Quesnel watershed covers 5,930 square kilometers and is the deepest fjord lake in the world. There were a few sockeye left in the river.
Today's sockeye in the Quesnel are survivors of a 763 foot dam built in 1897 to temporarily hold back water so miners could look for gold.
In 1923 the dam was dynamited only because it did not work to produce much gold and wagons could not use it to cross the river. A bridge was built in its place.
The Quesnel sockeye managed to bring themselves back from this incredible act of human short-sightedness, but like most sockeye that enter the Fraser River, their productivity declined from 1992 - 2009. "Productivity" is not the total number of fish, it is the number of spawners that return per parent. The astonishing thing about this graph (below) is that the Harrison sockeye "productivity" shows the opposite trend than most other Fraser sockeye. The Harrison are the only stock not observed passing through the salmon feedlot regions of the BC coast as they appear to migrate to sea via Juan de Fuca around southern Vancouver island.
Last year was the big cycle year for this river/lake system that includes the Horsefly and several other rivers and it was a stunning failure. The calamity that struck all "Fraser" sockeye except the Harrison destroyed this run and this is a huge blow for Quesnel sockeye. It is possible the "dominant" cycle has been lost and a new cycle will hopefully take over as the most abundant generation.
The Quesnel River and Lake and the Cariboo River are certainly splendid and I hope we can clear the salmon feedlots off their migration route.