Wenatchee River

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Background:

Historically the dividing line between Okanogan County and Kittitas County, the river has been in the center of Chelan County since the county's formation around 1899. Water from the Wenatchee River and its tributaries has been diverted for irrigation since 1891, mainly for orchards. There are two small dams on the Wenatchee River, the Tumwater Canyon Dam, which sits just west of the community of Leavenworth, and the Dryden dam, a low-head dam situated just outside the town of Dryden. The Tumwater Canyon dam originally provided power to the original 2-mile (3.2 km)-long railroad tunnel used near Stevens Pass to get trains across the Cascade Mountains

Threats:

Toxic chemicals banned decades ago in Washington continue to linger in the environment and concentrate in the food chain, threatening people and the environment, according to three recent studies by the Washington state Department of Ecology. In 2007, the Washington Department of Health advised the public to not eat mountain whitefish from the Wenatchee River from Leavenworth downstream to where the river joins the Columbia, due to unhealthy levels of PCBs

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Wenatchee River Updates

River Steward Program Newsletter Winter 2018

We are starting to see rains show up earlier in southern Oregon than I can remember in the past couple of years, and I hope that this is the beginning to a long wet winter here in the Northwest. ...

Wenatchee Cold Water Campaign

Last year, during a June river snorkel on the Wenatchee River I stumbled upon dozens of adult bull trout, salmon, and steelhead sheltering in the frigid outflow of a small creek. At first, it was...

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