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Salmon festival sponsored by MHCC instructor
The Advocate
MHCC’s geography and criminal justice instructor Chris Gorsek said he hopes this Sunday’s Salmon Festival at Multnomah Falls will become an annual event.
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“Multnomah Falls, even this time of the year, gets a fair number of people. We hope that several hundred will attend; that would be very nice if that happened,” said Gorsek. “It’s a modest start but it will be something that we hope to expand in the future and the nice thing too about it is that it’s free.”
The Salmon Festival will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., sponsored by Gorsek and the U.S. Forest Service. Its purpose is to celebrate MHCC’s Geography Awareness Week but also to educate the public about Columbia River salmon and the “importance of water quality and not polluting the water,” Gorsek said.
“We’re going to have geography students and forest service personnel that will be guides along the creek to talk to people about the salmon and what’s going on there,” said Gorsek. “There’s something that’s different reading about salmon in a book than when you actually see the salmon in the stream. You’re out there in nature and it’s a much better approach.”
According to portlandfishingtrips.com, every year more than a million Chinook salmon swim up the Columbia River to spawn and “begin their lives in the freshwater mountain streams of the Pacific Northwest.” After living in fresh water for about one to three years, they swim to the Pacific Ocean and live in salt water for two to five years.
“As their internal reproductive cycle start, they migrate their way back to the Columbia River and search (for) the stream they were born and lived in.” Once the adult salmon lay and fertilize their eggs, they die and the baby salmon feed off their parents’ “carcasses for their first few months of life,” said the website.
For 25 years the local Metropolitan Regional Government (Metro) organized an event similar to the Salmon Festival in October at Oxbow Park, but had to recently stop due to the economy.
“They did some salmon walks out there this year but nothing else. When I heard that they had scaled back their event, I actually called to talk to them and they confirmed that they won’t be doing the full festival. Apparently budget cuts killed it,” said Gorsek.
The new festival will provide information booklets that will explain the life cycle of the salmon and will feature a number of activities for children to participate in at the festival.
“We’re going to do some coloring (activities) for the kids and then the forest service will have some shirts that kids can take a mold and use paint and make a salmon shirt. We’re trying to do some things that are both for adults and for kids,” said Gorsek.
Gorsek said the salmon are not only a valuable food source in the Columbia Gorge area, but are also essential to the Native American tribes out on the Columbia River, being an important part of their spirituality. Because salmon spawn upstream, Gorsek told the Gresham Outlook last Saturday, “I see them (the salmon) as an inspiration for life — they’re a wonderful symbol of not giving up.”
Also attending the festival will be Columbia Riverkeeper, OSU Water Shed Extension, and two representatives from the Colombia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. These organizations will also educate visitors about the salmon and how to preserve their environment.
“The site that we have at Multnomah Falls I think is a really good site. The great thing about that site is that it’s right next to the lodge, right by the falls; there’s lots of parking, and the best part is there’s a nice accessible path, so that if you’re having a hard time walking or (are) in a wheel chair, you’re right there. The path is right next to the stream and the salmon are there,” said Gorsek.
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