SG - To answer your earlier question, yes there were once spring/summer Chinook in the Clearwater. The river upstream of the Snahapish was where the spawning habitat was. It was a decent population in the 60's and 70's. If memory serves there were about 100 or so adults, roughly, that made up the annual Clearwater spawning poluations during the 80's and 90's. There may be a few left today but my guess is there are years where zero spring/summers show up.

There were some corker slides during the 1970's and 80's associated with the last of the large active timber cuts and new road building efforts. The Solleks took several big hits back then.

The Suzie Creek slide in 1990 was a biggie. It absolutely nailed the upper river. The sediment loading that occurred completely altered the habitat conditions in the upper 10 miles of river. They remain altered today. Stability of the upper river was once a feature of this system. It may take another 100 years and 10x as many NC purchases to ever see those conditions again.

The Solleks was really hammered in 1994 with a major slope failure off an old landing very near the upper end of the anadromous reach. The slide was so massive it actually came down the hill, through the river and slid up the other side. For weeks the Solleks was impounded until flows found a surface exit and then eroded the "dam" that was created. Sediment from the Solleks soon entered the Clearwater and began "piling up" for 10 years or so. There are still massive gravel bars between the mouth of the Solleks and Copper Mine Bottom that "appeared" in the years following the 1994 event.

There were many people, contracors, timber companies, etc. that made their fortunes off the timber harvested from private and public lands in the Clearwater River for a solid 30 years. Those folks are now retired, their estates passed on, whatever. The legacy of that era is passed on to us the public in the form of a damaged resource.

In my opinion the Clearwater is a case study for how NOT to manage a watershed. Its study should be required learning for every fish biologist, hydrologist, forester, ecologist, etc., in training.

In my opinion the NC purchase on the Clearwater is exactly the kind of place to put our limited recovery funds. The problem is we need to up the ante by about 10x or more.