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Trying to revive spring-run chinook salmon on the San Joaquin River

Rene Henery, California science director of Trout Unlimited (front) and Matt Bigelow, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, spot a wild spawning chinook salmon in an upper portion of the San Joaquin River that has been devoid of salmon for more than 60 years.

Rene Henery, California science director of Trout Unlimited (front) and Matt Bigelow, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, spot a wild spawning chinook salmon in an upper portion of the San Joaquin River that has been devoid of salmon for more than 60 years.  (Bethany Mollenkof / Los Angeles Times)

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The San Joaquin’s spring-run chinook once numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The run dwindled as San Joaquin Valley agriculture sucked more and more water from the river system. After the Friant Dam was built as part of the Central Valley Project, the spring-run chinook disappeared.

All dried up

Chase Hurley, general manager of the San Luis Canal Co., near a section of the San Joaquin River that has been mostly dry for half a century.  (Bethany Mollenkof / Los Angeles Times)

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U.S. Bureau of Reclamation fisheries biologists Charles Hueth, right, and Shaun Root, center, arrange a net used to trap chinook salmon that migrated up the San Joaquin River to the Hills Ferry Barrier. The trapped salmon were transported in a tank truck to an upper portion of the river, where they were released as part of a restoration program.   (Bethany Mollenkof / Los Angeles Times)

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From left; Jim Nickel, president of Nickel Family LLC, Chase Hurley, general manager of the San Luis Canal Co., and Cannon Michael, vice president of the Bowles Farming Co. walk near a stretch of the San Joaquin River that has been mostly dry for half a century. Restoring flows to the dry stretches has caused water to seep from the river bed to beneath adjacent fields, hurting crop production  (Bethany Mollenkof / Los Angeles Times)

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Charles Hueth, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, releases a salmon into the San Joaquin River at Camp Pashayan as part of a program to restore flows to dry stretches of the river and revive some of its historic chinook salmon runs.  (Bethany Mollenkof / Los Angeles Times)

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