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PrintTorpedo the Dam!
Removal project will help the area's native Snake River fine-spotted cutthroat trout, and please the anglers who love them
Workers use heavy machinery to remove the Spread Creek Dam in September 2010. According to Trout Unlimited’s Scott Yates, the dam’s removal will improve conditions for trout. “All this habitat up here is like a hotel, just waiting for fish to check in,” he says.
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Last summer, earnest yet overly optimistic Snake River fine-spotted cutthroat trout circled in a pool a few miles upstream from where Spread Creek passes under U.S. 191. Every so often, the fish would rise out of the water, as if trying to overcome a tree branch that was impeding their passage to habitat stretching eastward up into the Bridger-Teton National Forest.
But the Spread Creek Dam was no tree branch. Instead, it was a thirteen-foot-tall, 125-foot-long concrete and metal blockade—a piscine Berlin Wall between the trout’s spawning grounds and the rest of the Snake River drainage.
Fortunately for the fish, land managers from the National Park Service and Forest Service joined together with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Trout Unlimited, and a host of donors to obliterate the structure last fall. Using heavy machinery, engineers took the dam apart and put in place a semi-natural diversion structure that will allow cutthroat to move back upstream.
Built in 1967, the dam was supposed to provide a water diversion for development down in the valley to the west. But for the next forty-plus years, it languished. Water scoured gaping holes in its concrete apron and the metal parts rusted and bent. In the end, the dam provided only a small percentage of its water-diverting potential.
For the Park Service, the dam added to the park’s already substantial maintenance backlog. “It either needed to be removed or repaired in a way that was going to be very costly,” says Sue Consolo-Murphy, Grand Teton’s chief of science and resource management.
