The Dena’ina people of Eklutna have contributed much to the growth of Anchorage and south-central Alaska. Most of the city is located on ancestral Dena’ina land, including seven public schools that are sited on land still owned by the village of Eklutna. A highway, railroad, power lines and granite quarries intersected the village and the Eklutna River, vital to Dena’ina culture, was dammed and diverted, devastating the salmon upon which the community relied.

Removing a “Deadbeat Dam”

The Eklutna River was once a bountiful salmon-producing waterway that provided a rich subsistence resource to the Dena’ina people who located their village on Cook Inlet’s Knik Arm, near the river’s mouth. Although the Dena’ina remain in the village of Eklutna, the salmon are greatly diminished due to a succession of water diversions and hydropower projects that cut off water flow and fish passage in the river.

The first major barrier to fish and water on the Eklutna River resulted from the construction of the Lower Eklutna River Dam and its associated hydropower plant in 1929. This dam, located in a steep-walled canyon, was used to divert water through a 1,800-foot tunnel to a powerhouse located along Knik Arm. This facility provided electricity to the city of Anchorage until 1955.

When the Eklutna Power Project came online in 1955, the Lower Eklutna River hydropower project was abandoned, leaving behind an unmaintained concrete diversion dam 70 feet tall and 100 feet wide that quickly filled with sediment. Now, the abandoned diversion dam impounds approximately 230,000 cubic yards of sediment and remains a major impediment to full ecological restoration of the Eklutna River.

Recovery of this important salmon stream habitat is vital to maintaining abundant salmon populations in Knik Arm and Cook Inlet in general. Cook Inlet supports the largest urban area in Alaska — more than 60% of the statewide population lives there — and fishing pressures on salmon can be high. Additionally, salmon support a wide variety of other wildlife species, including seabirds, marine mammals and bears.

The Alaska Federation of Natives — the largest Native organization in the state — endorsed the restoration of the Eklutna River in March 2021 by passing a resolution for a free-flowing Eklutna River to support the recovery of Pacific salmon and benefit Dena’ina Athabaskans in the village of Eklutna.

Our Role

For five years The Conservation Fund diligently worked with our partners to remove an abandoned dam along the Lower Eklutna River near Anchorage that was crippling salmon populations.

We teamed with Eklutna Inc., an Alaska Native corporation, to raise $7.5 million for one of the most ambitious habitat restoration projects ever attempted in the state. Eklutna Inc. and its subsidiary, Eklutna Construction and Maintenance LLC, worked over a three-year period to remove the dam and, in 2018, the last piece was taken down. For the first time in nine decades, five species of Pacific salmon in the Eklutna River can once again move upstream, providing the rich subsistence resource on which the Eklutna Dena’ina people have traditionally relied.

Working With Wells Fargo

To help secure lands sacred to the Dena’ina people and preserve traditional Alaska Native home sites, Wells Fargo donated 143 acres of land adjacent to the village of Eklutna to The Conservation Fund for permanent preservation. Semi-subterranean dwellings called nichilq’a identified as among the few remaining undisturbed Dena’ina habitations in the area and storage caches found across the property have also been preserved. This land is another piece of our ongoing effort to protect and restore the Eklutna people’s culturally and environmentally important lands, a partnership which now includes the continuing removal of the Lower Eklutna River Dam.

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