When someone at the Washington Department of Natural Resources told Pete Barber about a derelict dam on the upper Washougal River, he was intrigued. Barber, the Habitat Restoration Program Manager for the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, had grown up near the Washougal, a tributary of the Columbia River, and had heard tell of the Kwoneesum Dam. “But I thought it was being used as a reservoir for the city of Camas,” he says. “Come to find out that it was a relic from the Camp Fire Girls [an outdoors-focused group for girls that preceded the Girl Scouts]. There was no real purpose, and it hadn’t been in use since 1985.” Barber’s discovery was correct. Once an outdoor swimming spot for the Camp Fire Girls, the reservoir — and the dam that created it — had been tucked back in the woods and mostly forgotten about for 40 years. Yet the dam, like all dams, had an outsized negative impact on the fish population, stopping the flow of steelhead and salmon upstream, meaning they weren’t able to access their headwater spawning grounds. The post One Year Later: A Dam Removal and a River’s Rebirth appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.