The habitat was not destroyed on the Toutle system, only temporarily impacted, except of course for the man-made sediment detention dam The habitat on the Cowlitz is pretty much totally destroyed by damming and diking. You have been there 18 years CFM, but I fished it in the 50's when it was still free-flowing, and I remember lots of lampreys along with lots of monster wild steelhead. The Toutle experience was one of the most enlightening events in fisheries management - basically the system was closed to fishing after the eruption and left to it's own devices, and by 1985 there were more wild steelhead in the system than ever recorded prior to the eruption. Then we planted fish, opened it to fishing, and the runs went back down to mediocre at best. Pretty good case for hands-off steelhead management if you ask me. Given the same scenario on our few remaining rivers without dams or significant channel alterations I suspect that wild steelhead would recover in a couple of generations, enough to provide C&R on a limited basis. In a perfect world we would limit hatchery steelhead to dammed and ruined rivers and limit free-flowing rivers to C&R with no competition from hatchery plants. I know which rivers I'd choose to fish on