelle first saw the Queets River on a fishing trip with his father when he was in sixth grade. "We drove out and parked at the Matheny Creek bridge and fished a clear, shallow riffle that you could see didn't have any fish in it," he told me once, adding "I thought it was the most beautiful river I'd ever seen." A little experience showed him that Dolly Varden trout could sometimes be found in backwater pools, and by the time he was a teenager he had decided to become a fisheries biologist. He steadfastly pursued his goal through high school and upon graduation from the University of Washington was hired as the Quinault Tribe's Queets River biologist. After three years on the front line of the Northwest salmon wars, Lestelle was still known to slow down at every bridge to look at the river below.

"Well, who's going to see the first salmon?" he asked as he got to his feet. Neither Blackburn nor I made any promises, but it did seem that we should start seeing them soon if they were in the river. Although Chinook have the physical strength to climb Kilkelley Rapids, there are no records of them spawning above Hee Hee Creek, Hee Haw's lower companion. We were now a mile from Hee Hee, and the river was beginning to split into spurs and side channels as the gradient of the valley diminished. To cover these multiplying stream-sized channels, Lestelle divided the party. Blackburn, a stocky man with long, tightly curled hair and a Pancho Villa moustache, would cover the right, while Lestelle and I would cover the left.

Since Chinook are most fond of big water spawning, we were looking for places where the main river broke across a broad gravel bed, or twisted tight under the cover of an overhanging bank or tree. Although the river had appeared clear from the helicopter, the rock flour ground in the Queets's glacial headwaters made it opaque as jade to waders. For this reason, Lestelle instructed us to stay in the water as much as possible. He wanted us to flush the fish with our feet. There was also a chance that we would locate one of their redds by stepping in it. Remembering that Chinook nests can be more than a foot deep, I began to wonder if our survey would be a record of the number of times we were wet to the crotch.

As it turned out, we didn't find any salmon at all on the first stretch of river, the big gravelly bend that followed, or the next stretch approaching the cliffs on the south side of the valley. It wasn't until a little after 4:30 that a glimpse of something surprisingly large, almost out of scale with the water that contained it, first caught my eye. Crossing the gravel bar, I found a female spring Chinook that must have weighed twenty-five pounds lying in the mouth of a small side channel. When Lestelle came over to join me, the fish started and shot across the main river with such force that she beached herself on the opposite shore. Lestelle said her thin appearance indicated she was spawned out, but he grabbed her by the tail and threw her back into the water anyway.

Starting at the surprisingly clear mouth of the side channel, we traced it back through a wasteland of gravel and uprooted trees. There were six more leopard-spotted Chinook lounging in the lower portion of the stream. Most were holding quietly in water so shallow that their backs and tails were almost entirely exposed. They seemed entranced as we approached, but once one had seen us they all became fidgety, and dashed away upstream to hide. We followed until, turning a corner, we found the stream emerging whole from a bed of dry gravel. By the time we got back to the main river, Blackburn had gone on without us, crossing an immense tangle of fallen old growth spruce that vaulted fifty feet off the ground, and then winding his way through a group of small, tree-covered islands below.

Leaning on a newfound staff and-cleaning my glare-resistant Polaroid glasses, I asked Larry why these Queets Chinook were known as spring or summer Chinook. "It has to do with the time they return to the river as adults," he said. "We call them springs or summers based on the general season of their migration, but it's a somewhat arbitrary distinction. The fish begin entering the river in little spurts from March on ... Some of these fish have been in the river waiting to spawn for seven months now." Because of the extra fat needed to sustain them over their long fast, early running salmon, such as the Queets spring Chinook, are considered choicer eating than their later running relatives. They also tend to be more vigorous and secretive.

On the next riffle I made the mistake of trying to cross the river in an area of standing waves. White water welled up over my waist as the river tore the stones out from under my feet. "Keep moving," Lestelle shouted from the other side. "You can't stand still!" With a dozen yards of thrashing water between me and him, I decided to back out and retrace my steps. Soon after I regained the shore, three red-breasted mergansers swooped in and landed immediately upriver from me. They preened themselves nonchalantly as the current bounced them through the standing waves toward a dead spruce that was loudly ploughing water across more than half the river. Still unaware of my presence, the three ducks dived simultaneously in front of the sweeper and then bobbed up on the other side where the river relaxed into a smooth glide.

There they thrust their rakish heads under the water again and again. At first I thought they were drinking, but then it occurred to me that they were probably scouting for prey, preferably young salmon. During late summer they would be looking for the flash of white on the anal fins of coho salmon, or the more shadowy steelhead. At other times, these powerful swimmers pursue all five species of Pacific salmon native to North America, as well as the two anadromous relatives of the Atlantic salmon, steelhead and cutthroat trout. (A sixth species of Pacific salmon, the diminutive cherry salmon, is found only in the rivers of Asia.) I rested on the log until the birds had drifted out of sight and then backtracked to cross the river thirty yards upstream.

Lestelle estimated that we were less than a mile from Alta Creek, our planned camp for the night. We were discussing Blackburn's whereabouts when Lestelle spotted a dark torpedo in the water close to a bank of overhanging alders. He approached cautiously, but once again the fish started, this time driving downriver until it died right in front of me and floated on its side, head down. Despite the white fungus that covered her tail, this was a handsome fish, measuring thirty-four inches and weighing an estimated twenty-eight pounds in her emaciated post-spawning state. I steered her onto a nearby gravel bar with my staff, marveling how easily even a stiff, lifeless Chinook could glide through the water.

Looking back from a big log at the next bend, I saw Lestelle, a tiny figure in blue gym shorts, bending over the dead fish while the darkening wilderness rose to the long shafts of light that still flushed the upper peaks. Judging by the fossil remains found in the sea cliffs near here, salmon and their ancestors have been running in these rivers for at least five million years. The earliest known salmonid is Smilodonichthys rastrosus, a ten-foot-long creature of the Pliocene. The giant skulls of these fish, which are characterized by extremely large canine teeth and numerous gill rakers (or plankton sieves), have been found in Washington, Oregon and California. Ted Cavender of Ohio State University and Robert Miller of the University of Michigan have speculated that Smilodonichthys may have been a direct ancestor of the Pacific salmon, among whom it bears the closest resemblance to sockeye and chum.

Within the last two million years, repeated glaciation has by turns depleted, multiplied, isolated and mixed the salmon to a considerable degree. When the glaciers were at their greatest advance, both Atlantic salmon and steelhead abandoned their northern haunts for rivers like the Rhone on the Mediterranean and the Colorado on the Gulf of Mexico. Pacific salmon are believed to have survived the most recent glaciation in two refuges, one each on the North American and Asian continents. With the glaciers' retreat 10,000 years ago, the salmon fanned out and recolonized millions of miles of rivers draining into the North Pacific.

Spawning at times in the shadow of the withering glaciers, the salmon led the return of life to the ice-scarred valleys. They were not the only means by which nature reclaimed the wasteland of gravel, boulders and clay, but they were among the most important, for they provided the only way of capturing large amounts of nutrients at sea and returning them to the land. (Many biologists believe this is why all Pacific salmon die after spawning, unlike the Atlantic salmon of the more nutrient-stable East Coast.) Running in such numbers that many rivers like the Olympic Peninsula's Hamma Hamma (or "Stinky Stinky") were known for the marvel of their rotting, the salmon helped recreate the soil which supports the rococo excesses of the modern Olympic Peninsula rain forest. At the same time, as Harry Fisher learned, they attracted animal life.

At sea, when salmon are preparing to begin their spawning run, seals, sea otters and porpoises congregate to feed on them, and in their wake come the voracious killer whales. Faster than the fastest porpoise, killer whale packs overtake their prey from behind and eat them alive. Off British Columbia's Nass River nineteenth-century whaler Charles Scammon observed orcas with salmon "in their bristling jaws, shaking and crushing their victims, and swallowing them apparently with great gusto." Once the salmon are in the river, bears, cougars and coyotes take their toll, and then the carcasses of the fish that survived to spawn become the dinner of bald eagles and other scavengers. The salmon's eggs are eagerly sought by the trout that shadow the big fish in their last days, and so in time are the young salmon by diving ducks, cormorants and squawfish.

During much of his residence on the North Pacific coast, man too has been among the principal salmon predators. Virtually every riparian culture along 10,000 miles of coastline was dependent, often to a large extent, on the salmon as a staple of their diet. The people of the Kamchatka Peninsula and neighboring Siberia used salmon to make a pounded, breadlike dish, a variety of cakes and blinis, and used the oil to fry their choicest delicacy: a mashed combination of sarana lily bulbs, marrow of the purple fireweed, sweet grass, cloudberries and crowberries. Indian tribes of the North American coast like the Kwakiutl, Nootka and Chinook ate smoked salmon and made a type of "cheese" out of the eggs, which were also used as a dip for salmonberry shoots and fern rhizomes that had been boiled and peeled like bananas. When fresh, the fish were simply boiled, roasted or fried in a little grease, preferably bear.

In the early days of European and American settlement in the North Pacific, the white man was as dependent on salmon as the Indian, eagle or otter. Small frontier communities such as the socialist Puget Sound Cooperative Colony on the north side of the Olympic Peninsula followed the migrating salmon to obtain their store of winter food, and many citizens of the area's towns and cities did the same. In 1891, when a young man named Joshua Green came to the metropolis of Seattle, salmon was an important local subsistence crop. Green, who later founded one of the largest banks in Washington State, remembered on his hundredth birthday in 1969: "We had plenty of salmon then. In those days, I fished just like the Indians did. I had a little skiff, and I put a line around my neck in a loop, and I'd row, and the rowing would move the spoon I was trolling, and that's a grand way.... I caught two barrels of salmon the first season I was here-besides working."

It was nearly dark by the time we found our Indian companion crouching near several Chinook at the mouth of Alta Creek. We conferred briefly and then headed up the bank, squishing softly as we walked. After kindling a fire on a grassy flat grown thick with ghostly white-barked alders, we changed into dry clothes and set our wet ones to drying around the blaze. I had been told to bring no food, and so watched with interest as my companions pulled the elements of our dinner out of their packs. Dehydrated soup, beef franks and plain white hot dog buns appeared one after another and were devoured in as much time as it took to scorch them to the taste of the chef. I passed around some dried fruit I had smuggled in for dessert, and then the three of us drew close to the fire, laughing as we strained to read the tiny print that revealed the multisyllabic ingredients in the soup (lactalbulin, monosodium glutamate, hydrolized vegetable protein, potassium carbonate, disodium inosnate, disodium guanylate).

We all agreed that salmon would have been preferable, but we would be happy enough just to see the fish at this point. Queets spring Chinook have declined to one-third their number a century ago, with the population dropping from 2,300 to 1,300 in the last decade alone. Early signs had suggested that this year's spring Chinook run in the Queets would be considerably larger than it has been in recent years, but we were not finding the fish to confirm that hopeful forecast. Tallying the day's count in his yellow waterproof notebook, Lestelle figured that the three of us had seen twelve redds and twenty-three fish in five miles of river, none of which, curiously, were adult males. "There should have been fish in that first bend below Hee Hee Creek, and then on the right-hand riffle above that nice deep pool," he said, shaking his head.

The tone in Lestelle's voice told how important it was to him that we find salmon spawning on the Queets. Already the English-speaking world had exterminated two substantial wild salmon resources within the last two hundred years. First the English pillaged the wild Atlantic salmon in rivers like the Thames, and then the Atlantic salmon of the Eastern United States met the same fate at the hands of the Americans. In both instances, the cause of the problem was well known. "There is no question," as one nineteenth-century observer put it, "but salmon were most plentiful before civilization had begun its work, and when dams, traps and other obstructions and hydraulic mines were unknown, when the sources of the river were unsettled and undefiled by the sewerage of the cities, the forests at the headwaters still untouched by man, the country yet in a natural state."

The same process of "civilization" has been at work on the Pacific salmon since the California gold rush of 1849. During the intervening years, Pacific salmon have declined to less than half their former number along the entire West Coast of North America. Many significant runs have been wiped out entirely, and virtually every surviving run has been reduced in number and range. On the Columbia River, which 100 years ago boasted the largest runs of Chinook, coho and steelhead on the face of the globe, these same fish have declined to the point of receiving serious consideration for the federal government's threatened or endangered species list. And since artificially propagated hatchery salmon now make up more than half the remaining fish in Washington State, the choicer wild salmon probably total less than a quarter their number before the coming of the white man.

It is not surprising to learn, therefore, that there are no sub-sistence salmon fishermen in San Francisco or Seattle, and no wild salmon in the streams that drain their famous hills. The Olympic Peninsula on the other hand would seem to offer a different prospect. This 6,000-square-mile area of mountain and forest, located directly opposite Seattle across Puget Sound, is one of the wildest places remaining in the contiguous United States, and the upper Queets is as wild as any place on the peninsula. Ninety years after it was first explored there is still some confusion about the names of prominent features, and the description "unnamed and unknown" appears with frequency on fisheries survey maps.

If the wild salmon can no longer survive here, one might ask, where can they?

"Mountain in the Clouds" © Copyright 1981 Bruce Brown
Salmon sketch by Bruce Brown

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