Below the whitewater of Hells Corner, the Klamath placidly enters farm country. For the past 107 years, it then entered Copco Reservoir. No more; we noticed our arrival at the drained lake by the presence of empty lake-front cabins, now river-front property.

The apocalyptic moonscape of a recently drained reservoir never materialized. Restoration teams did a remarkable job at re-seeding the Copco and Iron Gate footprints, leaving slopes of native grass and bright orange California poppies.

The old Copco Dam site conjured memories of a sketchy poison ivy portage and a too-short rope. Back then, I precariously balanced my touring boat at water’s edge while scrambling around the adjacent cliff. This time, I watched Seth drop over a misty horizon ahead of me as the Klamath plunged through the eroded crest of the Cascade Range.

A big-medicine place, we were entering Kikace’ki (a.k.a. Wards Canyon), a basalt canyon that dribbled with a paltry ankle-deep flow for a century. I remember a long afternoon of dragging and ghost-floating my kayak down the creek in 2008. Now it was game-on with busy whitewater.

Where Iron Gate Reservoir once filled the valley, we camped on a gravel beach beside the rejuvenated river’s soft hum. I was struck by the impermanence. In the Copco zone, oak trees that were buried in mud and water for a century emerged as stoic snags. Farmer’s rock walls from the early 1900s still stood. The entire dam era was barely a weekend in the life of this river. To anthropomorphize, I can imagine the Klamath itself groggily waking on a Monday morning asking “did that really happen?”

Seth Ricker drifts past the old Iron Gate Dam