The final water samples for this year were taken from under the choppy surface of Adams Lake on Tuesday, a process the team working on the Upper Adams Salmon Restoration Program has undergone several times since April.

The goal of the program is to boost the Upper Adams sockeye return by adding fertilizer to the lake, increasing nutrients that will result in stronger salmon — fish that will be more likely to return and spawn.

Don Holmes, Upper Adams Salmon Restoration Program manager, told Castanet the data obtained from the water samples will help determine how the project is progressing.

“These little creatures called zooplankton that the salmon live off, we want to see their numbers,” Holmes said.

“We want to see the numbers of the phytoplankton, which is the plant composition, and we want to see how that has responded to the nutrients. We look at the chemistry to see how the nutrients have reacted over the course of the whole year.”

Holmes said the fertilization is necessary as Adams Lake has been devoid of nutrients since the Upper Adams salmon run was wiped out in the early 1900’s.

“We have a system where we can't grow the micro-organisms that the salmon fry live on,” he said.

Holmes said the fertilizer, once applied to the lake, will boost phytoplankton production, which, in turn, will increase zooplankton numbers.

“If we can increase the number and type of zooplankton in the lake, we will have better growth of the sockeye smolts. And when they leave and head to the ocean, they're bigger and healthier,” he said.

According to Dave Nordquist, title and rights natural resource manager for the Adams Lake Indian Band, former Kukpi7 Cliff Arnouse was the driving force behind this four-year program which started in 2020.

“The Upper Adams was 75, 85 kilometres of salmon spawning ground, and it used to be red with salmon from top to bottom in that whole watershed, and they were early run salmon too, so they were in really good shape,” Nordquist said.

He said over 100 years ago, the logging industry installed a splash dam on the Adams River that kept the salmon from spawning, which “exterminated” the fish and in turn, caused the lake to lose its nutrients.

Tests in the mid-1990s showed lake fertilization could help to increase the salmon return.

Nordquist said currently, the salmon population is “in the thousands, instead of in the millions.”

A written summary of the restoration program said the lake has the potential to produce about 500,000 spawning adults and 26 million sockeye salmon smolts.

A larger number of returning salmon would be a boon to not only the Adams Lake Band, but the entire lake and land base.

“If we get tens of thousands of kilograms of returning salmon, when they die and spawn they feed the whole ecosystem. The lake gets richer, so all of the lake char, the Kokanee, everything in the lakes gets bigger, and more of them,” Nordquist said.

He said on the land base near where the salmon go to spawn, the bears eat the fish and drag the carcasses into the forest.

“They leave the rest of the carcasses which will return to the earth and that land-based ecosystem will get fertilized as well.”

Michelle Walsh, who works for the Secwepemc Fisheries Commission, came on board with the program when the commission — part of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council — was asked by the Adams Lake Band to help with the project.

She said the program has been a success so far, and she is hopeful for the future.

She said historically, Secwepemc communities relied on sockeye returns for food, resources, and for sustaining their culture.

“It was obviously really important to restore that, and make sure future generations have sockeye to support all of these cultural aspects and food sovereignty,” Walsh said.

She said she hoping to see some more long term, sustainable funding to support the program for as long as it takes to restore the sockeye runs.

“It's great that this is being led, and spearheaded by the Adams Lake Indian Band, but it'd be really great to find some more partners added to help make the program a little bit more robust and secure, and building on some more knowledge and data collection,” Walsh said.

Holmes said they have to continue with the lake fertilization until they reach a point where it’s no longer needed — which will be dependent on the salmon returns.

“Once we get to that point where the salmon themselves, when they die, and the carcasses float in the lake and supply the nutrients that are lacking — like it was done before the impact — I guess that's when we realize we've been successful,” he said.

“The benefit I'm looking at is for the Adams Lake Indian Band to start to harvest the salmon like they used to do. That was the goal of the program. And if that does come about, that will be a great success story.”