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In today’s world of satellite cell cams and manicured hunting leases, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the 200-plus-inch non-typical whitetail recently taken by Mike Reitz had been patterned, nicknamed, and meticulously hunted. But Reitz says that’s far from the case.

“I had no idea the deer existed until five minutes before I shot him,” Reitz tells Outdoor Life. “I don’t even put out trail cameras any more.”

On Nov. 16, his last opportunity to hunt before Wisconsin’s gun opener, Reitz was out to bust an unlucky streak with his bow, planning to take the first legal buck he saw. He made his way to a property in Dunn County, which he’d only hunted twice before. He built a brush blind and waited.

After spooking a forky early in the afternoon, Reitz saw a group of eight does appear on the trail behind him.

“The wind was blowing straight at them,” Reitz says. “They all started putting their noses in the air and most of them ran off up a ridge, but for whatever reason, one fawn started walking right toward me.”

Reitz decided to record the fawn on his phone when one of the larger does barreled back down the hill, stopping directly behind him at 30 yards.

Reitz could only glance to the limits of his peripheral vision as he heard a buck approaching from his seven o’clock—the same direction where the does had winded him from minutes earlier. As the buck passed through the brush, all Reitz could make out was antlers moving toward the fawn that he had been trying to video.

When Reitz was sure the buck’s vision was obscured by the brush, he decided to risk spooking the doe. He grabbed his bow, and turned to face the buck.

“She didn’t spook, but all of the sudden here comes this other buck running right down at her,” Reitz says. “The first buck sees him and they just start snort wheezing at each other. It was wild.”

Eventually, the confrontation ended and the doe finally took off. That’s when Reitz realized the stars were aligning; the buck was going to follow her directly by his blind, and the shot was going to be close. Really close.

“I drew on him as he was coming past a tree and into a little lane. It was like it was meant to be. He popped out from behind the tree at five yards, slightly quartering away.”

Wielding a second-hand, 20-year-old PSE, Reitz made a good shot on the buck. Still, he decided to give the buck plenty of time before finally approaching.

“I called my brother-in-law Danny when I finally walked up to it,” Reitz says. “I thought it was an eight or ten pointer or something right until I started counting the tines. I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘Danny, I think I just shot an 18-pointer.’”

The buck was later rough scored by Pope and Young Ethic magazine editor and co-founder Steven Ashley. It green-scored 212 and 4/8 inches gross nontypical. Although the buck was unknown to Reitz until their encounter, the deer became somewhat of a local legend when its record-book shed antlers, nicknamed the Hardy Sheds, were found in 2022 about five miles from where Reitz later killed it. According to Reitz, that set of antlers scored 236 inches even. Without counting the spread, the sheds scored 219 7/8 inches, according to a video uploaded last year. The sheds are shown to have 28 scorable points, with 18 on the right side, and 10 on the left. It was quite possibly the biggest pair of shed antlers found in the state last year.

Reitz mentioned people around town were happy the buck was taken by a local, although plenty of people tell him he’ll probably never see a buck of this caliber again.

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“Well, I shot a buck that scored pretty good a couple years ago, and they said the same thing about that one, too. You just never know.”

Authorities in central Minnesota are investigating a bizarre crime that involved a tree stand, a damaged hardwood, and a thief who’s dumber than your average vandal. The crime was summarized in a Nov. 14 report from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

Judging from the evidence at the scene, conservation officers believe the suspect was attempting to steal a tree stand that was set up on public land in Crow Wing County. Because the stand was locked to the tree, the suspect used a chainsaw to try and take the whole kit and caboodle. As they cut into the trunk, however, the weight of the falling tree compressed on the bar of their chainsaw, pinching it solidly in place. The suspect was then forced to leave their saw in the tree, where it was eventually found by the hunter who owned the stand.

“The morning hunt was ruined for the tree stand owner,” the DNR reports, “and the county sheriff’s office is investigating the theft attempt.”

The Crow Wing County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and the status of their investigation remains unclear. It’s also unknown if there was any photographic or video evidence of the attempted theft. Trail cameras are legal on public land in Minnesota, but if there were any cameras in the immediate area, chances are slim they were pointed toward the tree stand.

If the tree-cutting suspect is identified, they’ll likely be charged with attempted theft as well as hunter harassment, which is a misdemeanor in Minnesota punishable by a $375 fine.

The fine seems a little light-handed in this instance, however, since messing with someone’s tree stand can have disastrous (and even fatal) consequences. Besides, the thief could buy a new gas-powered chainsaw for less than that, and they’d still have some money left over for a few felling wedges—which, if used properly, would have kept their saw from getting pinched in the first place.

The fact that the hunter went through the trouble of locking their stand to the tree also suggests that stealing and sabotaging tree stands is becoming more of a regular occurrence in the deer woods. This is confirmed in other media reports, and several hunting forums have entire threads devoted to it.

Sadly, the most recent incident is another reminder that there are plenty of dishonest thieves out there. And plenty of dumb ones, too.

A social media influencer who calls himself “Mr. Adventure” has been accused of illegally killing three bears in the Yukon. Court documents released last week allege that Tristan James Hamm lied to obtain his Yukon resident hunting license and then killed several bears in the province illegally, according to CBC News. Hamm now faces 19 charges for breaking both federal and territorial wildlife laws.

The 28-year-old influencer and CEO of Revived Outdoors has built an audience of more than 2 million followers on Instagram by posting about his exploits in the outdoors. Most of those posts feature Hamm rock-climbing, boxing, skydiving, and engaging in other extreme sports besides hunting. He made his account private, however, shortly after the recent poaching allegations went public.

The charges filed against Hamm stem from a trip he took to the Yukon in May. Court documents allege that he illegally killed two black bears—one on Bove Island and the other at Dry Creek—on May 17 and 19. He’s also been accused of illegally killing a grizzly bear near Kluane Lake on May 21.

Hamm faces additional charges related to exporting the bears’ remains (presumably the hides and skulls) outside the country, and for providing false or misleading information to obtain a Yukon resident hunting license. It’s unclear if Hamm broke additional laws when harvesting any of the three bears he killed in May.

President of the Yukon Fish and Game Association Bryce Bekar told CBC that he was troubled by the charges filed against Hamm—particularly the allegation that he lied to get a resident hunting license.

“We’re kinda lost for words. We all understand how difficult it is to get a license and become registered with the Yukon Department of Environment,” Bekar told the Canadian outlet. “It just doesn’t look good for all of us that are really trying to do the best we can and promote ethical and responsible harvesting.”

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According to Hamm’s Facebook profile, the self-described “adventure connoisseur” lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, but is originally from Manitoba. A local newspaper article from 2021 refers to Haam as a “former Winkler resident.” The city lies southwest of Winnipeg, and it’s a roughly 2,080-mile drive from Winkler to Whitehorse.

Hamm was not taken into custody, and his case in Yukon territorial court is slated for January, according to the CBC. In his emailed statement, Hamm added that he was “deeply saddened” by the charges brought against him, but that he was advised by his lawyers not to discuss the specifics of the situation.

Chase Mortenson of Madison, Minnesota killed an extraordinarily rare whitetail buck on his uncle’s property in Granite Falls on Sunday. The deer has since been dubbed the “unicorn buck” for the third beam protruding from its forehead.

Mortenson took to Facebook to share a photo of the unusual buck. Its heavy main beams sprout five tines on its right side and three on its left. The third beam is nearly as thick as the other two, and it forks into two equal-sized tines.

Mortenson was hunting from a tree stand when he took the shot, the Learfield Wire Service reported. He initially thought he missed the buck, but then found it just 20 yards from his stand. Sunday was the last day of Minnesota’s rifle deer season and the second day of muzzleloader season, although it isn’t clear whether Mortenson was hunting with a rifle or a muzzleloader. He did not immediately respond to request for comment.

His Facebook post received lots of support and warm wishes from friends, including one commenter who posted a video of the buck walking through what looks like a parking area near a power line in broad daylight. The angle shows how the third pedicle is wedged between the buck’s eyes, warping the left eye socket.

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Some triple-beamed bucks result from a prior year’s antler not shedding and the new one growing up underneath it. But why an antler would grow out of a whitetail’s face, inches away from the two main beams, is less clear. The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources gives some explanation, pointing out that a buck’s hormones will allow it grow antlers wherever a pedicle can take root.

“The most interesting aspect of this antler growth tissue is that, if it is surgically removed and grafted to another part of the deer’s body, it will grow there,” the Virginia DWR writes. “For example, it would be possible to surgically produce a unicorn deer or a deer with 10 antlers growing out of its skull or any other part of the body.”

On a hillside above the Salmon River, Kyle Smith, his setter, and I stood there and panted. Still catching our breath from the climb, we looked down to see a fish break the water’s surface. The big Chinook rolled in a deep pool, a fine place to rest during her long trip home from the Pacific. Swimming more than 500 miles up the Columbia and Snake Rivers before taking a left up the Salmon, this fish dodged predators, avoided gillnets, and fought through walls of concrete to carry the next generation upstream.

We were pulled away from the scene when Sadie got birdy, and we followed her down a steep slope through broken basalt and cheatgrass. The dog went on point, a covey flushed downhill, and Smith dropped a chukar out of the sky.

Back at the water’s edge, we traded shotguns for fishing rods and hopped into drift boats. The guides rowed down to where the fish had rolled and we tossed out our plugs, using the boats to pull them back and forth across the pool. Minutes later, Smith hooked a fish. He landed the 12-pound hen in the shallows, her silvery sides reflecting a tinge of maroon in the sunlight.

It was the heaviest fish we caught during our week-long float down the Salmon, but her value couldn’t be measured in poundage alone. She’s a symbol of what we’ve lost and everything we stand to regain. Because although this river still holds some of its namesake fish, its once prolific runs of wild salmon and steelhead are on life support.

Historically, out of the roughly 10 to 16 million fish that would return to the Columbia River Basin each year, over 2 million would swim up the Snake and its tributaries to spawn. This included sockeye salmon, coho (or silver) salmon, Chinook (or king) salmon, and steelhead (a rainbow trout that migrates to the ocean and back).

Today, these fish are returning at less than two percent of their historical abundance as their ancestral migration route is choked by four aging dams that are getting harder and harder to justify. Every one of the anadromous fish stocks native to the watershed is now endangered or threatened, while some runs have collapsed altogether.

These hardy sea-goers are suffering on a global scale, but the fish that return to the Snake River Basin are in a unique position to be recovered. All they need is their river back.

Down in the Canyon

On a starry night in late September, after going one for two on steelhead that day, we sat around a campfire near the mouth of Billy Creek. Our group might have seemed an odd cast of characters anywhere else. But on this particular beach, it was only natural for a trial lawyer, a photographer, a country and Western drummer, a writer, a city councilman, a campaign organizer, a young river guide, and a 72-year-old ski bum to share camp. Our cups full and our bellies stretched, we wiggled our toes in the sugar sand while bull elk bugled on the ridge tops.

Across the fire from me sat Roy Akins, the veteran guide who led our crew down the river his life revolves around. He read aloud from a book of poems written by an old fisherman.

…Lookin’ back on it feels like so long now,
I did good for havin’ no plan.
Well I’ve got it made and I’ll never trade
The life of a Riverman…

A sportsman with a ponytail and a mystical side, Akins was cut from the same cloth as the legendary boatmen who pioneered these runs in wooden dories. He names all his favorite lures and has a keen eye for agates, which he carries around in his pockets. The creases on his face are from squinting into the sun and sleeping in the rain, but the deepest lines seem carved by laughter.

Over the course of our float down the Salmon, Akins shared most everything he knew about the river’s past and the pains of its present. Every stretch held a story. Early in our journey, we anchored our boats at Big Rock Creek, which has what’s arguably the longest tale.

Now the site of Cooper’s Ferry, this side canyon was home to an ancient village of the Nez Perce, who call themselves the Nimiipuu, or “the people.” It’s now considered the oldest human-inhabited site in the Americas, and the most recent archaeological dig determined people have lived on this stretch of the Salmon for at least 16,000 years.

The culture that flourished here was built around the first foods that sustained it. Chief among these were the salmon, which gave themselves to the people as they returned to the river each year to spawn and die. In completing their lifecycle, these fat, oily fish fed not only humans, but every other being in the river corridor, too.

“The Nez Perce Tribe, Nimiipuu,” says Nez Perce tribal chairman Shannon Wheeler, “has a cultural and spiritual connection to the land, water and nàcox—the salmon.”

The Case for Breaching the Snake River Dams

The Columbia River system was once the most productive salmon and steelhead fishery in the world. This included not only the Big River, but also the hundreds of tributary streams that form a giant basin encompassing most of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, along with parts of British Columbia, Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana. The mightiest of these tributaries, in terms of the volume of water and salmon it carried, was the Snake.

The Snake River’s spring and summer Chinook run, for example, used to number around 1 million wild fish annually. This year, fisheries managers are estimating a return of around 7,500. And if their most dire predictions come true, these fish could wink out within the next 20 years.

Human intervention is mostly to blame. First, we caught, killed, and canned too many. Commercial fishing boomed on the Columbia River during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when salmon harvests peaked at around 42 million pounds per year. By the time the first federal dam was built in 1938, engineers and government officials had convinced themselves that with enough human engineering, we could have salmon and steelhead without rivers.

The more than 470 dams that were built on the Columbia, Snake, and their tributaries have cut off access to more than half of the spawning habitat that once existed there. The upper third of the Columbia is now devoid of migratory fish, and a wild salmon hasn’t been seen in Nevada waters since the 1930s.

The best remaining habitat is found on the high-elevation, cold-water streams like the Salmon that pour into the Snake. As we look toward a warmer future, fisheries biologists see these free-flowing rivers as the last stronghold for anadromous fish in the lower 48.

Standing between the Pacific Ocean and this salmon Shangri-lah are eight large dams controlled by the federal government—four of which were built on the lower Snake River in eastern Washington during the 1960s and 70s. And the declines in fish returns we’ve seen over the last half century have proven that eight dams are just four too many.

“The negative impacts of [federal] dams and their reservoirs on salmon survival are clear and unequivocal,” wrote 68 leading fisheries scientists in 2021. “The survival problems of various ESA-listed salmon and steelhead species in the Columbia Basin cannot be solved without removing four dams on the Lower Snake River. These four dams must be removed to not only avoid extinction, but also to restore abundant salmon runs.”

A report issued by NOAA Fisheries last year echoes these conclusions. The authors refer to dam breaching as the “centerpiece action” in restoring Snake River fish stocks, and they call “for bold and immediate action.”

Removing the dams won’t solve all their problems, as the myriad factors plaguing Pacific salmonids extend beyond their home rivers. Poor ocean conditions are also impacting fish populations, and one researcher contends that until we can fully diagnose problems in the Pacific, breaching the Snake River dams should be a secondary concern.

“It’s a problem of poor marine survival. The problems caused by the dams are small compared to the very large declines in ocean survival that nobody knows how to address,” says CEO of Kintama Research David Welch. “The question now is: If you take the dams out, is the productivity of those populations going to go up the way proponents want? And my answer is: I don’t believe so.”

Many experts struggle with Welch’s conclusions, pointing out that his 2020 study on coast-wide declines was funded by the same behemoth utility company that benefits the most from the Lower Four Dams. (Welch acknowledges this and stands by his findings, which he says were not influenced by his funding.) Other scientists don’t doubt that ocean conditions are having serious effects on fish, but they also believe that the best way to keep populations viable is by pulling the levers under our control.

Freeing the Lower Snake would benefit more than just the fish: It would expose the roughly 14,000 acres of big-game and bird habitat that’s now underwater—most of which would be public land. It would also restore around 140 river miles, uncovering whitewater rapids and cultural sites, and effectively re-opening one of the West’s most accessible float trips.

A Moral Dilemma in Dam Breaching

As the calls for dam breaching have turned to shouts, the campaign has been championed by a growing army of anglers, hunters, river runners, tribes, and conservation groups.

“Those of us who hunt and fish, we consider ourselves to be resilient and resourceful,” says Liz Hamilton, executive director of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association. “And I don’t think anything says ‘resilience’ like a creature that goes out 600 to 900 miles to the ocean, finds its way back, and then gives itself up for the next generation to succeed. It’s a moral issue, for those of us who live the hunting and fishing life, to allow an [Idaho] steelhead or a spring Chinook to go extinct.”

This dilemma is also a political one. The Lower Four Snake River Dams are federally owned and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which means that breaching them would require an act of Congress. And since the dams provide several benefits to our modern, energy-hungry society, the notion of dam-busting pits fish and river advocates against the dam’s supporters.

These include the farmers who ship their wheat in barges down the Snake, and the growers who irrigate with water pulled from the reservoirs. But the loudest (and wealthiest) voice representing the pro-dam crowd is the Bonneville Power Administration, which purchases the hydroelectric power that’s generated by the four dams. This accounts for roughly 1,000 megawatts in a normal year, or roughly 4 percent of all the electricity generated in the Pacific Northwest.

As the executive director for Northwest River Partners, Kurt Miller advocates for the region’s community-owned utilities, which get most of their electricity from hydroelectric dams. He says the electricity generated by the Lower Four Snake River Dams helps stabilize the power grid, and points to research that warns against sacrificing any of our renewable energy sources.

“If you’re really serious about achieving a decarbonized grid, then you need to keep your hydropower resources,” Miller says. “And decarbonization laws have made it so that the Lower Four Snake River Dams are essential to meeting those goals.”

The pro-breaching crowd says otherwise—and that concerns around grid reliability have typically been blown out of proportion by those who profit or otherwise benefit from the dams. They also point out that the proposal for breaching would replace every benefit provided by the structures before they’re removed.

For irrigators, this would mean renovating their systems so they could reach a free-flowing Snake. Meanwhile, the grain growers who’ve benefited from subsidized barging in recent decades would rely on trains and trucks to ship their harvests, just as their neighbors do elsewhere in the inland Northwest. Replacing the dams’ electricity with other renewable sources will take effort, but we’re already well on our way. Batteries are getting more affordable, and investor-owned utilities in the region are planning to bring 10,000 megawatts worth of wind and solar projects into the grid by 2030, according to a report from the Northwest Energy Coalition.

“The fact is that we can replace every single social and economic benefit provided by the Lower Four Snake River Dams,” says Trout Unlimited CEO Chris Wood. “We can replace the power, we can replace the water, we can replace the transportation, we can replace all those benefits. Except the fish need a river. They just need a river.”

Itching to Catch a Steelhead

After studying the long, glassy run below our first night’s camp, a few of us just had to swing flies through it. We grabbed two-handed rods and followed each other down the inside bend, working the run from top to bottom with nary a tug. As we shed our waders back at the tents, Akins, a devoted plug puller, told us we’d be able to fish the run “properly” before we left the following day.

“Besides, fish laugh at flies,” he added with a smile.

In the morning, Akins’ right-hand guide Ben Brault rowed us through the meat of the tailout. As he pulled on the oars to keep the plugs working, I watched the rod tips twitch and bounce and fought my own internal battle between hopefulness and fishless despair. Then it happened.

I heard the reel’s clicker scream before I saw the rod go down, and I fought the urge to set the hook as I reeled tight to the fish. Way out in front of the boat, the steelhead jumped twice as it took off running for the rapid below. Brault hauled on the oars while I pulled sideways on the rod, and we turned the fish back upriver.

When we eventually brought it to the net, I saw the fish was slightly colored up from the time it had already spent in fresh water. It wasn’t one of the giant B-run steelies that Idaho rivers are famous for, and it had a clipped adipose fin, which told us it was a hatchery fish and not a wild one.

But it was still a steelhead—the first I’d caught in years and Brault’s first of the season. As I held the fish and looked into its wandering eye, I felt I’d been given a rare and remarkable gift.

Covenants, Treaties, and Broken Promises

The government officials who green-lit the construction of four dams along the lower Snake were keenly aware of the connection that indigenous peoples had with Pacific salmon. They also suspected the dams might impact the agreement they made with the tribes more than a century prior.

This agreement, known as the Treaty of 1855, required the Nez Perce and other sovereign nations to cede millions of acres to the U.S. government under the sole condition that they would retain the rights to hunt and fish in “their usual and accustomed places.” Those rights were severely eroded, however, when the government’s dams went in, burying some of their favorite fishing holes underneath 40 feet of water.

“Preserving and restoring the salmon population is a high priority for our people, to ensure the survival of not only our culture, but our identity and way of life,” chairman Wheeler says. “It is our ancient covenant to the salmon that gave up so much for us.”

It’s now been 48 years since we severed Idaho’s connection to the Pacific by completing the last of the Lower Four Snake River Dams. As we’ve watched these fish disappear, we’ve paid a fortune to compensate for the dams’ interference.

Tribes and government agencies have built hatcheries to compensate for the loss of wild fish, but these facilities have largely failed to meet their goals. The dam’s operators have also tried replacing the river’s current with buckets, trucks, pipes, and barges. After going through countless lawsuits and spending $17 billion in taxpayer dollars, these mitigation efforts haven’t been enough to stem population declines.

That’s because the dams harm migratory fish in several ways. Fish ladders help the adults jump the hurdles, but they aren’t 100 percent effective, and the big, spinning turbines occasionally turn some juveniles into mincemeat. They’ve also decimated stocks of less glamorous native fish like Pacific lamprey and white sturgeon, which are unable to pass through the fish ladders.

But it’s not just the dams that kill fish. The real killers are the slackwater reservoirs backed up behind them.

Sea-going salmonids are most vulnerable when they make their downriver trip to the ocean—known as the outmigration. In the pre-dam era, their springtime journey from the Idaho border to the Columbia River estuary would take about two to four days, according to Jay Hesse, a researcher and fisheries manager for the Nez Perce Tribe who’s spent the last five years studying the relationship between dams and salmon. It now takes juvenile fish between 10 and 30 days to make the trip, he says.

“Now, out of that stretch that’s 465 miles long, 324 miles of it are impounded reservoirs, so it’s no longer a free-flowing river,” Hesse explains. “Think about it this way. If you’re starting a road trip and you think it’s going to be a three-day trip, but it takes you 30, you’re not gonna have enough gas in the tank to make it.”

The 324-mile slog has become even more perilous as the sluggish reservoirs have warmed. This brings an influx of warm-water species like smallmouth bass and walleye to the lakes, where they form chow lines and feast on smolts. Terns, cormorants, and other birds take advantage as well, dive-bombing the fish from above.

The Sockeye Swim

Akins knows all about this hellish journey. After all, he’s one of the only people who’s experienced it firsthand.

Born one year after the last of the Lower Four Dams went in, Akins never got to see a free-flowing Snake. What he did witness during his formative years were the huge declines in fish numbers across his home state. These crashes peaked during the early 1990s and were embodied by the tale of Lonesome Larry, the only sockeye that returned to Redfish Lake in 1992.

At that time, most people blamed everything but the dams for flagging salmon runs. They pointed to poor habitat in headwater streams and commercial boats along the coast. Others, like Akins, couldn’t see how the dams weren’t having an effect.

“Us guys who love the river, we wanted to try and help spread the word because we felt that there was a smokescreen,” Akins says. “We truly believed there was more to the story, and it didn’t take much research to figure out that the Lower Four Dams were killing a huge percentage of our outmigrating smolts every year.”

To prove their point, Akins and three friends decided to imitate the outmigration by swimming all the way from the Salmon River headwaters through Lower Granite, the uppermost of the four dams. On July 1, 1995, the men started their 580-mile relay swim from Redfish Lake Creek to Lewiston. It would take them 31 days to complete.

“When we started, life was pretty easy on the Salmon River. We made incredible mileage, up to 28 miles a day. We had to swim in some of the really nasty rapids, but other than that it was easy traveling. At times we just floated on our backs and rode the current,” Akins recalls. “But when we hit that dead water above Lower Granite, boy, everything changed. We had to freestyle swim with the wind in our face, with the waves hitting our biceps every time we threw our arms forward.

“It was the stench that stuck with us the most, from all the toxins backed up behind the reservoir,” he says. “It smelled like death.”

Along the way, the swimmers and their support crew would stop in towns to hand out pamphlets. But the wet, bearded men were seen as “radical environmentalists,” and Akins remembers being waked by power boats as they struggled through the lake.

By the time they reached Lower Granite, however, they’d been joined by the Nez Perce, who ran alongside in dugout canoes and jetboats, cheering them on. Somehow, the swimmers convinced the Corps of Engineers to let them pass through the dam’s lock as long as they stayed with the tribe’s boats.

“The Corps guys said, ‘All right, you can stay in the water, but you have to be holding onto a boat with both hands.’ Which was great advice, because it about ripped our britches off when they dropped that lock,” Akins laughs. “But being with the tribe as they sang their prayers for the fish and beat on those drums. It gave us the sensation that the whole damn thing might come crumbling down while we were going through it.”

Turning the Slow Wheels of Congress

In the years since Akins’ epic swim, the campaign to breach the dams has moved along in fits and starts. There’s still a stigma of radical environmentalism that’s tied to dam-busting. And since the dams are located in rural, deeply red voting districts, it’s traditionally been a political non-starter.

That all changed in 2021, when a conservative senator from eastern Idaho announced his support for dam breaching. Sen. Mike Simpson (R-ID) was one of the last politicians anybody expected to back the idea, and his announcement jump-started a conversation.

“My staff and I approached this challenge with the idea that there must be a way to restore Idaho’s salmon and keep the Lower Four Snake River Dams,” Simpson says in a video explaining his Columbia Basin Initiative. “But in the end, we realized there is no viable path that can allow us to keep the dams in place.”

His $33 billion plan would give farmers, bargers, ports, the Bonneville Power Administration, and local communities the resources to make the transition while ending decades of ongoing litigation.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) followed with their own recommendation, which says “the status quo is not a responsible option.” Even more recently, the Biden Administration has thrown its weight behind the issue, acknowledging what river advocates have said all along: that federal dams on the lower Snake have “severely depleted fish populations” and undermined the core promises guaranteed in the Treaty of 1855.

To understand the benefits of dam breaching, consider Washington’s Elwha River. When the river’s two dams were removed in 2011, it was the biggest project of its kind in U.S. history. In the 12 years since, wild salmon and steelhead have returned there in higher numbers (and more quickly) than most people expected. This year, the Klallam Tribe held its first salmon season on the river in more than 100 years.

Proof That Dam Breaching Works

“We know the fish will come back,” Wood says. “Steelhead were functionally extinct [in the Elwha] for 106 years. And a couple years ago, we had a couple of our scientists go up and snorkel the stream. They found 600 spawning pairs of steelhead. So, the rainbow trout in the headwaters, they recovered their anadromy. They remembered.”

Director of government affairs for the Wild Salmon Center Jess Helsley says there’s no reason to believe that breaching the Snake River dams wouldn’t have similar effects.

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“These fish are proving to us time and time again that if we just simply give them the opportunity to go back to their home waters, they’re going to do it,” she says. “It harkens back to the tenacity of these fish. They’re displaying the same sort of drive and leadership that we need to see in the members of Congress right now.”

The other politicians representing the people and resources of the Northwest have mostly avoided taking a stance on the issue, however. Wood says “their silence has been deafening.”

Perhaps this is because they’ve never experienced the Salmon River in the fall, when the hills are alive with game and fish are rolling in the current.

On the final leg of our trip, near the confluence with the Snake, we passed through a narrow stretch called Blue Canyon. Sitting in the bow of Akins’ boat, I got to thinking about the only concrete barrier that’s ever plugged the Salmon.

Sunbeam Dam was built by a mining company in 1910 on the upper river near Stanley. The company went broke within a year, but the derelict dam stayed and blocked all fish passage for the next 20 years or so. This blockage was cleared in 1933, when the dam was blown up at night by parties unknown. Although the story behind Sunbeam remains one of Idaho’s greater mysteries, most believe the dam-busters were local fishermen.

As we drifted between the towering walls of Blue Canyon, I could hear the echo of water running freely over rock. It sounded just like a river should.

A correction was made on Nov. 29, 2023: A previous version of this article mischaracterized the location of the former Sunbeam Dam. It was built near Stanley and not on the lower river.

For the last few years, Dalton Hiltibrand has been watching the same giant buck on an 80-acre parcel of private land in Nemaha County in northeast Kansas. Trail camera photos going back to 2020 showed that the huge, double drop-tine buck, nicknamed “Paraglider,” would regularly move off the property and onto other nearby farms.

“This year he showed up again in August,” Hilitibrand tells Outdoor Life. “But we only had a few photos of him during the day and night.”

On Nov. 15, Hiltibrand decided it was about time to make his move. With some help from his good friend Loren Henry and Henry’s two sons, they hung a lock-on stand in an evergreen tree near a spot where the buck had been photographed in previous years. The cellular cams captured photos of the giant buck over the next two days.

“I checked my phone the morning of Nov. 17, and there he was, and I knew I’d better try him at the stand that evening,” says the 25-year-old bowhunter from Seneca, Kansas. “A little cool front had come through, and it looked good for hunting, so I got up in the tree stand around 2 p.m.”

He’d only been up in the stand for about 20 minutes when he started seeing does. They were going back and forth between a rye field and a nearby bedding area with thick cover.

Then, a 10-point buck appeared. It walked within 40 yards of Hiltibrand before it started chasing does. Around 4:15 p.m., he heard a buck grunting from a different direction, and then he spotted a doe walking toward the sound. Hiltibrand watched the doe closely as the giant, double drop-tine buck finally showed itself.

“That’s when the smaller 10-point buck spotted the doe in the ditch and he started chasing her,” Hiltibrand said. “The bigger buck bristled up, snort wheezed, and the big buck started after the doe, too.”

The bucks ran the doe about 300 yards away from Hiltibrand. The doe then circled back and came directly toward Hiltibrand with “Paraglider” right on her tail. The doe passed in front of him, and the buck stepped into his shooting lane from 23 yards away.

At 4:50 p.m., Hiltibrand drew his compound bow and released, sending a 100-grain expandable broadhead into the buck’s chest.

“I saw the arrow hit him, and knew it was a good shot, passing almost completely through the deer,” he says. “He ran to a grassy area and laid down. I tried looking for him through binoculars, but I was shaking too much to get a really good view.”

Hiltibrand quietly eased out of his tree stand and headed home. He called his friend Henry, then his father Mike and three brothers to let them know he’d made a good shot on the buck they all knew he was hunting.

They met at Hiltibrand’s house, where they watched some football while they waited for the buck to expire. Four hours later, they went back to the tree stand to track the buck. They found a blood trail right away.

“We followed the blood trail right to where I saw him in the grass, and he never moved, he was right there, dead,” Hiltibrand says.

The group loaded the massive buck into a truck and took it to Hiltibrand’s house. Once there, they compared its rack with some shed antlers they’d found last February and concluded they were from the same buck. They’d found the sheds roughly 70 yards away from where Hiltibrand shot the buck on Nov. 17.

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Hiltibrand’s giant buck had an estimated live weight of 250 pounds. A local taxidermist gave it an unofficial green score of 235 inches.

“He’d broken off a couple of tines from fighting two weeks before I shot him, losing about 10 inches of antler mass,” says Hiltibrand, who noticed the broken tines when comparing the buck with past trail cam photos. “I’m still in awe about what happened. Patience, persistence, hard work, and sleepless nights paid off with lots of help from good friends like Loren Henry.”

Editor’s Note: This article was updated to clarify the location where the buck was killed. A previous version stated that Hiltibrand killed it in Nemaha County, Nebraska, when he actually killed the buck in Nemaha County, Kansas.