The Everglades of the West

Riding shotgun across Kurt Thomas’s 2,000-acre cattle ranch in Chiloquin, Oregon, feels like driving back in time. “Hold on tight, sweetheart,” he says, swerving his ATV around a beaver hole.

As we move along a narrow dike in the valley, cattle are nowhere in sight. Instead, a different type of world emerges. To my left, a spring-fed tributary flows into the headwaters of the Klamath River. To my right, cattails, tules, geese, egrets, wocus, ducks, otters and beavers work overtime to run a lush 700-acre wetland.

“All we had to do was stop the pumps, and within 18 months, we had 8-foot-high wetlands. Now we’ve got a creek, a wetland, a cattle ranch and no lost income,” said Kurt, 79, a first-generation Klamath rancher. “It wasn’t rocket science.”

About a century before Kurt stopped draining his ranch, the Klamath Basin was wetland country: a vast network of freshwater habitats along the Pacific Flyway that acted as a natural filter and sponge for the Klamath River. Straddling Northern California and Southern Oregon, the basin historically hosted spawning Chinook and coho salmon in the upper tributaries, wocus plants and waterfowl in the wetlands and marshes, and endemic species of sucker fish in the headwaters.

But in the early 20th century, the construction of four massive dams in the lower section of the river transformed the natural ecology, blocking the migration of salmon upstream to their historic spawning grounds. Over the next 50 years, the US government would go on to build two smaller dams upstream and drain and destroy upward of 95 percent of Klamath wetlands, the vast majority of them in the basin, to make way for industrial farming and cattle ranching.

Klamath Tribes Chairman William Ray Jr. watched that destruction happen in real time.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” recalls Chairman Ray Jr. “There was a big white barge out on the lake running 24–7, reclaiming all the wetlands, digging them up and destroying them, with no oversight from the state, county or federal government.”

In place of the wetlands, the government built a system of canals, dikes and pumps to reroute water to and from the Upper Klamath Lake. Today, water flows from the lake to farms and back again, carrying runoff that feeds toxic algae blooms. Without wetlands to filter pollution and regulate water flow, and on and off droughts, the lake has shrunk and its waters have turned poisonous. It’s also driven native freshwater species like c’waam and koptu, also called Lost River suckers and shortnosed suckers, to the brink of extinction.

“When I was young, there were millions of c’waam and koptu in the lake. Now, we’re down to fewer than 5,000 [koptu],” said Chairman Ray Jr. “As they disappear, our food sources, our ceremonies and our traditional knowledge disappear with them.”

Look around the basin and the scars show. The land is thirsty; the smell of dying algae hangs in the air, and smoke from nearby fires runs rampant. But despite decades of erasure, the wetlands, just like the history of Chairman Ray Jr.’s people, live close to the surface.

Drive farther into Kurt’s ranch, deep in the sagebrush, and you’ll find a plaque that marks a historic monument. Here, Chairman Ray Jr.’s ancestors were pressured to sign the 1864 treaty with the United States, losing more than 23 million acres of their homelands in exchange for a 1.8-million-acre reservation along the lake and rights to its lands and waters “in perpetuity.” Over the years, the US government broke its legal commitments to the tribes and in 1954 terminated the tribe, dispossessing most members of their land.

“It was devastating,” says Chairman Ray Jr., whose family has managed to hold on to one of the last tribal-member-owned lakeside ranches in the basin. “We’ve never really recovered.”

The Klamath Tribes successfully regained recognition in 1986, but most of their lands—like Kurt’s ranch, purchased by him and his wife in 1981 from a short-lived ranching operation and named “Agency Ranch” after what was previously the Klamath Tribes Agency Headquarters—remain in private hands or federal control. Today, the tribes are left to compete with farmers for what little water is left to preserve their traditional culture, medicine and foods. And despite decades of costly lawsuits, there is still no legal decision on who controls the flow of what water.

But over the past few years, a type of ecological renaissance has taken root in the basin and across the entire watershed. Farmers have largely embraced the potential of wetlands to coexist with agriculture; Klamath River tribes have secured historic land-return deals and developed inter-tribal stewardship groups; and salmon, defying all odds, have made a quick comeback in the mid-Klamath region after the 2024 removal of the four dams downstream. These breakthroughs—backed by decades of organizing, historic regional working groups and more than $200 million in federal restoration investments between 2022 and 2024—signal a new politics of cooperation. Chairman Ray Jr. and Kurt Thomas are part of that story.

Back in 2008, Kurt didn’t want to bring a wetland onto his ranch. But a friend was persistent. She explained how the USDA’s Wetland Reserve Program worked: Landowners could get paid to restore wetlands through conservation easements. At the time, Kurt had three kids to put through college and the weight of a financial recession on his shoulders. He took the cash.

“That moment shifted everything,” says Kurt’s daughter, Kelley Delpit, who now owns and runs the ranch with her siblings. “We realized that you can still run cattle and manage your ranch for restoration. You can fence off riparian areas, convert land to wetlands to filter nutrients and still be a profitable, working ranch. That’s been our model ever since.”

Kurt, who now identifies as part of the basin’s “mossback” generation, has taken it upon himself to introduce other innovative restoration efforts—like laying gravel beds on a creek on his ranch to support the eventual return of spawning salmon. Still, he refuses to take credit for the transformation on the ranch.

“My kids are smarter than me. They see this property as something to steward, not just a way to make a living,” he said. “When I bought it, I thought only about running cattle. This next generation has accepted what we found hard to believe.”

In her day job, Kelley gives tours to local ranchers and farmers and runs listening sessions to connect them with restoration tools, infrastructure and funding like the USDA’s Wetland Reserve Program as part of her role at the nonprofit Sustainable Northwest. Through these sessions alone, she’s implemented $2 million in government funding across 20 restoration efforts and seeded new relationships between landowners and government agencies.

These relationships are emblematic of what Kelley calls a “golden era” of regional working groups across the basin—a handful of networks formed over the past five years that bring landowners, federal agencies, tribes and NGOs in direct conversation and partnership on solutions like riparian and wetland restoration, water quality and reduced water usage.

Large-scale wetland restoration projects have been underway in the basin for years—from The Nature Conservancy’s purchase of a 3,000-acre barley farm in 1996 (Tulana Farms) and the Bureau of Land Management’s acquisition of a 3,200-acre cattle ranch in 1994 (Wood River Wetland), to more recently, Walmart heir Samuel R. Walton’s rapid acquisition of crucial lake-fringe properties.

But what Kelley and Kurt are doing is different. They’re building proof of concept for the basin’s agricultural community. Their goal isn’t to convince anyone to implement wetlands—it’s simply to identify win-win opportunities, find the right funds and tools, and then help implement them from the ground up.

“Walton has the resources to make big leaps by buying important properties from willing sellers. But every smaller project matters too,” said Kelley. “A good experience spreads through word of mouth. That’s how momentum builds.”

Karl Wenner, a “retired” orthopedic surgeon who now runs a 400-acre barley farm on the Upper Klamath Lake’s southeastern edge, is working hard to multiply this momentum. He’s used a mix of restoration easements to create a permanent wetland on his farm, rotate wetlands seasonally on crop fields, and partner with the Klamath Tribes to establish a nursery in his spring-fed pond for juvenile sucker fish, which are too young to survive in the lake’s toxic algae.

“You take a barley field that’s been barley for 90 years, and it’s a freaking crazy wetland in a year,” Karl said, almost in disbelief as he pointed out over a dozen species of waterfowl taking cover in his permanent wetland. “This system wants to go back to what it was.”

Since Karl’s farm borders the lake, his wetlands act as a direct filter between his agricultural operations and the lake. Using a pump system, he directs high-phosphorus wastewater from his agricultural fields into his permanent wetland, where it strips out harmful nutrients and provides habitat and food for birds. Then, as lake levels drop in the drier months, he releases cleaner, fresher water back into the lake.

“Our farm is a microcosm of the whole system,” said Karl. “Apply what’s happening here to the whole system and you start moving the needle on restoration. Then, who’s to say we can’t tackle bigger systems? The San Francisco Bay, the Chesapeake, the Mississippi.”

At Karl’s farm, the vision for restoration is clear. Reintroduce dozens or even hundreds of smaller wetlands across farms and ranches, match that with large-scale projects run by NGOs, philanthropists, federal agencies and tribes, and, bit by bit, connectivity returns. The water becomes cleaner, more evenly distributed and abundant for all the birds, fish, plants and people that live off the land. Each wetland, however small, forms decentralized ecosystems and human relationships, and this redundancy protects the larger system against threats, like drought, disease or even hostile government policies.

While most of the Biden-era funds earmarked for Upper Klamath restoration have been spent or appropriated, some still hang in the balance. The Klamath Tribes, for instance, have waited over a year to receive $3.17 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds to restore major tributaries, like the Sprague and Williamson Rivers. Nonprofits supporting Klamath wetland recovery and related state and federal conservation programs have taken hits from President Trump’s attack on environmental funding, too, and moves to weaken the Clean Water Act could undermine future wetland restoration efforts. Still, in Trump’s first full year back in office, the larger, multi-stakeholder groups and projects in the Upper Klamath have survived.

An under-the-radar project, known as Agency Barnes, is one of the most impressive ones. The $23 million three-phase initiative, run by US Fish and Wildlife in partnership with the Klamath Tribes and Ducks Unlimited, is set to reintroduce 14,000 acres of wetlands in the Upper Klamath Refuge. It’s also the largest freshwater wetland restoration project in the western United States.

The first phase of the project breached a levee that long separated Agency Lake from Upper Klamath Lake in December 2024, just a month before Trump’s inauguration. Funds for phases two and three were frozen, but then released again, and are currently being spent to restore a destroyed channel known as Sevenmile Creek that once fed into the historic wetland. Once restored and reconnected, the Agency Barnes wetland will serve as a massive filter and sponge above Upper Klamath Lake and double the available wetland habitat for c’waam and koptu sucker fish.

“This is the only path I see to save our fish from extinction,” said Chairman Ray Jr., a key collaborator on the project.

When speaking of Agency Barnes, Chairman Ray Jr. is blunt but pragmatic. He worries that without a final court decree to enforce the Tribes’ senior water rights guaranteed by the 1864 treaty, the project could end up favoring irrigation users. At the same time, his goal of re-establishing tribal stewardship is a generations-long fight, one his parents and grandparents laid the groundwork for. So, while not perfect, Agency Barnes is, in Chairman Ray Jr.’s eyes, progress.

“We didn’t create this system,” he told me. “But we have to work within it.”

On my last night in Klamath, I get a view of the newly formed Agency Barnes wetland. But it’s not Chairman Ray Jr. who took me out. It’s Kurt.

“I can’t get you to the water, sweetheart,” Kurt apologizes. The sun’s setting, and we’re about a couple miles north of Kurt’s property, trying to catch sight of the edge of the wetland. There’s a field of cattle to my left and the soon-to-be restored Sevenmile Creek to my right.

“But take a look,” he points to the corner of the valley where the Agency Barnes wetland starts. “On my place, all we did was stop pumping, and the wetland came back. So, my neighbor and I asked Fish and Wildlife: If landowners were interested, could we get flood easements for the Sevenmile Creek?”

That question initiated a 14-year journey for Kurt and his neighbor, John von Schlegell, to secure restoration easements for Sevenmile Creek.

Though most of the Agency Barnes units span federal land, Kurt and John knew the reformation of the wetland would not be viable without restoring this historic creek, which happened to intersect with three of their other neighbors’ properties. So, with a humble request in mind, they approached their neighbors. One was happy to sign an easement, another sold their property to The Nature Conservancy, which then secured an easement, and the third sold to Kurt and John—land we now found ourselves on.

As I stood there with Kurt, I thought of something Chairman Ray Jr. told me.

We have to work with as many groups as possible. Because without these wetlands, our culture doesn’t survive.

I look to Kurt and I see: It’s the unseen threads that tie people like him and Chairman Ray Jr. together that make this ecological renaissance possible. Kurt doesn’t know Chairman Ray Jr., and Chairman Ray Jr. doesn’t know him. Yet, with their belief in the basin, they’ve planted the seeds for something far bigger than either of them could alone.

Months later, I get news that no one—not Kurt, Kelley, Karl or Chairman Ray Jr.—had truly expected. Hundreds of Chinook salmon jumped past the fish ladders at the last two dams below the Upper Klamath Lake, swam through the lake and found shelter in the river’s tributaries to spawn.

“We’ve been fighting to bring these relatives home for over a century,” Chairman Ray Jr. said on a call in November. “So, for these c’iyalls [salmon] to traverse two impediments and toxic water to return home in less than two years after the removal of the dams downstream—it’s a blessing.”

Across the pond, a flawless finale: One of those Chinook salmon found her way to Crooked Creek on Kurt’s Agency Ranch to lay redd on gravel beds the rancher created decades before—all in anticipation of her eventual return.

Hanging up with Chairman Ray Jr., I ask him to reflect on how far the basin has come since he saw the wetlands destroyed as a young boy. He thinks for a moment, then answers with resolve.

“There’s a new wave of people who want a different path. They’re tired of courtroom battles and want real solutions. That gives me hope.”