“The objective of this wasn’t so much to necessarily find solutions or change the design of the fish ladder, its real focus was to provide an evaluation as to how well the fish ladder is working,” Twardek said.

The results of Twardek’s study haven’t been published yet, but he is sharing preliminary results with the community.

Chinook are considered strong swimmers, but the salmon in the Yukon River already work very hard to get to the fish ladder. Entering the river in Alaska, the salmon travel nearly 3,000 kilometres to get to their home spawning sites, making it one of the longest inland salmon migrations on earth.