No. 6
From the Mac's card in your pocket to the Elwha running free outside
If You Can Only Pick One
The Olympic Peninsula, told through the things that sustain it: salmon, rivers, rain forests, mountains, and the people whose lives are bound up with them. Tim McNulty's extraordinary portrait of the place we call home.
Best for The one book about the Olympic Peninsula to give or keep
Buy from Port Book and NewsPick the line that sounds like you. The first book is where to start; the second is where to go when you want more.
Six dollars, and the one most likely to be in a pocket. One laminated card, every salmon and trout in North America painted small and side by side, so you can hold it against the fish and compare. It will not tell you anything else. That is the point.
Best for Identifying a fish in hand, on the bank or at the fish counter
At Port Book & News
Seven essays for the seven salmonids of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, by a writer who lives on it. McDougall gives each fish its own chapter: where it spawns, when it runs past Port Angeles, what the people here have made of it. Independently published, slim enough to carry, and more local than anything a national press would print.
Best for Knowing which fish is in the river this month, and why it matters here
At Port Book & News
Lynda Mapes covered the Elwha dam removals for the Seattle Times, and this is her account of the river as the dams came down, with Steve Ringman's photographs. It was finished before the project was, so it is a record of the moment rather than the verdict. For that moment, there is nothing better.
Best for The dam removals as they happened, in pictures and reporting
At Port Book & News
Bruce Brown went looking for wild salmon on the Olympic Peninsula in 1982 and came back with a case for taking out the Elwha dams, three decades before anyone did. The reporting has aged into history; the argument has not aged at all.
Best for The long argument behind the Elwha, and the state of the rivers before it
At Port Book & News
A life of Billy Frank Jr., the Nisqually fisherman arrested more than fifty times for fishing where his treaty said he could, told plainly and with his own voice throughout. If the treaty-rights story is new to you, start here, not with the law.
Best for Understanding the fishing-rights movement through one person's life
At Port Book & News
Charles Wilkinson's account of the 1974 Boldt decision, which held that the treaties of 1855 meant what they said and gave the tribes half the catch. The book covers the case, the backlash, and the fifty years of co-management that followed.
Best for The law itself, and what it changed on this coast
At Port Book & News
A small, bright guide to the Pacific salmon and their relatives, with Joseph Tomelleri's paintings, which are the standard for fish illustration. Godwin and Krkosek keep the text short and the life histories clear. If you want one book that explains the fish before you read anything about their politics, this is it.
Best for A first guide to the species, their runs and their life cycles
At Port Book & News
Kurlansky does for salmon what he did for cod and salt: a history of the fish across every ocean and culture that has depended on it, with recipes. It is broad where the rest of this shelf is local, which is why it is the one to read if you are curious and not yet committed.
Best for A general reader's history of salmon, from Norway to the Pacific
At Port Book & News
Elwha Starter Pack
The story of the Elwha's restoration, told through reporting and photographs, paired with an illustrated version for readers of any age. Two ways into the same remarkable story.
River Reader Pack
Brian Doyle's mythical Oregon coast and Cheryl Grey Bostrom's real Olympic Peninsula. The PNW river fiction duo — one funny and mystical, one quiet and true.
The pocket key for creek volunteers
At Port Book & News CardLaminated, waterproof, pocket-sized
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Revised & expanded
At Port Book & News33 books in this guide, in 6 shelves.
The dams came out of the Elwha between 2011 and 2014, and the river is still telling us what that means. These four books were written before, during and after. Start with Mountain in the Clouds, which argued for removal thirty years early, then Mapes for the removal itself and, in Breaking Ground, for the village uncovered on the waterfront in 2003. River's Gifts is the one to hand a kid.
The 1982 search for the wild salmon, and what it found
At Port Book & News
The Tse-whit-zen discovery that changed everything
At Port Book & NewsLife in the valley before the dams came out
You cannot read about salmon on this coast without reading about the treaties of 1855 and the 1974 Boldt decision that enforced them. Heffernan's life of Billy Frank Jr. is the way in. Wilkinson is the law and its aftermath, Charles is the S'Klallam side of the same story, and Cordalis takes it to the Klamath. Stewart shows how the fishing was done before any of it.
Billy Frank Jr. and the fishing rights movement
At Port Book & News The Boldt Decision and its legacy
At Port Book & NewsA S'Klallam elder on treaty rights and a fishing community
At Port Book & News
A Yurok fight for the Klamath River
At Port Book & News
Traditional methods, beautifully illustrated
At Port Book & NewsFour books that answer different questions. McDougall is about the fish themselves, the seven salmonids that run past this town, and she is our neighbor. Lichatowich asks how the decline happened; it is the history every other account leans on. Montgomery widens the frame to a thousand years and two oceans. Malarkey is about what it would take to keep the wild runs that remain.
Our strait, its seven salmonids, a neighbor who knows them. Start here.
At Port Book & News
Where the salmon crisis began
At Port Book & News
The thousand-year run, from Europe to the Pacific
At Port Book & News
The campaign to protect the last wild salmon rivers
At Port Book & NewsDams are decisions, and these books are about the people who made them. McPhee puts David Brower in a boat with the man who built Glen Canyon Dam and lets them argue. Harden watches the Columbia turned into a machine. Hawley asks what happens to dams in a hotter century. Fedarko is the odd one out: a river run at flood, and the best thing ever written about the Grand Canyon in motion.
Puts a conservationist and a dam builder in the same room
At Port Book & News
The life and death of the Columbia
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The future of dams in a hot, chaotic world
At Port Book & News
The fastest ride through the Grand Canyon
At Port Book & NewsNovels where the river is a character. Doyle's is the strangest and the warmest. Marlantes and Kesey wrote the big Northwest epics: Finnish immigrants along the Columbia in one, a stubborn logging family on the Oregon coast in the other. Maclean is the short book everyone quotes. Bostrom is the newest, set here, and the one we have been handing people all year.
The most quoted book in the American river canon
At Port Book & News What a river is, and what it is owed, as those questions stand this decade. Macfarlane travels to three rivers to ask whether a river can have rights. Scott, in his last book, argues for floods. Moskowitz photographs the Columbia Basin as it is now. McBride followed the Colorado, by packraft, on foot and from the air, to the place it no longer reaches the sea.
What rivers do when we let them
At Port Book & News
The Columbia Basin now, in photographs
At Port Book & News
The Colorado, source to vanished delta, by packraft, on foot and from a small plane
At Port Book & NewsWe sell these because we use them. Ask us what we'd bring to your specific river.
This handout is about the story that runs through this particular store, in this particular town, on this particular river — cross-checked with the reading list our neighbors at the North Olympic Salmon Coalition keep. The wider river canon has its own shelves here. Just ask.