I'll add some additional info. My observations were that the tribe was very interested in catching their share of Steelhead. I worked on the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge for a number of years and witnessed first hand their efforts each season near the mouth. In addition, when we floated the river during the netting season, there was never a shortages of set nets and quite often drift nets working the river. I remember it well as the tribal members fishing almost always gave us a really nasty look.

Here is some data for anyone who is interested. The Nisqually has been closed to steelhead fishing since 1991. In 2005, only 180 steelhead spawned. In 2015, over 1500 steelhead returned. One year later in 2016, over 2000 steelhead returned. That was the largest return in 20 years. in 2016, WDFW designated the Nisqually a wild steelhead gene bank. Interesting stuff.

Please send us a link to the study of your numbers Lifter 99. Also please include all years - not just the years you selected out to promote your agenda if they are even real numbers. Those numbers seem inflated and inaccurate.
The wild steelhead coalition has a specific agenda.
This site is full of folks who are delusional in thinking that wild fish will return to fishable numbers while decimating the habitat. Less people = More wild fish
More people = Less wild fish. Guess what? There are not going to be less people here in the future.

Those numbers came from a expert steelhead biologist from trout unlimited and from the Wild Steelhead Coalition. I don't have an agenda. I am just reporting facts. If you are such an expert where are your numbers? You can't even find the numbers yourself. The reason there are more wild fish in those rivers i mentioned is because they have been closed. is that too difficult for you to figure out? If you knew anything you would know that the Nisqually has good habitat. What is your agenda? Go back under your rock if you can't figure things out.

Those numbers came from a expert steelhead biologist from trout unlimited and from the Wild Steelhead Coalition. I don't have an agenda. I am just reporting facts. If you are such an expert where are your numbers? You can't even find the numbers yourself. The reason there are more wild fish in those rivers i mentioned is because they have been closed. is that too difficult for you to figure out? If you knew anything you would know that the Nisqually has good habitat. What is your agenda? Contact well known and respected steelhead bio John McMillan of Trout Unlimited If you want numbers. Can you figure that out? The agenda of the Wild Steelhead Coalition is to bring back wild steelhead to the numbers so that we can have a c/r fishery for them using selective gear rules. Since you proclaim to be a fly fisherman you should know what that means. They have proposed a c/r steelhead fishery on the Skagit and were hoping it would happen in 2018. Do your research.

Sorry for the double post.

Hey Lifer99, way to stick it to Elijah! I would agree with your numbers. I haven't followed the Nisqually very closely since it closed but I have heard similar numbers. Another interesting fact which I have nothing to back it up except for hearsay is that the Nisqually prior to the 70's, the Steelhead run had crashed before. It came from a neighbor who had fished it maybe in the 50's or 60's, (I'm taking a guess on the years) that it went from good fishing to very poor fishing. He said the fishing got so bad he gave up bothering with it. I wonder if this is just some sort of weird cycle that the Nisqually naturally goes through? It's still one of the very few rivers I have even fished that has such a lopsided return of hen's to bucks.

Nisqually steelhead, along with most of PS, really augered in during the early 90s. If memory serves, they fell off some in the 70s, rebounded and then tanked.

I just tried to find escapement tables on the WDFW website with no success.

A well functioning population of self-sustaining steelhead should be reasonable lopsided towards females. If it is not, the population is in trouble.

Survival to first return should be pretty close to 50:50. Unfortunately, I can't find a wild stock that has a R/S that averages even 1.0. Many are quite a bit lower.

Repeat spawners are primarily female. They spawn and leave while the males essentially spawn till they die. So, the repeats are mostly female. In Argentina, where a steelhead run got established, has shown seven or eight spawnings so they can come back a lot.

Sooooo, if your run has way more females than males that should be a sign of lots of repeat spawners and (very most likely) a self sustaining population.

Interesting to know the sex ratio of the Situk (I know they have a lot of repeats) and the Kamchatka streams.

CM, I fished the Situk for about four years in a row but that was quite a few years ago. Fishing was excellent with lots of fish.. I remember catching both males and females but I can't remember the ratio. Before I fished it, you could use bait and you could keep fish. When I fished it, you could keep only one steelhead for the season but it had to be a minimum of 36" and no bait was allowed. We never kept any fish however. There is a Spring and Fall run in the river. If I remember correctly, the numbers of fish in the Spring run (April and May) are larger then the Fall run but the Fall run fish tend to be larger. ADFG cut steelhead retention and eliminated bait fishing (before I fished it) because the numbers of fish were dropping drastically. When I fished it the numbers had rebounded nicely. But I haven't been there in more than 10 years. A tiny brushy stream but terrific numbers of fish.

I remember the Situk had good runs of salmon also. Sockeye, pinks and Chinook in the summer months a great run of coho from mid August into September. I fished it once for coho( more than 20 years ago) around the first of September and fishing was great for large coho. I can't remember if the daily limit was two or three coho. If memory serves me correctly I think the average yearly coho run was around 30,000 back then. The river runs about 20 miles from Situk Lake to the ocean. But all the fishing is done in the lower 12 miles or so of the river. Lots of large Bull Trout also. An amazing little river.

Odd that you find strong runs of steelhead in association with strong runs of salmon. Almost as if they were connected......

Nice personal attacks Lifter99. Could we get your first name at least so that you don't have to hide behind the computer screen? Your response is very typical of other fly fishermen that I have encountered on the river who think that they are better than everyone else. I can see that you are also well to do (travelling to fish in AK) and probably think that you are better than everyone else also. Please continue to go to AK to fish and don't ruin our fisheries here. Just because I fly fish that does not mean that I have to adhere to your agenda of catch and release. I like to harvest.
Your numbers are typical of what folks do with a hidden selfish agenda. Only present 2 years that are hand selected (probably made up) and no concrete facts. Here is a concrete fact: No river has been reopened to harvestable numbers of fish once hatchery production has been cut. Can you point out one river in which the wild population has rebounded after hatchery cuts to harvestable numbers?
Waiting patiently for your response... and please don't say that it needs more time because that is what the bios have been saying for the past 20+ years.

Elijah, I am not personally attacking you. Just do your research before you make statements. I am not a fly fisherman and I like to eat and harvest fish also. But you don't harvest wild fish when they are recovering.I am not well to do but when I went to Yakutat it was quite a few years ago and it was not very expensive. I had frequent flyer miles for the plane ticket. The place where we stayed (Glacier Bear Lodge) was a few hundred dollars each for a a room, food , drift boat and a fishing license. Four days and 3 nights was less than $1000 for each of the 3 or 4 guys in our group. I don't know what the costs are now. Again do you research.
The Skagit steelhead numbers have rebounded enough for a fishery (c/r) but no c/r season yet. All rivers in Washington are now closed to the KILLING of wild steelhead. Maybe the closure will be permanent even if wild numbers rebound. There are plenty of other fish to eat (hatchery salmon for example). If you dispute the wild steelhead numbers I mentioned, then contact the steelhead bio I already gave you the name of. Again, please do you research and reading. Do you have scientific data and numbers to dispute the numbers I gave instead of just saying those numbers are wrong. You sound a little like just another disgruntled angler.

CM, yes it is an amazing productive little river. It will be interesting to look at the present day numbers for the Situk.

And , like I said, the Situk is a short run river. 20 miles long through heavily forested (At least when I was there) land and very little if any flooding. Very little bank access. Only bank access was at the 9 mile bridge (?) where the boats were launched and at the takeout in the lower river ( A short distance up from the mouth). Like I said, I fished it four years in a row along time ago. Last week of April to the first week of May. The weather was never the same each year we went. One year was sunny and clear and the next year there was 5 ft. of snow on the ground. Lots of brown bear and moose.

I love steelhead fishing as much as anybody but I don't feel that I have to kill a wild steelhead to have something to eat. Even when you could kill wild steelhead I kept very few many years ago. I will take a hatchery steelhead home to smoke. Most rivers that are planted with hatchery steelhead have a mandatory kill rule on them. I eat plenty of salmon. I prefer the taste of salmon to steelhead anyway.

Since this thread about Nisqually chum salmon and the river closure has morphed into Nisqually steelhead, there are some salient points to be made. It's counter-productive to blame either, and most likely untrue, non-Indian sportfishing or treaty tribal fishing for the decline in Nisqually wild steelhead abundance. The Nisqually steelhead run tanked beginning around 1990 just like all the other Puget Sound steelhead runs did. It was and still is a marine survival thing, not a sport-fishing or treaty net fishing thing. Even though it is likely true that the sport and tribal harvests reduced the spawning escapements in the seasons around 1990, steelhead are very resilient, and their populations typically rebound very well when the limiting factor is removed.

Targeted harvest of steelhead last occurred in 1993 for both the treaty and non-treaty fishermen. The population has had roughly 25 years, six generations, of insignificant harvest. (Some poaching does occur, by both treaty and non-treaty fishermen, just like on many other rivers, but the take is not enough to limit the productivity of the populations.) The population has not rebounded to the numbers witnessed in the 1980s because the factor limiting their abundance - marine survival - has not been removed.

There were significant improvements in spawning escapements in 2015 and 2016, which parallels the good escapements of most Puget Sound rivers during those same years. The most likely reason is that marine survival was better for all the runs at that time, but has not been sustained.

For those who like to harvest and eat steelhead, you need to support hatchery steelhead programs where possible. It is highly unlikely that wild steelhead harvest will ever be allowed in WA state again. With 7 million people in the state, and more coming here every year, there is just no way wild steelhead populations will recover to a level that supports a general harvest season. I think we will be fortunate if we can just maintain self-sustaining wild populations into the future. Some of them may support CNR seasons.

The Skagit River was mentioned above in this thread. Let me be clear: Skagit steelhead have not recovered from anything except the record low escapement of 2,500 spawners in 2009. The run has average around 8,000 steelhead for the last 40 years, ranging from the low of 2,500 in 2009 to 16,000 in 1988/ The river was closed to fishing after 2009 and remained closed because WDFW did not have a management plan approved by NMFS. In 2012 a grass-roots group calling itself Occupy Skagit (OS) analyzed Skagit steelhead data, determined that the run was not threatened or endangered, but was included in the Puget Sound-wide ESA listing. So OS asked the WDFW Commission to have the Department prepare a management plan for submission to NMFS. WDFW and the Skagit treaty tribes did finally develop the plan, and NMFS approved it last April. The Skagit CNR steelhead season that was intended to run from Feb. 1 to Apr. 30 opened on Apr. 12, Tues - Sun, allowing 12 days of fishing to the end of the month.

The Skagit will have a steelhead season again next year from Feb. 1 - Apr. 30, provided NMFS approves the co-managers' annual steelhead plan, which is compliant with the 5-year Resource Management Plan (RMP) NMFS approved last April. So there is no reason for NMFS not to approve it, other than much of the federal governement shut down at midnight last night. I'm adding this because the Nisqually might be a good candidate for a steelhead RMP in seasons when marine survival supports runs near or above the escapement goal.

While I'm on this steelhead topic, I'll add that IMO most all PS steelhead rivers are and have been at their natural carrying capacity in recent years. With no, or next to no targeting fishing on wild steelhead, wild populations certainly aren't limited by over-fishing by anyone. It appears that marine conditions have been controlling steelhead abundance in PS for nearly 30 years, certainly for the last 20. And with the steelhead smolt tagging studies over the last 10 years or so, it looks like much of that marine survival problem is with predation here in PS. My tagged smolt ended its seaward migration when it began showing up in the migration of a harbor seal following the tide in and out at the Nisqually River mouth and delta. The upshot is that fishing for steelhead in Puget Sound will be limited for the foreseeable future. If pinniped removal is supported for orca survival, I think both Chinook and steelhead smolt survival will benefit nearly proportionately.

Salmo - thanks for the historical refresher. My 2017 nisqually adoptee ended up back and forth between McNeil and The Narrows in the belly of the beastly seal.