A giant female Chinook salmon flips on her side in the shallow water and wriggles wildly, using her tail to carve out a nest in the riverbed as her body glistens in the sunlight. Now, less than a month after those dams came down in the largest dam removal project in U.S. history, salmon are once more returning to spawn in cool creeks that have been cut off to them for generations. Video shot by the Yurok Tribe show that hundreds of salmon have made it to tributaries between the former Iron Gate and Copco dams, a hopeful sign for the newly freed waterway.