Winter-run Chinook salmon returned to the McCloud River in 2022 for the first time in more than 80 years. The state helped put them there. Now it says it’s done paying for the effort.
The Winnemem Wintu Tribe, whose members have called the McCloud River home for generations and who consider the winter-run Chinook a sacred species, is now grappling with the loss of state funding and the jobs that came with it. Tribe officials say California ended its financial support with little warning, leaving a restoration program in jeopardy at exactly the moment it needed to scale up.
“It makes me feel betrayed. It makes the tribe feel betrayed,” said Gary Mulcahy, government liaison for the Winnemem Wintu. “It’s like they just gave up.”
The Problem the Fish Were Trying to Solve
To understand what’s at stake, you need to know where winter-run Chinook actually live today, and why that’s a problem.
Shasta Dam, completed in 1945, blocked the fish from reaching the cold, high-elevation spawning grounds on the McCloud and other rivers where they evolved. That forced them downstream into the Sacramento River, water that gets warm enough in dry years to kill eggs outright. Federal scientists classify the Sacramento’s winter-run Chinook as “one of the most at-risk endangered species” currently tracked.
The situation creates a secondary problem. Keeping Sacramento River water cold enough to protect the salmon means restricting how much water federal managers can release from Lake Shasta for irrigation. Central Valley farmers and endangered fish are competing for the same cold-water pool, and the fish have been losing that competition for decades.
Carson Jeffres, a senior researcher at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, put the risk plainly. “We are forcing the fish to be in places where they never were historically,” he said. “When we have all those eggs in one basket, you are one really warm event from losing that cohort of fish.”
The drought years of the early 2020s proved him right. Warm water decimated salmon egg survival, triggering emergency intervention before any formal plan existed.
What the State Built, Then Walked Away From
In 2022, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife partnered with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe and federal fisheries agencies to relocate endangered salmon eggs from the hatchery below Shasta Dam to the spring-fed, cold upper McCloud River. The eggs hatched. The fish swam in water their ancestors had used before the dam cut them off.
A year later, state and federal agencies formalized the partnership, naming the tribe as a “co-equal decision-maker.” Governor Gavin Newsom spotlighted the collaboration as a centerpiece of his salmon recovery strategy.
The program employed tribal members, built institutional knowledge within the tribe, and established monitoring infrastructure on the McCloud. It was, by any reasonable measure, early-stage work. Salmon restoration operates on the timescale of the fish themselves, which take years to reach spawning age.
Now the state says the money is gone.
“The pilot was designed to take urgent action during severe drought conditions while testing key tools and approaches needed for potential long-term reintroduction,” California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Stephen Gonzalez said in a statement. The funds, the agency explained, were tied to the state’s drought emergency response and were never meant to be permanent.
One-Time Money for a Multi-Decade Problem
That explanation points to a structural mismatch between how California funds environmental programs and how ecological restoration actually works.
Drought emergency funds are allocated for crisis response. They move fast and get results quickly, which is politically useful. But salmon reintroduction requires sustained, multi-year investment. The fish need multiple seasons of monitoring. Hatchery protocols need refinement. Tribal staff need to build technical capacity that doesn’t evaporate when a single grant cycle ends.
This article draws on reporting from CalMatters.
The McCloud program checked every box that a state environmental initiative is supposed to check. Tribal co-management. Cold water access above the dam. A specific, measurable goal. Federal partnership. Newsom announced it at the kind of press event that generates favorable coverage and commitments. Two years later, tribal officials are describing the experience as betrayal.
California’s broader salmon strategy is still formally in place. The state has committed, at least on paper, to long-term recovery goals for several salmon populations. But goals without funding mechanisms are just statements. The Winnemem Wintu’s situation illustrates the gap between announcing a partnership and sustaining one through the years of unglamorous work that follow the ribbon-cutting.
What Losing This Costs
The McCloud River remains one of the few places in the watershed with consistently cold water capable of supporting winter-run Chinook through summer. That’s not a trivial asset. As climate change pushes average temperatures higher and drought years become more frequent, cold-water refuges become more valuable, not less.
Jeffres’s warning about eggs in one basket applies with particular force in 2026. The Sacramento River population faces the same warm-water risks it always has. The McCloud program was, in part, a hedge against catastrophic loss of the Sacramento cohort. Letting it lapse doesn’t eliminate that risk. It just stops addressing it.
The Winnemem Wintu Tribe is now looking for alternative funding sources to continue the work. Whether federal agencies step in, or whether a new state appropriation materializes, is unclear. What is clear is that 80 years passed before the fish returned to the McCloud River, and the window to keep them there is open right now.