Steelhead Outlook

A look at the Northwest's steelhead run with Fish and Game's Ed Schriever: "When we look at a ten-year average, within that were a couple of real banner years for steelhead that really influenced the average abundance in that 10 year average. Our ten-year average run at Lower Granite total, including hatchery and wild or natural fish, and the natural fish sometimes make up a third of the run or so, anyway usually by now if you look at the 10 year average, about 55% of those fish have completed the migration to Lower Granite Dam, that is up the Columbia River, over Lower Granite Dam and they are coming into Idaho and Eastern Oregon, those tributaries of the Snake River. So that's about where we are in the average run. We are currently almost 83,000 souls it is holding true to the 10 year run time we will be in the 160,000 fish ballpark which will get us pretty close to the 10 year average which is more fish than we thought we were going to see when we did a run forecast months ago. That's good but it is not setting a record. It is considerably more steelhead than we had last year. For folks who follow steelhead fishing, they know that the steelhead fishery in the Clearwater River is renowned across the West.