California removed an 18-foot dam after 70 years; salmon returned to spawn upstream by 2026

In 2024, California removed an 18-foot dam from Neefus Gulch and restored 1,600 feet of stream, reopening habitat that salmon had been unable to reach for more than seven decades. By January 2026, surveys recorded eight spawning nests, known as redds, in the newly accessible reaches above the former barrier, a sign that endangered Central California Coast coho salmon are beginning to reclaim their historic range. According to NOAA Fisheries, the project is part of a wider push on the Mendocino Coast that has helped drive record returns of more than 30,000 adult coho in the 2024–2025 season and is now allowing fish to move into streams where they have not spawned in 70 years or more.A small dam with a big impactNeefus Gulch is a tributary of the North Fork Navarro River on California’s Mendocino Coast. For decades, an 18-foot-high earthen dam blocked the channel, preventing adult salmon and steelhead from swimming upstream to spawn and keeping juveniles from using the cool, shaded pools above. The structure was a legacy of earlier land use, but it had become a hard limit on the life cycle of fish that depend on connected streams to complete their journey from gravel nest to ocean an...