Dick Goin’s decades beside Olympic Peninsula rivers helped turn a fisherman’s observations into valuable evidence about what was disappearing.
Editor’s note: This article is part of our “Quite a Life” series, exploring remarkable people with meaningful connections to Western Washington.
Fishing stories have a credibility problem: The fish get bigger, the weather gets worse, and the audience develops questions. But Dick Goin had notebooks.
The Port Angeles machinist kept detailed fishing journals that scientists eventually used to understand changes in Olympic Peninsula waters. His observations became part of a much larger effort to restore the Elwha River, where two dams had blocked migrating fish for generations.
According to Olympic National Park fisheries biologist Sam Brenkman, quoted in the Peninsula Daily News, Goin’s diaries offered a “rare chronicle of the Peninsula’s historical conditions and changes over several decades.”
That is quite an outcome for time spent fishing.
But Goin’s relationship with the river began with something considerably less recreational: his family needed dinner.
Before salmon were a cause, they were food
Goin arrived on the Olympic Peninsula from Iowa with his family in 1937, during the Depression. He was six. Salmon became an important part of what the family ate, establishing a connection that lasted through his working life and retirement.
He explained it plainly in material published by the makers of the documentary The Memory of Fish: “We were poor as rats when we went to live on the Elwha.”
The filmmakers describe his later advocacy as a debt he felt toward the fish that had helped sustain his family. It is a useful detail because it makes his commitment understandable without turning him into a saint. Here was a man who had taken something valuable from a river and believed he owed something back.
Goin spent 42 years working as a machinist at Port Angeles’s Rayonier mill, retiring as a foreman. His knowledge of fish accumulated alongside an industrial career.
That combination puts him firmly in the story of Clallam County: a place where livelihoods drawn from natural resources and concern for those resources can belong to the same person.
He remembered details worth writing down
A 2008 draft watershed plan led by Clallam County includes an interview summary describing Goin’s knowledge of northern Peninsula streams. It records his recollection that he began noticing fish disappearing by the mid-1940s.
His observations were specific. For Salt Creek, he recalled coho, winter steelhead, chum, sea-run cutthroat and a substantial lamprey run. He also described changes to stream wood, water withdrawals and sediment.
These were recollections collected for planning purposes, rather than a controlled scientific experiment. Their value lay partly in their reach: Goin had known these waters across decades.
Long records matter because a damaged river can still look perfectly normal to someone encountering it for the first time. Without earlier observations, “normal” can quietly become whatever remains.
Goin provided another point of comparison. His notebooks recorded fish; his testimony helped explain the places in which he had found them.
His expertise was recognized publicly, too. In 2007, Olympic National Park promoted a salmon-watching event at Sol Duc’s Salmon Cascades by naming Goin as a local fish expert who would help visitors understand what they were seeing.
A river needs to move more than water
To understand Goin’s fight, it helps to understand what the Elwha’s dams interrupted.
According to the National Park Service’s history of the Elwha, the lower Elwha Dam became functional in 1913. Glines Canyon Dam followed upstream in 1927.
Both were built without fish passage, leaving returning sea-run fish access to roughly five miles above the river’s mouth. The projects helped power the region’s economy while imposing enormous costs on its fisheries.
For migrating salmon, a river is a route between different stages of life. Blocking that route cuts fish off from spawning and rearing habitat upstream.
But removing a barrier is only part of repairing the system.
The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe explains that the dams also interrupted the downstream movement of sediment, nutrients, trees, branches and root wads. Those materials help shape habitat.
A river’s work includes moving the ingredients that create its channels and living spaces.
This is why the Elwha project became an ecosystem restoration effort. Giving fish a passage upstream and restoring the river’s physical processes were connected tasks.
One persistent man in a much larger fight
It would make a tidy movie pitch to say Goin brought down two dams. It would also give him credit that belonged to many people.
The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe had opposed the dams since their construction, and its relationship with the river long preceded Goin’s arrival. Tribal advocacy, conservation organizations, scientists and government action all contributed to the eventual removal.
American Rivers, itself involved in the campaign, describes Goin as a persistent local advocate within that broader effort.
His persistence left traces. The makers of The Memory of Fish, Jennifer Galvin and Sachi Cunningham, drew on a cassette recording of his 1983 plea for the Elwha’s wild fish.
They filmed him over five years, beginning in 2010, as the long campaign finally became demolition and restoration.
Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act in 1992. Physical removal of the two dams took place from 2011 through 2014, reopening more than 70 miles of salmon habitat.
Decades of argument; years of physical work. Restoration operated on a considerably longer schedule than a fishing trip.
He lived to see the barriers come down
Goin died on April 12, 2015, after the removal project was completed. He lived long enough to see the river opened, although the work of rebuilding its ecosystem would continue.
By 2018, a joint account from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe documented salmon returning above the former dams, expanding estuary and coastal beaches, and new habitats being used by plants and wildlife.
These were measurable changes, rather than a declaration that every part of the recovery was finished.
Goin’s story offers a particularly satisfying kind of local achievement. He paid attention to familiar places for long enough that other people needed what he knew.
The watershed interview preserves one revealing example. Alongside salmon and steelhead, Goin remembered Salt Creek’s lamprey.
An easily overlooked fish, in a particular creek, remembered decades later. He had been keeping track.
