Last summer, I went to a little village called Daehyeon-ri in Bonghwa County, North Gyeongsang Province.
There’s an old zinc mine there that closed down in the 90s, and I was curious what was left of it.
If you drive two hours from Seoul, past Taebaek, just south of there is Bonghwa.
The narrow road to Daehyeon-ri along the upper valley of the Nakdong River is covered in dark mountain shadows even at midday.
When I get to the village, there’s a few old, empty apartments sitting all alone.
They say the miners used to live there.
Looking around the neighborhood, I see it’s called Lenok Village these days.
The elementary school is now a campsite, and there’s a little cartoon lenok out front
and an information board that says the lenok’s habitat is nearby.

I follow the directions to where I find a small waterfall.
The waterfall flows into a deep blue pool below.
If you pass the pool and go on a bit further, there’s a second waterfall.
The second waterfall is even smaller.
Not the majestic size you imagine from the word waterfall, just about knee-height.
They say when the summer floods come, fish swim up the creek valley here.
You know, it never rains much in late spring or early summer.
But even when there’s no rain, and the backs of the rocks are exposed,
there are some fish that leap and climb up the dried-out waterfall anyway,
and that’s the powerful lenok.
They say the lenok are born in this deep, narrow mountain stream.
Little babies with plump bellies like a tadpole.
They spend their childhood in this pristine place of overhanging moss and abundant shade.
I asked what they eat when they’re babies—
You know all those little bugs that buzz around your face when you go hiking?
Mayflies, stoneflies, caddisflies, craneflies, midges.
They say they eat the larvae of those bugs.
If you flip over a rock on the streambed, it’s swarming with tiny bug larvae like that.

The lenok grow up fast on those bugs. Then they go down into the big river and become adults.
Their bodies swell up, enough to hold tens of thousands of eggs.
They grow strong, so they can swim back up the valley,
and when it’s time to lay eggs, they return to the stream where they were born.
They leap and jump up the rocks, through the water pouring down on them.

The mountain stream where the lenok are born is numbingly cold even in midsummer.
Even though Korea is on the same latitude as California, Spain, and Turkey,
it’s much colder because Siberia is to the north.
And the area of Taebaek, Bonghwa, Inje, and Hongcheon is at high elevation too.
The forest is lush, and the shade is thick, so the stream water is even colder in summer.
This is exactly the environment the lenok like.
It can’t be too cold, but it can’t be lukewarm.
And the water must be exceptionally clean.
They’re not like other fish that can live anywhere, like catfish, carp, or loaches.
They’re sensitive and picky, and maybe even a bit snooty.

It was a Japanese ichthyologist that first found the lenok in Daehyeon-ri, back in 1937.
No one knew this fish that you might find in Siberia could live in the upper reaches of the Nakdong.
It was in the newspaper, and apparently got a lot of attention in academia, too.
The area around the Daehyeon-ri valley was promptly designated a natural monument.

But something else was discovered before the lenok—
the largest zinc mines in the entire country.
Mitsubishi started development immediately.
The mines were quite near to the mountain stream.
Just up the way in Taebaek, they found a massive load of coal in the ground too,
and a railroad was put in to transport the ore from the mines.
Today they’re mostly closed down, but they say there used to be over fifty mines in Taebaek.
All the wastewater flowed into the Nakdong,
and they timbered all the land.
Think about it. All the trees in the forest were gone. The cold water disappeared.
And in the end, all the lenok disappeared along with it.

In the 80s, when there were no more lenok in the river, people organized a restoration project.
They caught lenok from the headwaters of the Han River in several stages.
Dozens, thousands of baby fish, full-grown fish—
all stocked in streams and ponds over a number of years.
They built hatcheries and tried artificial incubation,
and said in interviews, “We’ve successfully managed to domesticate and breed them.”
At last, they thought they’d succeeded in reviving the Nakdong lenok.
In 1999 there was even a KBS documentary called Return of the Lenok.

Taebaek and Bonghwa are a region of frequent earthquakes.
The creak-crack, scritch-scratch of two grinding masses of land scraping past each other.
Taebaek in particular is the source of the Han, the Nakdong, and the Samcheok-Osip’s waters.
That’s three rivers in the same tectonically unstable neighborhood.
They say when the earth juts up, splits apart, crumbles, and shudders, the rivers and even the fish get dragged right along with it.
Lenok who once lived together were split into the Han and Nakdong, and they went on evolving separately.
They might look the same, but they’re tens of thousands of years apart.
When people thought they’d reintroduced lenok to the Nakdong, they didn’t even know how different the Han and Nakdong lenok were.

If the individuals from the Han River were ‘successfully’ established there,
then people should be catching Han River lenok in the main course of the Nakdong.
But you know what? These days when they catch lenok in the Nakdong,
all they find are the same ones that have always been there, the original specimen!
That means when the mountains were hollowed out, the trees plucked, and the coal dug up,
the lenok everyone thought had perished actually survived, somewhere in clear water…

And who knows,
maybe right now in some corner of the Nakdong, those Han River lenok are
finding their way.”

– Artist’s note