Why salmon line up below the Berrien Springs dam each fall

When the hydroelectric dam went up at Berrien Springs in 1908, it did something the people who built it weren’t thinking much about: it walled off the St. Joseph River. Fish moving up from Lake Michigan hit the dam and stopped, penned into the lower stretch of river below it. For most of the 20th century that’s how it stayed.

That changed in 1975, when a fish ladder was finished at the dam. A fish ladder is exactly what it sounds like — a stepped concrete channel of pools climbing alongside the barrier, each one a little higher than the last, so a fish can muscle its way up one short jump at a time instead of facing a sheer wall. The Berrien Springs ladder reopened about ten more miles of river, all the way up to the Buchanan dam, to fish that had been shut out for nearly seventy years.

What climbs it is the reason anglers crowd the riverbanks here. The St. Joseph runs a serious Lake Michigan fishery — steelhead, Chinook and coho salmon, and brown trout, all stocked or wild and all looking to run upstream to spawn. In the fall the salmon stack up below the dam waiting their turn at the ladder, and in spring the steelhead come through. The ladder’s success became the model for a bigger interstate effort that later put ladders on dams downstream toward South Bend and Mishawaka.

The good part for a bystander: there’s public access on both sides of the dam, above and below. Come in late September or October and you can stand on the bank a stone’s throw from the dam and watch dark, hook-jawed Chinook hold in the current, waiting on the ladder, while a line of anglers works the pool below.