​Yankee Fork Rehabilitation Project

Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) along with the Bureau of Reclamation and a number of other project partners – Idaho Department of Fish & Game, Idaho Department of Parks & Recreation, Idaho office of Species Conservation, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Trout Unlimited, and the U.S. Forest Service Salmon-Challis National Forest have embarked on a mulit-year effort to revitalize the Yankee Fork, a tributary to the Salmon River, located in the central mountains for Idaho.  This area has been historically impacted by dredge mining and agricultural activity.  The focus of these recovery efforts is to benefit ESA-listed spring and summer Chinook salmon and steelhead.   Habitat restoration efforts would impact the historic mine tailings that are related to the gold-mining Custer Ghost Town in Bonanza City upstream of the project.  These impacts required the project partners to mitigate for those impacts. 

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The following video is part of that mitigation effort.

Overview of Yankee Fork Area.

Overview of historic mine tailings along Yankee Fork Road, looking southwest.

​Barkley Irrigation Company Infrastructure Improvement Project 

For this project, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) partnered with Trout Unlimited to implement measures to increase the efficiency of the Barkley Irrigation Canal and East Side Canal of the Methow Valley irrigation District located near the town of Twisp, Washington.  These types of measures help maximize withdrawal efficiently and ensure more water stays instream to benefit aquatic fish, wildlife and plants.  In this case, this irrigation system was determined to be historically important, therefore as a result of this project, BPA funded the development of an art installation and interpretive panel focusing on the history of irrigation in the Methow Valley to be installed at the TwispWorks campus in downtown Twisp.

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