There were salmon. More than a quarter of a million salmon passed through Rampart Canyon every year, some of them destined to go through two time zones to spawning tributaries all the way across Alaska and into Canada. A high dam would end their migration, irrevocably. The Corps’ plan to lift them out and carry them across the 250-mile reservoir in barges wouldn’t help, because the tiny fry couldn’t possibly navigate such a vast body of slack water on their way back to the sea.
