Drifter,

1. WDFW produced a Wild Steelhead Management Plan in 2008. I don't think it has been updated since. In a nutshell, it says, among other things, when wild run sizes are less than established spawning escapement goals, there will be no fishing seasons on wild steelhead. Well, here we are. Wild run sizes are less than the escapement goals, so the rivers are closed to fishing. Just like the plan says.

2. I haven't seen any data or other results from 2020-2021 either. What likely resulted is that a few more wild steelhead survived to spawn because they didn't suffer incidental mortality from angling. If WDFW knows more than that, they likely aren't saying.

3. Do you seriously believe that the decline in wild steelhead abundance didn't begin before your arrival in 1968? Declining salmonid populations most likely began shortly after of white settlers and began commercial fishing, road and railroad development, logging, mills, farms, and towns - all the usual things that degrade fish habitat and reduce their populations. You appear to be another example of the "shifting baseline paradigm." As if the fish populations were never larger than when you arrived on the scene.

It would be more accurate to say that the declines continued under the watch of managers recently retired. And the declines continued for all those same reasons that have been mentioned over and over. WDFW and its predecessor agencies don't have and never have had the legal authority to protect fish habitat. Adequate habitat protection would require socially unacceptable restrictions on road building, logging, agriculture, flood protection, commercial fishing, and more. Heck, it took the threat of a federal lawsuit by treaty tribes just to get DNR to follow its own guidelines for culvert sizing on small streams just because larger culverts cost more money.

Spring Chinook are gone because all the suitable habitat for springers is gone. Gone due to clear-cutting and road building to the mountain tops of the Chehalis, Wynoochee, and Skookumchuck. All due to land use activities that WDFW has never had any control over. Do you think the USFS, DNR, and private timber owners were going to leave all that old growth timber in those upper watersheds to protect stream flows and water temperatures for a few thousand Spring Chinook (and a few other salmon and steelhead) so that a couple dozen Harbor gillnetters could kill most of them every spring and summer? Of course not. And they didn't. And the habitat was and remains trashed. It might recover somewhat in one or two hundred years, but we won't live to see it.

Now why do you think if wild and hatchery steelhead spawned together their might be an increase in unmarked steelhead? After everything that has been posted in this forum about why hatchery steelhead don't survive well in the natural environment, you should know a hell of a lot better. The utter lack of unmarked summer runs in the Wynoochee is about as clear of evidence as you can get that hatchery steelhead, even though they spawn in the natural envionment, utterly fail to produce subsequent returning wild adult fish. (There are a few cases of Skamania summer runs producing subsequent wild fish where there is suitable habitat; Chambers Ck spawners are statistically zero in that regard.)

I've said it before, if it's good steelhead fishing you want, buy a time machine and set it for 1968.