Upper Klamath Lake

Upper Klamath Lake runs nearly thirty miles north to south and up to eight miles across, the largest body of fresh water in Oregon, and it is shallow, averaging about fourteen feet. It is the largest remnant of an Ice Age lake that once joined it to Lower Klamath and Tule lakes. Its marshes and its rivers, the Williamson, the Wood and the Sprague, fed one of the great waterfowl flyways of the West, and the c'waam and koptu, the Lost River and shortnose suckers that ran up those rivers each spring, fed the Klamath people.

The lake is also the main reservoir of the Bureau of Reclamation's Klamath Project, which irrigates some 200,000 acres of farmland to the south. When the suckers were listed as endangered in 1988, the lake's level became a federal decision, and in a drought year there is not enough water to hold the lake up for the fish, send enough down the river for salmon and fill the farm canals. In April 2001 the government announced that no irrigation water would come from the lake that season. On May 7 more than ten thousand people formed a bucket brigade in Klamath Falls in protest. In 2021 the canals were shut off again.

Downstream, the four lower Klamath River dams came out between 2023 and 2024, the largest dam removal anywhere. That October Oregon biologists found a fall chinook in a tributary above the site of the old J.C. Boyle Dam, the first salmon back in Oregon's part of the basin since 1912. The Klamath Tribes welcomed them home as c'iyaal's, relatives. US-97 follows the lake's east shore north of Klamath Falls; on the west side, the Upper Klamath National Wildlife Refuge keeps a canoe trail through the marsh.