Dagger Falls

Happy 4th of July!

We are celebrating the day by watching salmon exploding up waterfalls, firecrackers of miraculous strength.  The heavens are applauding with rumbles of thunder, purring appreciatively around the clouds.  We made it to Dagger Falls (just above the Boundary Creek put-in on the Middle Fork, where we began our river trip back on June 1), and have been watching the Salmon make their amazing struggle to reach their spawning beds, still long miles up the river.  [Historically 2,000,000 Salmon made the over 900 mile journey back to the Salmon River system in Idaho, and today only about 10,000 return.]  Dagger Falls is a relatively narrow stretch of the river, where the canyon walls push the water over a series of large ledges and through chutes.  Rocky spikes stick up out of the churning water like the teeth of a huge dragon mouth, gaping at the top of the falls.

It seems the fish make their biggest push in the late afternoon and early evening hours, which is fairly ideal for filming.  You only have to watch for a few moments before seeing a huge, dark and glistening body come torpedoing out of the boiling water, hurling itself at a wall of foaming water.  A few make it in one airborne surge, only to land in a boiling pool that is just a turbulent lay-over between levels.  Some hit the rushing water somewhere in mid-falls and struggle valiantly for a few moments (you can see them hanging on underneath the veil of water), squirming ferociously to hold their ground, which they can for what seems an impossible amount of time, before tiring and flushing backwards into the churning pool below.  And some (Isaac and I have been imagining this group to be younger, less experience, fish) corkscrew out of the water like torpedos gone haywire, only to flair majestically, high above the pool for long seconds before crashing down, usually downstream of where they left the water on their helter-skelter trajectory.  

For a few hours it seems that fish are everywhere, being tossed haphazardly around in the turbulence.  Aside from the actual leapers, you can see fish bodies hurtling through the foaming water, fins flailing here, a tail flipping around there... I can't imagine what it must be like to be in that pool as a fish.  They must not be able to see a thing, and look like they are simply getting smashed around, crashing into each other and the unforgiving rock walls, unable to rest in water that refuses to remain still.  Perhaps the holding pools have some deeper areas where they can dive down near the bottom and get a bit of rest between leaps, but I sure doubt it.  It would be so interesting to see for a moment, down through the thick water to the bottom of the river, suspending all the fish for a single moment in time, to understand how it all works.  

We saw a couple unlucky fish leap and miss, landing on sharp and jagged rocks, flipping and bouncing head over tail, barrel rolling eventually back to water.  I could imagine these fish, dazed and seeing stars, slipping limply back over the falls they had just fought so hard to conquer, and finally coming to rest down stream a mile or so, on some sandy-bottomed limpid pool, wondering what the heck just happened.

While watching the fish, we also found a family of Dippers nesting precariously just above the very top falls.  Dippers (American Dipper, also known as the Water Ouzel), are an extremely interesting and endearing bird.  They spend their entire lives along rushing mountain streams, hunting water bugs and insects from off rocks and underwater in the streambeds.  They have the ability to walk and even "fly" underwater, clinging to the rocky bottom with their tiny feet.  They can navigate (and even prefer) the turbulent waters of rapids, and make their nests directly above the rushing waters.  Their nests are these round orbs made of mud and moss, with the entrance pointed straight down towards the water, a few feet off its churning surface.  When their young fledge, I can only imagine them shooting out these precarious holes, seeing a few frantic moments of spinning daylight, and then plummeting into the frothing waters to careen downstream, bobbing and spluttering their way to some rock or snag, whatever they can grab onto to drag themselves, bedraggled and half drowned, out of the water.

We found our family of Dippers valiantly feeding their hungry young, racing up and down the river, snagging bugs from the water and stuffing them into the gaping beak that would stick out the bottom of the nest whenever it heard the chirp of the incoming food-laden parent, and sometimes even when it didn't, just hanging its big pink mouth out the chute, clinging to the inside of the nest presumably by its toes as it swings upside down waiting for something to fly by and zip into its hungry mouth.

Just yesterday morning, I sat for a couple hours by the side of the river above the falls, waiting for the Dippers to fly by so I could record their feeding calls.  I never saw hide or hair of a Dipper, but had a peaceful morning anyway, leaning against a rock reading a good book ("Into Thick Air", Jim Malusa: I recommend it highly), with my finger poised over the record button of the sound-deck incase I heard the call.  Later that afternoon we found out why there were no Dippers upriver that morning.  We found the entire family, including newly fledged baby, below the falls.  The baby was perched on the edge of a river rock, looking fluffed and cold (to me) as it stood first on one leg, and then the other, dipping all the while (Dippers "dip" almost constantly, which is a bobbling up and down motion which nobody seems to know the purpose of.  There are many theories of course, the one I like best being that they "dip" as some weird sort of way to stay sane and oriented in their extremely turbulent world of rushing, tumbling, never still white water).  It's parents continued to feed it diligently all afternoon, and it would make these tiny, pitiful hopping flights from rock to rock, moving ever so slightly downstream, stretching its wings and learning how to fly.  

There was an interesting and intense little interlude as afternoon moved into evening, when a mother otter and her cub appeared right next to the Dipper's rock, and eyed the tasty morsel skeptically for long moments, as the parent Dippers screamed angry warnings.  The baby stopped dipping and froze, wide-eyed and stunned (yes, anthropomorphizing shamelessly) as it watched the otter mama watching it.  Nothing ever came of it, but we did get some great otter footage as mom and pup played like only otters can, lolling on sunny rocks, spinning through golden sunlight-flecked water, fished in the rapids, and nursing.  The evening ended with some kind of insect hatch high above the molten river, sparkling like fairy-dust in the last burnished light of the long day, spinning lazy and hypnotic and mystical before the sun sank behind the peaks to the west, leaving us happily packing up camera gear and feeling like we'd had a productive day.

Better than any fireworks I've ever seen...