I stopped by yesterday, what a difference 15-20 years make. Hardly anybody there (or fish either). In the mid-'90s the place was a zoo this time of year because everybody was catching fish.

I know it's been discussed, but I wonder if any consideration was made about crowd dispersal when "they" decided to eliminate the lower river runs to enhance upstream elements, or whatever the motivation was. It's a huge factor, but I guess "those" people are probably not concerned about that.

Merry Christmas!

Im sure TPL is more than happy to have blue creek parking lot desolate. Have some very fun memories in that parking lot.

No more a "A" run might have an effect on that. Typically about end of February those B run start to make their way in and goes through mid April. Then you'll see the old girl back to her true form..... maybe worse.

I think the decisions on Cowlitz steelhead, and probably salmon, were based on ESA concerns. I seriously doubt that there was much real thought given to the impacts to fishing as the decisions were made in a vacuum that does not consider fishing, just ESA and "recovery".

The early hatchery winter run stock of Chambers Creek origin fish was discontinued at the Cowlitz for the same reason it was discontinued or reduced at many hatcheries. The reason was to reduce genetic introgression between hatchery and wild steelhead. However a good case can and has been made that the Cowlitz was the least apt place for this action. The barrier dam at the Cowlitz salmon hatchery is an absolute physical barrier that prevents any unwanted hatchery salmon or steelhead from reaching the upper watershed and possibly spawning with wild fish. And as for the lower Cowlitz tributaries, even after stocking some of them with hatchery fry or smolts for decades, the Cowlitz steelhead genetic study (2010) indicated an exceedingly low level of hatchery:wild genetic introgression. That is why I said that of all western WA rivers, the Cowlitz had the least of steelhead genetic worries from its early winter hatchery stock program.

Sg

Which would suggest, Salmo, that decisions like Colwitz are based on reasons other than science.

Getting rid of the early Cowlitz winter run has been a disaster for fishing conditions on other rivers, especially for fishing guides. Just where are they supposed to go? A lot of them ended up on the Wynoochee which is now a shadow of its former self as far as a good fishing experience goes. Some guides went to other Olympic Peninsula rivers. I'm convinced that there has been no consideration for the impact to other rivers when biological programs change with a head in the sand attitude that governs WDFW. The history goes way back. For instance, when I was a fishcop on the Cowlitz in the 70's we had a tremendous run of spring Chinook, so much so that we increased the limit from two to, six, if I remember right. Stupid, stupid, stupid. So then the prime spots at the barrier dam were snared by Joe Fish Hog, who never moved from there until he got his six. Eliminated a lot of other people from the best spot. The same could be said at Baker Rock: boats anchored in prime spots and stayed there all day until the boat limited. Look at the Olympic Peninsula wild fish rivers. They are open into April, so that steelhead junkies leave the Satsop, Wynoochee and Hump after March and head north. I suggested that those should be open into April also just to spread out the effort, but noooooo. The examples go on and on.

When I started in WDG staff recognized that license sales paid their salaries. No sales, no jobs. As such, management decisions were at least guided, if not based, on impact to license sales. Hence such things as Opening Day Trout.

When I moved to WDF the agency was funded by GF. As such, at least at the staff level, there was a conservation ethic that over-rode openings, whether sport or commercial. No harvestable? No fishing.

Now, WDFW has to deal with ESA, non-consumptive species, a broader habitat concept, and is yet significantly based on license fees. I doubt that present leadership has really made the concoction that if they don't sell licenses they don't exist. But, because of the decline in species they are caught in the bind of needing to have a conservation ethic and sell licenses.

This is probably exacerbated by the lack of folks in the agency who actively, on their own (not charter boat) pursue fish and game. There is the disconnect between what they do and who is impacted.

They are in a lose-lose situation because society won't pay for the needed conservation and as they regulate the consumptive users out of state they lose funding.

Ahh the memories. "Big Steelhead 18-20# not uncommon". I thought those Chambers Crk stock were genetically small...5-8#. Cool video. Wonder what year it was shot, and wonder if Dan Ross is still fishing out of Costa Rica? Thanks for sharing.

Uhm-hmm, 18 - 20# steelhead. For every 20# steelhead, there must have been 200 7# fish, just to get some realistic perspective.

Carcassman, the Fisheries Technical Committee thought it was a science based decision (assumption really) to terminate the early hatchery winter run program, but I think that decision was already cast before the results of the genetics study were available. The assumption was that with millions upon millions of hatchery steelhead releases over 50 years, there must have been overwhelming genetic introgression with whatever few wild fish might remain. That's not how I interpret the study results however. The wild fish have no more hatchery introgression than other SW WA streams with typical to even few hatchery releases. The spawn timing separation may have been accidental, but it was very effective.

Sg

I think the real problem with Chambers fish was the return time. I tend to agree with Jeff Cederholm's idea that the early fish went up the tribs and the later fish spawned in mainstems. Even with reproductively incompetent Chambers fish, their very presence resulted in by catch of wilds. Since it is not possible in PS to fish selectively for steelhead, the presence of Chambers fish removes that component.

Saw spawner survey data from the Green and Skagit. My look ended about a decade ago but the Green lost a whole lot of trib spawning and the Skagit some. This actually does fit well with the observation that calculations show that MSY escapement goals for many PS steelhead should be lowered. If you remove a big chunk of the rearing population (they don't redistribute too far up tribs) and the remaining mainstem spawners are most of what is left then the goal can, justifiably, go down.

While watching the Vine video. The scene with guys fishing the point. I see myself. Guy in the carhart coveralls with red pullover hood.

Dude F that noise lol

Fish mitigation at it's finest.
The deal was it would happen.
Yank all the concrete out of the river.
Eye for an eye bitches.

Meanwhile money talks and power sells.

Miss those days.....Though the crowds were big, I developed alot of friendships that made fishing in the cold weather tolerable. Plus Cowlitz fish at the time were all BIG.

Quote from SG..."Uhm-hmm, 18 - 20# steelhead. For every 20# steelhead, there must have been 200 7# fish, just to get some realistic perspective".

Hey SG
I don't know about you, but out of the fish I caught and what I saw coming out of the Cow back in 80's and 90's, only a hand full were those smallies. Most were 8-12 big shouldered fish w/ many bigger. They reminded me of the typical Quinault type fish. The small ones, 6-8#ers seemed to be more prevalent in the PS streams like the Puy, Green, Sky, Sno, Wallace, etc. Those were ones I focused my attention back then. If the Chamber's typical 2 salt returned 6-8 #, where did the the big boys come from in the Cow? Did they play selective breeding games to get more of the 3-4 salt returnies? The Quinaults have been doin that for a while now and seeing measured success. Your experience w/ the dept. and knowledge w/ biology, has always been a benefit to this and other boards. Thanks for any response.

Good times! Even fishing early into the millennium was great! Miss those days....

Run-n-gun,

Selective breeding of 3-salt summer runs was common in the hatcheries in SW WA from the mid-70s to early 80s. It might have been done with winter steelhead too at some locations, but I'm not aware of it. Yes, a lot of 3-salt hatchery fish have been caught from the Cowlitz and other rivers, but if you look at 50 years of hatchery winter steelhead in the Cowlitz, there have been way more 6 - 8 # 2-salt fish than 3-salts. Selective breeding was discontinued when the Dept. observed that the smolt to adult return (SAR) was significantly lower, reducing the return on investment, since it cost the same to produce a smolt regardless of the age of the returning adult.

Sg

Pathetic chain of events and excuses that has allowed this to occur.

Wild fish................................lol.

The best thing that ever happened to the WDFG was the ESA. From the gubmits point of view.

Gave the WDFG the loophole to escape operating state hatcheries.

I knowTPL is thanking it's lucky star they nolonger have to keep the cowlitz full of steelhead 12 months of the year.

The Mighty Cowlitz? Glad I cut my teeth on the Skagit and Sauk and those "crowds?" Are you serious?

Rather have a root canal without Novacaine than put up with that Sh..! Thanks Doc for sharing that vintage footage!

BTW SE AK numbers in from ADFG last night and looks like I'll be headed to Kodiak this year for Chinook! Chasing me further and further North each year :-/ Chile looks tempting these days too! How I long for the old days!

Brewer,

You completely misunderestimate WDFW's intentions. WDFW likes to operate hatcheries, and lots of them. With hatcheries comes something called FTEs (Full Time Equivalent jobs). The more FTEs, the more jobs with the Department. The more jobs, the bigger the Department's budget. Hatcheries are perfect for a government bureaucracy.

As for Tacoma Power, it never did have ". . . to keep the Cowlitz full of steelhead 12 months of the year." Tacoma is required to provide fisheries mitigation as prescribed in its FERC license. However it appears that since the license went into effect in 2002, the FTC (fisheries technical committee) decided to reduce certain hatchery obligations that they think may favor recovery of ESA-listed species. Like it or not, they have the authority to make those recommendations, and if FERC approves, that becomes the operative mitigation requirements.

Sg

WDFW would like nothing more than to pump out hatchery fish. Whole lot easier to manage and. like Salmo says, it brings in lots and lots of money.

The desire to "restore" wild fish above the Cowlitz dams is entirely a response to ESA and the fear that more areas would be required. There is the belief that the existing habitat above the Cowlitz dams is the best available for recovery, especially Spring Chinook.

Asa long as they are working on the solution(s) they really don't actually have to do much. Cheaper to study than to implement.

One of the neater concepts of recovery is that the hatcheries there are mitigation for lost production above the dams. To pick a number, let's say that the mitigation is for a run of 10,000 springs, 10,000 steelhead, etc. If they install the necessary passage and they get those numbers back as wild fish then the hatcheries need no longer be funded by Tacoma because they have mitigated.

When I was involved, WDFW wanted Tacoma to keep funding the hatchery even if the wild production achieved mitigation.

My understanding of TPL was equal fish replacement after Mayfield dam was put in. I have heard this for decades from the locals. So yes I'm sure i have this correct.

I noticed the comment made in Vine that the dam controls the high water caused by rains. The severe downside to this control was TPL constant YoYo raising and dropping the water. We all know how this greatly negates fish bite behavior. Nothing was more agravating than know TPL had dropped the water 3' over night or raised it. It completely would change the the fishing success. Always for the worse.

Carcassman,

To the best of my knowledge, restoring salmon and steelhead above the Cowlitz dams originated in the late 1980s with the group "Friends of the Cowlitz (FOC)." They got a local state legislator to require that then WDF and WDG study the feasibility of restoring anadromous fish to the upper Cowlitz basin. This appears to have been partly in response to the Lewis County PUD proposal to construct the Cowlitz Falls Dam. FOC also sued Bonneville Power - who provided the $$ for Lewis PUD - and obtained BPA's commitment to financially support this upriver restoration. FOC had in mind a combination of both hatchery and natural fish production for the upper basin in addition to the existing hatchery production downstream of the dams. At that time, FOC, like many others did, and some still do, thought that a fish is a fish, and that hatchery and wild fish are the same.

So after Cowlitz Falls Dam had already been designed, downstream passage fishways were appended as an afterthought. It didn't work very well.

Then came ESA listings in 1997-1998, during the relicensing of Tacoma's Cowlitz dams. It's an understatement to say that has complicated things a bit. Legally Tacoma had limited ESA obligations, so all the stakeholders tried to cobble together a license that included full mitigation of project impacts to fishery resources and still passed ESA muster, which remained vague at the time.

The license terms & conditions were written such that hatchery production could be reduced by one fish for each wild fish that returned to barrier dam. (I know because I wrote it.) I read some years ago now that the FTC modified that requirement so that each wild fish would account for 4 or 5 hatchery fish since wild fish are more productive than hatchery fish. More significantly, the mitigation obligation was modified from the metric of 5-year moving averages to mitigation benchmark values (measured as recruits) to set tonnages of smolt production, more like the old license, only lower. Whether this tilts mitigation requirements out of balance remains to be seen.

One might say that WDFW's major success in the Cowlitz license is that they still have the FTEs.

Sg

Brewer posted: "My understanding of TPL was equal fish replacement after Mayfield dam was put in. I have heard this for decades from the locals. So yes I'm sure i have this correct. "

Brewer,

No disrespect intended to your local source of information, but what matters legally is what was included in the terms and conditions of Tacoma's original FERC license, as amended in about 1966 or thereabouts. So you may be correct about what your local sources told you, but understand that is not necessarily the same as what was in the license. And the license is what controls actions on the ground, or in the water in the case of hatcheries.

Sg

My understanding of TPL was equal fish replacement after Mayfield dam was put in. I have heard this for decades from the locals. So yes I'm sure i have this correct.

I noticed the comment made in Vine that the dam controls the high water caused by rains. The severe downside to this control was TPL constant YoYo raising and dropping the water. We all know how this greatly negates fish bite behavior. Nothing was more agravating than know TPL had dropped the water 3' over night or raised it. It completely would change the the fishing success. Always for the worse.

The first mitigation requirement was X fish to the dam. WDF (some would say conveniently) harvested those fish in the ocean. Tacoma complained but WDF liked how it was written...

The new license changed the parameters. One that got me was that permanent up and down passage above would need to be installed if Spring Chinook or Steelhead achieved self-sustaining status. As I recall, the first type of trap was approaching steelhead sustainability (which would trigger permanent passage) but was getting next to no springers. So, that trap was abandoned in search of a new one that would trap Springer smolts. It got more salmon, not enough for sustainability, but blew away any hopes for the steelhead. I think WDFW preferred either the Springers or overall failure............

Carcassman,

Yes, there was a numeric requirement for coho to be met at barrier dam in the 1966/67 agreement. Tacoma caught on to WDF opening the Columbia to gillnets 5 or more days per week so that the mitigation requirement could not be met. That's but one reason why Tacoma wanted a different metric in the new license.

The new license requires upstream and downstream passage for the term of the license. Different stakeholders wanted different things. So there was a measure requiring volitional passage from Mayfield Lake up and over Mossyrock if and when wild returns +> 1.0, indicating sustainability. That term also included the option of using that passage money for additional fish enhancement if the FTC agreed.

Personally I never thought it would be a good idea to transport all wild fish to Mayfield Lake to allow self sorting (which is a desirable thing) and then re-trap the adults that show up at the base of Mossyrock. Fish passage history is replete with losses between dams so the benefit of fish self sorting would be lost to fewer fish arriving at the next upstream dam. This has required giving Tiltion origin fish a mark when they arrive at the Mayfield fish counting house, but such is the price of wanting and having both hydropower and fisheries from the same river.

My impression is that different WDFW representatives wanted different things from the new license. The one thing they all seemed to agree on was no reduction in FTEs. Some care about restoring wild fish to the upper basin, and some, like Region 5 management, were most concerned about retaining harvestable salmon in the ocean and LCR, with lip service to restoring wild fish in the upper basin.

BTW, Tacoma was just starting the new juvenile downstream passage facility at Lewis PUD's Cowlitz Falls Dam in early 2016. (Complicated agreement between two utilities that weren't getting along a few years back) It should be in service either this spring (2018) or the next (2019). I need to check on this. This will be key to the reality of recoving natural salmon and steelhead production in the uppper watershed.

Sg

I agree that WDFW was rather scattered in their desires. Obviously keep the FTEs. R5 really is all about having major fisheries. As I heard a Lummi say, "Wild fish are nice but the people gotta eat".

Personally, the whole idea of getting fish around dams seems a waste of time and certainly money. Concentrate on the streams undammed in the anadromous zone. No hatcheries there. As we develop new sources of power to replace hydro, take out the most downstream dam and work upstream.

Carcassman posted: ". . . the whole idea of getting fish around dams seems a waste of time and certainly money."

I suspect that many of the people at power companies and utilities that have to provide fish passage, instream flows for fish, and hatcheries would agree with you. However, they have no legal obligations outside the area impacted by their projects. I came to regard fisheries mitigation as a legitimate cost of doing business. If the prospective benefits of a power dam are in the public interest and worth having to a energy utility, then the cost of effective - no net loss - mitigation is just part of the cost of the project, like the dam itself, the power lines, and roads and ROW.

Would you really want no anadromous fish on the Columbia River upstream of Bonneville? I think these mitigation measures are the logical price of human development in watersheds.

Sg

If we are going to mitigate, then let's really mitigate. For the ecosystem. Put half a million Chinook above Chief Joe. All we seem concerned about is mitigating the catch. Actually, the NI catch. The Mitchell Act hatcheries should have been above the dams to get fish to return there. Still, there is no way to mitigate for Columbia River salmon, through natural production, as long as the dams exist. The Columbia from Bonneville to the inlet to Roosevelt is no longer salmon habitat.

I don't think we have the money, or the will, to mitigate the ecological loss that the dams and agriculture have brought. Use hatchery fish there. Concentrate the damage and restore other watersheds. I would prefer to see the Columbia downstream of Bonneville and the OP north of GH to be exclusively wild salmonids that exist at ecosystem appropriate levels. Above the dams? Meet ecological needs with hatchery production and adults passed above all dams. No need for DS passage as the goal is to get the ecological function of spawning salmon returned.

You want to eliminate some of strongest Salmon and Steelhead and cut them off from all that Spawning habitat? To what? create a pikeminnow hatchery?

Please do just the opposite. Collect returning hatchery fish at Bonneville. The future of hatchery fish is volunteers and fish boxes on all drainages that the wild fish have been wiped out. We should have started by now.

If the wild fish can make it, fine. But spend the money where it will get results.

Good stuff, in my opinion. A realistic approach is what is needed if we want both fish and fishing to live on.

Can we go all wild in GH, while we're at it? I think it could do pretty darn well if given half a chance.