My great-great grandmother's son, James Berrian, who worked his entire life in the fish preservation industry was one of the men that came up with the idea of the fish ladder. I do have articles concerning it and if anyone is interested I can dig them out and give a little more information concerning it.

That does look like a fish ladder, at least the bottom, but where does the top go. It looks like it just stops in mid air, but maybe just the photo. Would not it make better sense if it were a fish ladder to be built so that the fish went into it as they headed up the stream, instead of the bottom portion facing down stream?

Charlott on 5th May 2015 @ 7:07am

My guess is a fish ladder. It doesn't really look like a human stairway.
Condit Dam on the White Salmon River was designed with a fish ladder. The Dam was completed in 1913.
Two fish ladders were washed out by floods soon after completion, so the Department of Fisheries required the Electric Company to participate in building the fish hatchery on the Columbia.

L.E. on 5th May 2015 @ 7:12am

Charlott, I would be interested in James Berrian's work. I would like to know what worked and what didn't and would a ladder have been possible at Grand Coulee.

L.E. on 5th May 2015 @ 7:15am

Fish ladders were in use on some east coast streams at least as early as 1900. This fish ladder starts near the foot of the dam where the water spills over, which is what you want. It is quite steep though and probably didn't give the fish much of any place to rest on the way up.

Longshot on 5th May 2015 @ 7:22am

This is the fish ladder at Dee as in the mid 50s i would go look at the fish when they would clean out above the Dam there would be no water going in the ladder and you could see the fish. The boxes were about the size of a fruit binso they had some room to rest on the way up.

lee on 5th May 2015 @ 8:04am

I haven't unearthed what I was basically looking for about James Wendell Berrian and fish ladders.

By 1922 he was the superintendent of the Butte Falls hatchery located in the Medford area.

One of the things he was involved in an experiment of planting 30,000 silverside salmon fingerlings in Crater Lake. They wished to see the results of planting them in a land locked lake. He also planted 50,000 in Lake of the Woods, plus another 50,000 in Fish Lake. I wish I could find some article of what the results of that endeavor was.

Charlott on 5th May 2015 @ 9:39am

It appears that they are pushing smoking/burning debris over the edge. Was this at the time of one of the mill burnings, or did they burn slash in such a manner. No DEQ or ODFW at that time?

nels on 5th May 2015 @ 11:50am

Nels; I have seen several pictures of the burning of debris at the same location, I remember seeing parts of the fish ladder until the flood of 64, also saw fisherman using the path after the flood to go to the pool at the bottom of the dam.

Jim Gray on 5th May 2015 @ 1:22pm