Run and Gun, there was a discussion on here a while back that addressed the Puyallup, Nisqually and Skagit/Sauk. The article that you provided is good and yes the Nisqually also had a better year in 2016. This is likely do to better early survival in the marine environment as the study suggests. If it had to do with hatchery fish impacting the wild fish then the Nisqually would have rebounded earlier as that hatchery was shut down a long time ago and there has not been any recreational steelhead fishing there for many years. Voights creek stopped production in 2009 so it might appear that the increase in 2016 has to do with that however that was the same conclusion that Kostow jumed to in 2006 which now turns out to be incorrect.
The Sauk is open not because of a recovered run. It is open because of lobbying. The run is as low as it has ever been and those who promote saving wild fish should not be lobbying to fish on them at the same time (talking out of both sides of their mouth = hypocrites). There is mortality associated with CnR - like it or not but that is another argument.

Salmo - appreciate that you are able to admit when you are wrong. In my mind it takes a man to be able to do that. I might be just as old as you are and one thing that I have realized with old age is that it is hard to change. The problem here is that you have a large following here as demonstrated by the lemmings who followed you in blindly agreeing and even defending you when you were wrong. I am afraid that the inability to change with old age from a well respected member can eventually lead everyone astray. I believe that your biases affected the way that you read and remembered the article. Because when I read it, I cannot understand how someone would not realize that this was done on the upper Clackmas above the North Fork Dam - See Fig 1.
You are correct in that I have not read the majority of your posts but the ones that I have read seem to be biased towards the thought that hatchery fish are bad. Matter of fact this website seems disproportionately biased toward that thought that hatchery fish are bad - many influenced by your posts. If I am incorrect may I then I would ask why you did not bring the Courter study to light when you saved it to your computer months ago?

Oncy T that was one of the most biased posts that I have ever seen you write. I understand defending Salmo if he is your friend but that was borderline ridiculous. I was going to respond but since Salmo did I will not take the time. I will just say that my comment is taken from the article which was stated several times "Hatchery-origin summer steelhead spawner abundance did not have a negative effect on our estimates of upper Clackamas River basin adult winter steelhead productivity" Another quote "Our observation contradicts the previous assertion that negative ecological interactions between naturally produced summer steelhead juveniles and winter steelhead juveniles reduced upper Clackamas River basin winter steelhead productivity between 1972 and 1998 (Kostow and Zhou 2006)."
One more "In this case, the segregated summer steelhead hatchery program coexisted with the natural-origin winter steelhead population without negatively impacting adult winter steelhead recruitment"
BTW if you want to limit this study to the Clackmas and not apply it to other rivers then you also need to limit the Kostow study to just the Clackamas - which you have not. You can't have it both ways to suit your argument and need to be consistent. In my opinion all research is meant to be extrapolated from to other rivers to some degree (with limitations) because of the cost and time involved to produce these studies.

Carcassman to say that the studies complement each other is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of in my life. The article by Courter spends an entire section discussing how and why their results contradict the study by Kostow done 14 years earlier with less data. Your post decreases your credibility from 3% to 0.1% in my book. Nearly every sentence in your first paragraph is incorrect. In this case I think that it would have been better for you to not contribute because your contribution exposed the fact that you never even read the article. Typically it is better to not comment on something that you know nothing about. Better just to stay silent and see if you can learn something before talking, or in this case... typing.