OREGON CITY — Several hundred people turned out along the Willamette River on Thursday to celebrate a fish often misunderstood for its style but long revered for its substance.
Pacific lamprey, a jawless fish that looks like an eel, spend years in the Willamette and Columbia River basins before journeying to sea and back to spawn before dying. It is a First Food for many Northwest tribes, including the Yakama Nation who hosted its fifth annual Willamette Falls Lamprey Celebration at Clackamette Park.
The day before, more than two dozen tribal members went to the falls to harvest several dozen lamprey, most of which they brought to the Yakama Valley to share with members. A couple dozen others were sent to Bonneville Dam to ease their journey and be released closer to their spawning grounds without the challenge of the Columbia River dams.
More than 60 years ago, roughly 400,000 adult lamprey were regularly recorded at Bonneville Dam, according to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. Nowadays it’s less than 20,000, and scientists estimate that lamprey today have lost up to 70% of their historic distribution range throughout the Columbia Basin. The number of lamprey passing Lower Granite Dam—the last dam on the mainstem of the Columbia River before reaching Idaho—has been in the double digits, according to the commission.
Willamette Falls is among the few remaining sites in the Columbia Basin where tribes can still harvest lamprey. Members of the Yakama, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Nez Perce and Warm Springs tribes are allowed to access the base of the falls and hand harvest the fish, which use their mouths to suck on rocks and pull their bodies upstream and up enormous heights, including the falls.
Donella Miller, a project manager at Yakama Nation Fisheries, characterized it as more of a salvage than a harvest, because many of the lamprey attempting to make it over the falls and to their historic spawning grounds in Willamette River tributaries will not survive.
This is part of the reason that the Yakama Nation Fisheries bring some of the lamprey they catch past the dams and near the tributaries. Lamprey aren’t like salmon in that they return to the exact place they were born to spawn, but they do rely on the scent of their kin to make sure they don’t pass by a perfectly good spot for their last act.
“When we get lamprey into a stream that doesn’t have a lot of lamprey in it, it adds all those pheromones back in,” said Dave’y Lumley, a fish biologist at Yakama Nation Fisheries. “So when they are traveling upstream, they can smell it and know that it is a good spawning ground.”
Dozens of people lined up to ask Lumley and colleagues questions and to hold lamprey, including the opportunity to have it suck on them for a moment. The fish quickly release when they realize they’re inhaling not mossy rock, but human skin. Packed boats took attendees up river to see the falls.
And by 1 p.m. the lines stretched for yards to try grilled lamprey, salmon and sides, all donated by the Yakama Nation. Lamprey have been called the “bacon cheeseburger of the aquatic world,” because though they are not large, they have for thousands of years provided people with abundant calories, fats and nutrients on par with bigger salmon.
Rosie Johnson, 60 and a member of the Warm Springs and Wasco tribes, has been fishing for lamprey at Willamette Falls since she was 7, she said. At a demonstration table, she taught John Auneki, 17 and a member of the Yakama Nation, to clean and prepare lamprey to be dried. Auneki was part of the lamprey harvest the day before, his second ever, but Johnson was teaching him for the first time to prepare the fish.
The event included dances and speakers, including Yakama tribal leader Jeremy Takala and Oregon Senate President Rob Wagner, D-Lake Oswego. Former Gov. Kate Brown, who today is president of the Willamette Falls Trust, also attended.
The trust is a nonprofit network of more than 60 organizations and foundations trying to “rewild” the area around Willamette Falls and replace the Willamette Falls Paper Company and 40 acres near a Portland General Electric hydroelectric plant that crowd the falls.
The Oregon Legislature in 2025 approved a $45 million investment in the project, and Brown has said she’s secured roughly $30 million in private funding, two-thirds of which would come from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife. She said the next step is to get Portland General Electric to reach an agreement on turning over its acreage beneath and adjacent to the paper company, an area called Moore’s Island, “over the next six months to a year.”
“The plan, should we be successful, is to restore the landscape, reconnect Oregonians to the river and renew indigenous connections to the site,” she said.
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