Although I understand what you are saying, we can believe what we want to believe and point blame in any and all directions but the science is tough to defy. When pre-hatchery populations were 10-50x what we currently see in wild steelhead populations one would think it's logical to look back to when those populations took the hardest hits and almost all places you look it's right after the times that hatchery interactions started. These wild fish numbers have been extinguished long before any of us started fishing any of these rivers in discussion...

To me, it's a matter of time before hatchery fish are absolutely recognized for the demise of wild fish populations. My selfishness wants to see it happen sooner than later so that at some point in my life I can see the returns of wild fish like they once used to be. Call me crazy but I see this as something that can happen.

Part of being hell bent on the logic circles back to the Lewis River Fall Chinook known as the lower river brights. There has been 0 Fall chinook hatchery plants in this river since 1970 and it has always had an amazingly huge run of native fall chinook which has withstood all the ocean conditions, harvest, habitat, predators, in-river harvest, etc. When you get to fish the 21 miles of river below the dam and have such an amazing great Fall Chinook fishery and opportunity it makes you question hatchery fish in general. Every other sub-basin in the CR has hatchery plants and their native fall chinook populations suck.

In regards to steelhead, I've watched Pacific Corp and WDFW destroy the native winter steelhead population in the Lewis river over the last 10 years. They introduced broodstocking and numbers sky rocketed with cookie cutters then roughly 8-10 years later the Natural Origin spawning population is on it's lips. It's a sad thing to see. Pre-broodstocking this run actually was impressive.

I'm not throwing the towel in, but something needs to change.

Keith