GRANTS PASS (AP) — For the likes of Jo Anne Manardo, the summer of 2008 marked the end of an era of recreation on a dammed stretch of the Rogue River.

On a cool, late-summer day, too cold for water-skiing, all she could do was stare at a lake that soon will go away.

Since the 1970s, the 59-year-old Grants Pass woman has driven along Highway 99 each summer to what the locals call “Savage Lake,” a place that will disappear for good in the name of wild salmon.

“It’s hard to let this go,” Manardo says. “It’s sad to think that the grandkids will never get to know what this is about.”

The seasonal impoundment will disappear soon, and the four-mile stretch of the Rogue is to become a full-time stream for the first time in 88 years.

Beginning next spring, demolition crews will dismantle the summer lake’s fish-killing creator, Savage Rapids Dam, which will be replaced with electric pumps to feed Grants Pass Irrigation District patrons beginning in 2009.

The free-flowing section of the Rogue will allow free and easy passage of wild salmon and steelhead, as required by a federal court decree.

Salem-based Slayden Construction Group, which has the $28 million contract on the project, now is building the pumping plant that towers just downstream of the dam. A new pipe bridge that will deliver water to the Rogue’s north side already spans the river.

The waterside park, where skiers once burned in effigy a state biologist who lobbied for removing the dam in the early 1990s, is closed and the public ramp is off limits. It’s an equipment-staging area now.

“For all the turmoil, hard feelings and all the stuff it took to get from Point A to Point B, it’s all almost anticlimactic,” said Dan Shepard, the 60-year-old manager of the irrigation district who learned to water-ski there at age 14. “Maybe people have come to terms with it. It’s as simple as that.”

That’s almost too simple to Lana Pinkerton.

“I’ve been coming here since I was a little girl and pretty soon it’s all going to be gone,” she says. “It’s sad. Just really sad.”