What Five Salmon Taught Me

BusinessPolicyWhat Five Salmon Taught MeByBill Frist,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover global and domestic health care and conservation.Follow AuthorAug 19, 2026, 04:05pm EDTSix days on Idaho’s Middle Fork changed how I think about rivers, energy and stewardshipHalfway through our six-day journey down Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River, my wife Tracy and I joined five others for a hike up Loon Creek toward a natural hot spring.The trail was narrow. As we climbed, we found ourselves roughly 40 feet above the creek, looking through the trees at the clear water below. Then someone stopped. Holding almost motionless in a small pool were five enormous dark shadows.We knew immediately they were salmon. We had been fly-fishing for trout every day from rafts and McKenzie-style drift boats, and nothing we had caught was remotely that large. The seven of us gathered along the trail and stared down.The salmon run is the time when salmon, which have migrated from the ocean, swim to the upper reaches of rivers where they spawn on gravel beds. After spawning, all Pacific salmon die, and the salmon life cycle starts over again.gettyBy then Tracy and I had spent several days talking about what we were seeing: the changing forests, wildfire, climate change, the extraordinary power of moving water, biodiversity and the Indigenous history of these canyons. Most influentially, Sammy Matsaw Jr., a Shoshone-Bannock Tribal member traveling with us, had been teaching all of us to see this landscape differently. Those five salmon suddenly pulled much of it together.How had they gotten here? And why were so few now completing the same extraordinary journey?MORE FOR YOU Into the canyonOur trip with The Nature Conservancy had begun the previous evening in Salmon, Idaho, where wildfire smoke hung over town. Early the next morning, we climbed into small aircraft for the flight into Indian Creek, our wilderness launch point.Our group de...