Pautzke,
while many people believe that decades of hatchery production has eliminated truly "native" steelhead in Washington, have you ever seen evidence that this is true? Recent peer-reviewed research into the success of hatchery fish at spawning in the wild shows that hatchery origin spawners are extremely ill-suited to natural reproduction. Such studies have been done on Forks Creek WA, the Kalama River, and in several Oregon streams. All the studies are finding the same thing: hatchery "strays" produce fewer offspring than the adults that spawned them. If that holds for successive generations of hatchery origin fish, those "family trees" have dead end branches.
Hatchery fish have been selectively bred to return and spawn in December and January, great for life in the hatchery but apparently not suited to natural reproduction. There are some obvious ecological reasons for the bulk of the native/wild fish spawning in March-April-May (avoiding winter floods, cold stream temps, etc.). There are likely a lot of not so obvious reasons for this preferred spawn timing.
Do you (does anyone?) really believe that the bright 20-30lb unclipped fish folks catch in March and April are from hatchery strays?