“We knew that fish diseases practically wiped out juvenile populations in recent years,” said Nat Pennington, a board member of the Salmon River Restoration Council and the Klamath Riverkeeper. “Still it’s a shockingly low number of spring salmon.”

There has only been one time, in 2005, when fewer fish were counted: divers only managed to count 90 fish that year. Historically, hundreds of thousands of fish made the run from the Pacific Ocean upstream into the Salmon River, a 20-mile tributary of the much larger Klamath River that winds through Siskiyou County.