Wallowa Lake

The lake and its surrounding moraines connect landscape conservation with community life. Wallowa Land Trust describes the East Moraine’s transfer into county ownership in January 2020.

The lake is also part of a larger historical and cultural geography. Its story should be read alongside tribal accounts, rather than beginning and ending with recreation.

At the lake’s northern outlet, about a mile south of Joseph, a concrete dam built for irrigation in 1919 by its owner’s account, and raised in 1920 and 1929, lifts the water 28.4 feet above its natural level. The state listed it as a high-hazard dam in 1996, and the Wallowa Lake Irrigation District has since been limited to about 70 percent of its water right. The lake once held Oregon’s only Snake River sockeye run; the dam was built without fish passage, and only kokanee, the landlocked form, remain.

Rehabilitation began on September 2, 2026, after an August 2020 agreement among the district, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the state fish agency on instream water, after state lottery funds and a federal grant to the Tribe for sockeye passage, and after a dispute over trucking fish around the dam that ended with a fish ladder. The first phase is due in August 2027 and the ladder in 2028; a sockeye brood stock has been in the works since 2023. The land-and-water chapter carries the full account.

Through time

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