By some chance has anyone got a good look up close to the W. Satsop slide / wash out?

I took alook up close walking up the road. Ah the fix is going to be expensive and to stabalize it right on the river that is going to be difficult. Those living on the East Satsop better get used to some heavy trafic as all the trafic from the West side is going to have cross to the East Satsop at Schafer Park to get out for some time is my thought!.

The news about the budget is suggesting that WDFW will have pretty substantial cuts in access programs. Don't know, as it wasn't spelled out, just what that will mean but it probably isn't good.

Welcome to a collapsing government where the math will not allow a recovery and the government does not want to scale back its span of control or corruption...

It does not end very well for the government,, the longer they try and hang on,,, keep things the same the worse a situation for them... The sad part is,, under the MAFIA model they have no choice but to move forward speeding up their total destruction...

People we are in a process of a total system collapse...

There is no possible way the situation can be fixed or recovered...

"Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming"

We are already in the collapse process...

You can figure that this collapse will finish sooner than later because Trump is going to be the guy to both destroy it and rebuild it...

"You say you don't believe,
we're on the eve,
of destruction."

Barry McGwire, brought to us by RichG.

https://www.nwrfc.noaa.gov/rfc/

Love the weather now after several months of ugly! This caught me by surprise so look to Porter and Satsop for a general view. The really ugly is the upper Chehalis tribs and at Doty that gives ugly a bad name. I have seen nothing in the forecast that looks to reverse the trend. Coho are going have a difficult summer it seems.

And little edit and this is not good!? Biggest El Nino in 140 years!

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/...ng-for-2026-27/

More on 2026 El Nino

https://www.newsweek.com/super-el-nino-predicted-what-means-us-weather-2026-11786847

This is going to be a summer to remember at WDFW. The commission/director **ssing match, perhaps a big El Niño, really nice drought and fire season, and the new grand super de duper online license system seems to have a glitch or seventy.

Lots of popcorn to be consumed this summer....

It does look to be a spectator sport for sure! Unless you get caught up in the mess one way or another and then not so much. Fish don't vote will be the final verdict.

which is why they keep losing. They are kinda crappy at making campaign donations, too.

I am still watching this El Nino thing and it still isnt good from my seat in the bleachers.

El Niño, marine heat will likely make Washington's warm year even warmer

AP


Salmon circle just below the surface inside a lock where they joined boats heading from salt water Shilshole Bay into fresh water Salmon Bay at the Ballard Locks in Seattle, as federal scientists monitored an ocean heat wave off the West Coast. In this Sept. 14, 2017, file photo. This winter has been one of Washington’s warmest and driest on record.

Despite the wet weather we have experienced recently, the state’s snow pack remains much lower than normal. And climate observers say conditions are likely to get worse.

“October through February was the third-warmest start to the water year on record in Washington. And those records are long. They go back to 1895,” said Karin Bumbaco, Washington’s deputy state climatologist.

The warm temperatures have meant precipitation in the mountains is falling as rain rather than snow. Even though more rain has fallen over the past couple weeks, the snowpack is still about 61% of the median.

Meanwhile, Bumbaco said the Climate Prediction Center issued an El Niño watch and a seasonal outlook for May through April. She said it wasn’t good news.

“They're expecting higher chances of above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation,” Bumbaco said.“That's even before this El Niño will kick in.”

The “watch” indicates that El Niño conditions could take hold as soon as this summer, meaning even more above-average temps, followed by another dry winter. Washington residents can expect lower streamflows, potential stress on water supplies, an increased risk of wildfires and a longer fire season.

Added to all of this, Bumbaco said, is the influence of marine heat that has persisted off the coast of Washington. It has been about a decade since a major patch of warm water that scientists referred to as “the blob” dissipated. It stuck around for nearly three years. Since then, smaller heat waves have raised water temperatures off the West Coast almost every year. Bumbaco said that extra heat in the ocean transports to the atmosphere above it, often moving inland and boosting temperatures in Western Washington.

The new normal

Research oceanographer Andrew Leising runs the marine heatwave tracker website for NOAA Fisheries, which the agency started after the first blob, which was at that time an extraordinary event. This year, he said, they have been watching a marine heat wave that appeared to be another major anomaly: At one point, it covered a surface area that was even larger than “the blob.” It shifted to a band of warm water right off the coast that persisted until mid-March, at 1 to 2 degrees above normal.

“It actually has backed off a little bit from Washington, so Washington is back to around normal temperatures” Leising said. He said Oregon and northern California saw cooling temps too, thanks to seasonal upwelling of colder water that pushes the heat offshore, starting around San Francisco and northward.

Leising said the heat is still persisting along the coast of southern California, where surfers report more pleasant water temps. But marine heat can lead to harmful algal blooms that make shellfish poisonous, reduce seafood production and can kill marine mammals.

It can also cause atmospheric systems that lock in the heat and can lead to more intense atmospheric rivers and storms.

Leising agreed that the models and current data are all pointing to El Niño arriving by late summer and fall, which will drive more coastal heat through the winter.

“So it will likely be a pretty hot year, and we're very likely to see more records being broken offshore and then again in the near shore next winter,” Leising said.

Both Leising and Bumbaco said they were not surprised to see the recent paper published by the American Geophysical Union, confirming what many have suspected: Global warming is not just continuing at a steady pace, it is accelerating.

The study showed that the past decade ranks as the fastest-warming on record globally. At the current pace, the authors wrote, before 2030 Earth will exceed the limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming set by the Paris Climate Accord.

I just saw that Hawaii is having another downpour and flash floods. When this El Niño was first talked about a couple month ago it was said that Hawaii would have one of two weather patterns, or both. Hot and dry or flooded. They are sure getting the flooded.

Last month we were on the Oregon coast and Brown Pelicans were already there (early) and looking for food.

On the other hand, if the Pacific gets warm folks can chase albacore and maybe even the odd marlin. Still be fish out there to catch, just not chrome cod.

Ah yeah CM has been on yhis awhile here.Maybe the salmon problem isn’t in the rivers; it’s in the ocean

Timothy Schuerch

Special to The Seattle Times

Washington has spent billions trying to restore salmon and save the endangered southern resident orcas that depend on them. So why aren’t the results keeping pace?

Rivers have been restored. Dams modified. Hatcheries expanded. By every traditional measure, Washington is doing the work. Yet Puget Sound Chinook — the orcas’ primary prey — remain fragile, with returns that vary widely from year to year.

What if the real bottleneck isn’t in our rivers, but in the ocean?

For decades, the North Pacific was treated as effectively limitless. Once salmon reached saltwater, survival was thought to depend largely on climate cycles and predation, not competition.

That assumption is beginning to change.

The North Pacific is vast — but it is not limitless. Each year, roughly 5 billion hatchery salmon, mostly pink and chum, are released into the ocean by the United States, Japan, Russia and others. Once in saltwater, these fish mix with wild salmon from Washington, Canada, Alaska and across the Pacific Rim, competing for the same finite food supply.

The scale is easy to overlook. But at some point, abundance itself can become a limiting factor.

A growing body of research, including long-term studies in Alaska and across the North Pacific, suggests that as total salmon abundance rises, individual fish often grow more slowly, return smaller and, in some cases, experience lower survival. Some analyses have also linked large hatchery pink salmon releases to reduced productivity in other species.

These effects are subtle but cumulative: slower growth, smaller fish and more variable returns. They tend to fall hardest on already vulnerable stocks, including Chinook — the fish southern resident orcas depend on most.

For Washington, the implications are immediate. Despite decades of investment, Chinook recovery remains inconsistent; evidence increasingly points to ocean conditions, including competition, as a key limiting factor.

This pattern is not confined to Puget Sound. In Western Alaska, salmon runs on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers have collapsed in recent years, forcing severe restrictions on Indigenous subsistence fishing — a cornerstone of cultural food security for generations. While multiple factors are involved, poor ocean survival is widely seen as central.

None of this suggests hatcheries are misguided.

They support tribal, commercial and recreational fisheries and help sustain deep cultural and economic ties to salmon. They were built to offset real habitat loss and they continue to serve that purpose. But they were developed on a key assumption: that the ocean could absorb any scale of hatchery production.

Today, that assumption looks less certain.

The North Pacific increasingly functions like a shared commons — shaped by multiple nations making independent hatchery production decisions, with no mechanism to account for cumulative impacts. And like any commons, it can be overused.

The result is not a sudden collapse, but gradual degradation: smaller fish, less predictable runs and diminishing



zoom-in
A growing body of research, including long-term studies in Alaska and across the North Pacific, suggests that as total salmon abundance rises, individual fish often grow more slowly, return smaller and, in some cases, experience lower survival. Pictured are Coho salmon at the Seattle Aquarium. UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

returns from even well-funded, well-managed recovery efforts.

Washington did not create this dynamic, and it cannot resolve it alone. But that does not place the issue out of reach.

There is already a forum for coordination: the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, which brings together the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia and Korea to manage high-seas salmon. To date, the cumulative effects of hatchery releases have not been a central focus. That should change.

A practical first step would be to pause further increases in hatchery pink and chum releases across the North Pacific, paired with improved monitoring and clear triggers for adjustment if wild stocks show signs of stress.

This is not about shutting down hatcheries. It is about recognizing limits to the carrying capacity of the North Pacific — and managing hatchery production before those limits begin to constrain the very salmon we are trying to restore.

Washington has made a generational investment in salmon recovery, driven in part by the urgent need to sustain southern resident orcas. But if ocean conditions are already constraining survival, those investments may be approaching the limits of their effectiveness.

Restoration work in rivers and estuaries is not misplaced — it is incomplete.

The question is not whether habitat restoration or hatcheries matter. It is whether we are managing the full system that salmon depend on, including the ocean they share.

The North Pacific is vast, but it is not infinite.

And if we continue to manage salmon as if it were, we should not be surprised if recovery efforts plateau.

Timothy Schuerch is an Alaska Native attorney focused on Indigenous natural resource policy and development. He spent part of his childhood in Gig Harbor.