The rough water is at Hells Gate. More than two decades after the Hells Gate slides, in the summer of 1938, Bill Ricker, a scientist with the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission (IPSFC), perches on the rocks and investigates the causes of the precipitous decline of Fraser sockeye. The remnants of the slides lie on the opposing bank (see Photograph 6).

A copy of the photograph is among the papers of William Thompson, who, in 1938, had recently assumed the directorship of the Salmon Commission's scientific investigations after a distinguished career with the North Pacific Halibut Commission and as chair of the University of Washington's College of Fisheries. Unlike Ricker, who left after his first year of study, Thompson devoted the better part of a decade to Hells Gate; his ideas about its role in obstructing salmon migrations would provide the rationale for the construction of fishways at this point in the mid-1940s as one prong of a major effort to restore the salmon runs. After the completion of the fishways, when Thompson set down his ideas about Hells Gate for scientific scrutiny, his early charge, Bill Ricker, would criticize them strongly, engaging in a prolonged controversy with Thompson that would come to involve the reputations of their respective scientific institutions and national fisheries science communities. But in the summer of 1938, none of these later controversies could be imagined. Ricker leaned over the edge, photographing salmon, and the lens captured him too.