Eliminating the catch and kill fisheries has not helped the wild runs here in southwesy washington because it came about 15 years too late and any positiveimpact WSR had was offset by the Skamania hatchery.

Here is the key to restoring our wild salmon/steelhead runs , nothing else has ever worked and there is no reason to think, at least in my opinion, that anything else can work: Wild and native stocks in their home rivers with good habitat and reproductive isolation.(no hatchery fish in the spawning /rearing habitat)

I know a lot of guys wil dislike what I am going to say so I will give a little backround why i think the way I do.

I grew up on the Washougal which until the 1960'd had 1500 wild summer steelhead.
The Washougal watershed saw 2 major forest fires, massive copper and silver mining massive splash dams, 3 dams without fish passage and a grist mill, Overharvest by sport anglers and a paper mill pumping toxic waste into the river.. Through all this wild steelhead persisted in reletively abundant numbers.
Then in the 1960's the Skamania hatchery was built. Imediatly the numbers of wild fish began to drop by the 1980's wild steelhead counts showed numbers in the very low hundreds often under 100 adults. It was 1986 when WSR was inacted here in Southwest Washington and there has been no trend towards recovery.

Like it or not guys Hatcheries are a MAJOR!!!!! roadblock to wild steelhead recovery!!! On rivers like the Washougal I do not believe the run can be salvaged without the elimination of the hatchery run.