As the helicopter passes over the estuary of the Campbell River, Mike Gage points to a geometric grid of survey markers laid out along a shoreline.
"Habitat restoration," said the director of the Campbell River Salmon Foundation. "That used to be all log booms and industrial development in there."
Inside the markers, you can see vegetation springing up to reclaim the tidal landscape. It is a crucial rearing area for the salmon that come out of the Campbell River and which once grew so large and in such numbers that the town used to be known as the salmon capital of the world.
Now that title is held by another Vancouver Island town, Port Alberni.
But Campbell River is pushing back, led in large part by the Salmon Foundation, which is working with various levels of government at restoring local rivers.
Just a 15-minute flight northwest of Campbell River lies what Mr. Gage believes is the future. There in a verdant green valley of lush, second growth timber, the Salmon River winds down from distant, snow-capped mountains.
Mr. Gage is 71 now, but as a young cat skinner, handling explosives and operating a Caterpillar bulldozer for logging companies, he thought nothing of driving through salmon streams to get at the trees on the other side.
"In those days, we could see no end to the old growth forest, just as we could see no end to the fish," he said. "We were wrong."
Since he retired, Mr. Gage has dedicated his life to fixing some of the environmental wrongs of the past.
Each year, the Campbell River Salmon Foundation raises about $100,000 at an annual dinner. Then it promptly spends the money on salmon restoration.
As the early morning fog lifts from the valley bottom, the place Mr. Gage would most like to spend some of that money comes into focus.
"This is a magnificent watershed," he said of the sinuous river below. "But that is the show stopper."
His finger points through the window at a small B.C. Hydro dam known as the Salmon River diversion.
The concrete structure, located about 58 kilometres from tidewater, diverts part of the river down a flume to the Campbell River watershed, where it helps generate hydroelectricity.
When the diversion dam was built on the Salmon River in 1958, it was 12 kilometres upstream from a canyon that was largely impassable to fish. But in 1975, the provincial government eliminated that bottleneck, by blowing out a boulder. Almost immediately, fish started moving up, filling up spawning beds, until they hit the dam. In ideal water conditions, some fish can slip past the structure, but very few make it, and in the fall you can see salmon jumping to hit their heads against the concrete walls.
Salmon are struggling to reach the 40 kilometres of perfect spawning river above the dam. And Mr. Gage is determined to help them.
"Most years, B.C. Hydro doesn't need the water it diverts out of the Salmon River," he said. "So I question why the dam even exists. And if it does have to be there, it should have a fish passageway. I have counted 300 coho trapped at the base of the dam."
B.C. Hydro has been studying proposals for a fish ladder, but the project is in a committee process that could go on for years.
Mr. Gage says that's too long. And each year marks another missed opportunity to revive salmon runs in the Campbell River area.
"It's got to go," he says of the dam. "It's blocking the salmon. And that is just not right."
As a young man, he used to look at the seemingly impassable mountains on Vancouver Island and figure out how to blast roads through them. So the relatively small lump of concrete caught in the throat of the Salmon River does not seem so formidable to him.
Then he hands over a legal opinion, commissioned by the Salmon Foundation. Lawyer Christopher Harvey concludes the dam is in violation of the Fisheries Act and that the government's wild salmon policy "does not permit inaction while endless studies take place to determine whether BC Hydro has the financial and technical means to provide a system for fish passage."
So, the fish need it and the law demands it. What's needed now is action. Restoration of the Salmon River is not something that should be studied to death.
Mark Hume