Top Line: In 2000, Congress told the Bureau of Land Management to remove a small, but fish-damaging, dam on the Donner und Blitzen Wild and Scenic River and in the Steens Mountain Wilderness. The BLM may finally get around to it.
Figure 1. The so-called Page Springs Dam on the Donner und Blitzen Wild and Scenic River in the Steens Mountain Wilderness in the Sagebrush Sea of southeastern Oregon. Source: Bureau of Land Management.
It was 2000. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt would soon be ending his tenure, as would his boss, President Bill Clinton. Babbitt mused aloud that perhaps he would whisper in the president’s ear to proclaim a Steens Mountain National Monument on his way out the door.
As environmentalists’ best hopes for a national monument were lesser than the worst fears of the land barons (owners of large cattle ranches and holders of great numbers of federal grazing permits) about such a monument, both sides were incentivized to make a deal. A grand bargain was struck in the form of congressional legislation rather than a presidential proclamation. The conservation status of one million acres of Bureau of Land Management holdings on and around Steens Mountain in southeastern Oregon was significantly elevated for the benefit of current and future generations. But that’s a whole ’nother story, one that I will perhaps tell in a Public Lands Blog post someday. (For now, see the report I did for the Western Governors’ Association.)
Embedded in the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act of 2000—amid language establishing the Steens Mountain Wilderness, expanding or establishing new wild and scenic rivers, prescribing a no-livestock grazing area, creating a half-million-acre special management area, laying down a one-million-acre mineral withdrawal, and mandating several land exchanges that resulted in significant net gains for conservation—is a clause that has lain dormant for now going on a quarter of a century:
(4) REMOVAL OF DAM.—The Secretary shall remove the dam located below the mouth of Fish Creek and above Page Springs if removal of the dam is scientifically justified and funds are available for such purpose.
Because of the current federal spending largesse (thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act), these thirty-two words have come to life. The money is available and it’s time to move.
Map 1. The location of the Page Springs dam removal project area. Source: River Design Group.
In this case, “The Secretary [of the Interior]” is read as “The Bureau of Land Management.” “Scientifically justified” in this context means: Will it help the variety of redband trout unique to the Donner und Blitzen River? In the Steens Act, Congress found that the redband trout in the Donner und Blitzen River, which drains the western slope of most of Steens Mountain, “represent a unique natural history reflecting the Pleistocene connection between the lake basins of eastern Oregon and the Snake and Columbia Rivers.” There is no ladder for these fish, and the dam is a barrier to their passage.
The BLM hasn’t actually proposed dam removal or anything else at this point. It has yet to do any National Environmental Policy Act process compliance, nor has it published notice in the Federal Register. So far, the BLM has in hand a geological report commissioned by the High Desert Partnership and has penciled out some preliminary alternatives and estimated costs. Nonetheless, it’s a dam fine idea for the BLM to hear from redband trout aficionados, Donner und Blitzen lovers, and/or Steens Mountain fans that the dam needs to go and as soon as possible.
Map 2. The eco-socio-political geography of the Page Springs dam. Source: Bureau of Land Management.
The Damn Dam
The dam is located on the Donner und Blitzen River a few miles upstream of the Page Springs Campground near the southern border of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon (Maps 1 and 2). The dam was constructed in 1938 (another time the federal government was spending huge amounts of money on infrastructure) by the Civilian Conservation Corps at the request of the Fish and Wildlife Service to make it easier to more accurately measure the flow of the river, which was important information for downstream users, including the refuge and area ranchers.
Figure 2. The dam under construction ca. 1938. Source: River Design Group.
The BLM is billing this hunk of concrete as a weir rather than a dam. A weir is “a low dam built across a river to raise the level of water upstream or regulate its flow.” Whatever it’s called, it’s harmful to the redbands and other fish species, including mountain whitefish, longnose dace, and mottled sculpin.
At its lowest point, the dam is 5 feet high; at its highest point, about 7 feet. It is 55 feet wide at its base and 70 feet wide across the top. It has poured-in-place concrete abutments on both sides, for a total width of 85 feet. The lowest part of the dam is about 3 feet above what was and could be again a normal water level. The dam itself is small as dams go, being about 70 cubic yards in volume (an average-size street-legal dump truck holds ~10 cubic yards).
About 160 cubic yards of small-gravel-to-cobble-size sediment has backed up behind the dam. The current thinking is to dredge 50 cubic yards of this sediment and place it in a scour hole downstream of and likely created by the dam, in order to recreate an initial channel. The remaining 110 cubic yards of trapped sediment would erode and disperse naturally, continuing its downstream journey after being interrupted for more than eight decades.
Figure 3. Close-up of the fish-passage barrier, aka dam(n). How did we take pictures like this before we had drones? Source: River Design Group.
The Question of Dam Removal
Complicating removal as authorized in the Steens Mountain Act of 2000 is the fact that that very same act of Congress established the Steens Mountain Wilderness (SMW). Some might raise the objection that using mechanized equipment in a wilderness area, even for the noble purpose of addressing a native-fish-passage problem, violates the Wilderness Act. It does not.
Does such dam removal violate the spirit of the Wilderness Act? In the short term, yes; in the long term, no. While the project may be a short-term assault on the quality of the SMW, in the long term the quality of the wilderness will be improved if it no longer has a fish-killing barrier. After dam removal, the SMW will be more wild and more “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” The SMW will be more “affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.”
Before the establishment of the wilderness area, in 1988 Congress established the Donner und Blitzen Wild and Scenic River, which includes the segment with the Page Springs dam or weir. The Wild and Scenic River Act (WSRA) allows the inclusion of “small” dams, and this certainly qualifies; the stream is still generally free flowing. Under the WSRA, the BLM as river manager is required to protect and enhance the outstandingly remarkable values (ORVs) for which the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System was designated by Congress. One of the seven ORVs for the Donner und Blitzen is fish. Check!
Congress was well aware of the damn dam in 1988 when it established the wild and scenic river and by such designation implicitly mandated that the dam must go. In 2000, while establishing the Steens Mountain Wilderness, Congress explicitly mandated dam removal.
The Alternatives
Because of the National Environmental Policy Act, all federal actions are first considered as a suite of alternatives. Alternative 1 is always no action. In this case, preliminary alternatives 2 through 6 range from actually hauling another 380 cubic yards of outside rock to create a “rock ramp” for the fish to removing the dam using mechanized rock-moving equipment (Table 1).
Table 1. Six very preliminary alternatives for the removal of the Page Springs dam. Source: Bureau of Land Management.
Most of the alternatives come down to removing the 70 cubic yards of foreign material that created the dam in the first place and disposing of it outside of the wilderness and the wild and scenic river area. It all comes down to time and money (Table 2) and whether the off-site rock is removed more by human or mechanical energy.
Table 2. As with most things in life, in dam removal time is money. UTV = utility task vehicle. Source: Bureau of Land Management.
Figure 4. Don’t tell anyone, but ranchers these days are far more likely to be riding a UTV (utility task vehicle) than an ERV (equine riding vehicle)—and their footwear is more likely to be Nike than Tony Lama. Source: John Deere.
Given the sensitivities to using any mechanized equipment in a wilderness or wild and scenic river area, there are trade-offs between how quickly the dam removal is completed, how intensive is the human labor required, how long and how severe are the impacts, and how much it costs (Table 3).
Table 3. Preliminary estimate of impacts of the various dam removal options. Source: Bureau of Land Management.
My Recommendation: Go In Big and Get Out Fast
My recommendation is to go with full-mechanical Alternative 6. Relying on nonmechanized human labor to adequately remove the damn dam would be more costly (and beyond the $0.5 million now available). In any case, finding that much human labor would be problematic (it’s backbreaking work, and the job site is beyond the middle of nowhere). Using mechanized (in this case very motorized) equipment would have the greatest temporary construction impacts but for the shortest duration. Alternative 6 is also the cheapest and within the expected budget of $0.5 million.
I first contemplated recommending a combination of Alternatives 3 and 6: partial removal but done quickly with mechanical means. My mind turned to Elk Creek, a tributary of the upper Rogue River in Jackson County, Oregon. After decades of controversy, the US Army Corps of Engineers “notched” the half-built Elk Creek Dam to allow Elk Creek to flow freely again. However, in this case the dam was several times wider than any Elk Creek riparian area. The leftover hulk of a dam was no longer impeding Elk Creek and would have cost hundreds of millions, if not more than a billion, dollars to remove. So the dam hulk remains in place as an informal monument to pork barrel politics. However, in the case of the Donner und Blitzen, leaving any of the dam would impede, as the BLM calls it, “river continuity.”
If there is any money left over, perhaps the BLM could pass it on to the Fish and Wildlife Service to be used to restore the Donner und Blitzen River in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, where the Blitzen was channelized into a literal straight line of several miles more than a century ago. Downstream of the Steens Mountain Wilderness and the segment protected as a wild and scenic river, the Blitzen River was abused originally for domestic livestock and now for shootable waterfowl (the cows are still around). The Donner und Blitzen once flowed through a vast wetland that is now mostly dikes and ditches on its way to Malheur Lake. FREE THE LOWER BLITZEN!
How You Can Help
As noted above, I’m supporting Alternative 6. If you prefer another alternative, that’s fine unless you favor Alternative 1, the no-action alternative. Please send a short supportive email or letter to:
Don Rotell, Andrews/Steens Field Manager. Burns District, Bureau of Land Management. 28910 Hwy 20 W. Hines, OR 97738; drotell@blm.gov. (If you click on this email link, be sure to personalize your message.)
For More Information
Bureau of Land Management, Burns, Oregon. 2023. Page Springs Weir (handout to Steens Mountain Advisory Council).
Kerr, Andy. 2006. “The Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act of 2000 (Oregon)” in Collaborative Conservation Strategies: Legislative Case Studies from Across the West. Western Governors’ Association, Denver, CO.
National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. Donner und Blitzen River (website).
Salant, Nira, et al. 2010. “Geomorphic History and Current Channel Condition of the Donner und Blitzen River Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Oregon.” US Fish and Wildlife Service, Portland, Oregon.
US Congress. October 30, 2000. Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act of 2000. Public Law 106-399, 106th Congress. 114 Stat 1655-1674.
Wilderness Connect, University of Montana. Steens Mountain Wilderness (website).
Zunka, Jack. 2023. Page Springs Weir Removal, Frenchglen, Oregon, Level 1 Report. River Design Group, Corvallis, Oregon.
Bottom Line: In her book Watershed: The Undamming of America (2002), Elizabeth Grossman noted that our nation has entered an era when we are removing dams far faster than we are building them. Freeing the Donner und Blitzen would continue this vital trend.