Willamette Valley Summer Steelhead: 

(Hot Fish, Hot Flies, and Urban Fun)

Jay W. Nicholas

May 2008

In my dreams –

I don’t really live here.  I live beside a river.  Wild salmon and steelhead enter the river all year-round.  In my dreams I fish Clousers over cruising schools of salmon and cutthroat in the estuary.  I swing big leeches over big buck steelhead laying in boulder-studded glides.  I fish Spruce flies over ledges and sunken logs where twenty-inch Blueback ambush my fly.  When the water is high, I hike into fern fringed streams and chase chrome winter steelhead with little nymphs and egg-patterns in pocket water.  I never see another boot print in the sand ahead of me.  I get great photos and release magnificent fish, unharmed, to create generation after generation of Pacific salmon to roam the river, the estuary, and clear out into the Alaska Gyre during their life cycle.

But in real life –  

I live here in the Willamette Valley, surrounded by people, industry, grass fields, nurseries, vineyards, I-5, and an urbanized Willamette River.  The only native anadromous species in the upper Willamette are spring Chinook and winter steelhead.  Not Fall Chinook.  Not coho salmon.  Not sea-run Cutthroat.  And definitely not summer steelhead.  But, reality rules, as they say, and my urban reality includes fishing for hatchery summer steelhead, even though my dreams are wilder and far more adventurous.

Historically –  

Native steelhead in the Upper Willamette basin are characterized by a late spring run-timing.   Historically, it seems, it was only possible for anadromous fish to pass upstream over Willamette falls when Cascade snow-melt raised Willamette flows and Columbia River floods backed up the lower Willamette 20 feet higher than usual, making the falls more negotiable.

These conditions only existed in the spring, so coho, fall Chinook, anadromous cutthroat, and early-run winter steelhead were effectively blocked until the falls was laddered to provide year-round upstream migration.  Native winter steelhead populations existed in the Molalla; North and South Santiam; and Calapooia rivers, but not upstream from these basins. 

Native spring Chinook, though, thrived in these basins and also upstream in the McKenzie, the Coast Fork, the Middle Fork, and even the North Fork of the Middle Fork of the Willamette.  That was before the glory days of over fishing, dam building, logging, urbanization, stream channelization, pollution and all the activities that folks once considered a normal part of taming nature. 

Nowadays, native winter steelhead are doing OK in their four historical basins (although their abundance and distribution is mere shadow of what it once was.  In contrast, native spring Chinook above Willamette Falls are only doing OK in the McKenzie River; these fish are close to gone from the rest of the basins where they once thrived in the upper Willamette.

Willamette summer steelhead – research and mitigation

Today, runs of hatchery summer steelhead provide consistent fisheries in the upper Willamette and have expanded the opportunity for anglers to pursue steelhead from a few months to almost year-round.

Summer steelhead were introduced into the Willamette to provide mitigation for construction of dams on the Santiam system – dams that blocked native winters from much of their historical spawning and rearing areas.  ODFW introduced summer steelhead instead of the native winter fish because they were likely to provide angling opportunity for many months during the spring, summer, and fall. 

By the way, these summer steelhead are typically two-salt fish (they spend two summer seasons in the ocean before returning, and range in size from 6-10 pounds.   A few three-salt fish are usually present each year, and these larger fish can really be exciting.  I caught a 17-pound summer back in the 1980s, and a friend caught an honest-to-goodness 19-pounder; these are exceptional fish and there are never many caught in any given year.

Early research conducted by ODFW involved evaluating returns of both Skamania (Washington) and Siletz (Oregon) stocks.  This research, conducted during the 1960s, proved that Siletz summers were highly susceptible to Ceratomyxa shasta (a microscopic myxosporean protozoan parasite).  Essentially none of the Siletz hatchery fish survived to return in the Willamette system.  Skamania-stock summers, though, are inherently resistant to this disease and have formed the basis for all the hatchery summer steelhead programs in the Willamette.

Have hatchery fish established a natural run of summer steelhead? 

It seems not.  Virtually all of the hatchery summers are fin-clipped for positive identification, and so that anglers can keep hatchery fish but release any wild steelhead they may catch.  It turns out that only a handful of unmarked summers show up each year – and some of these are actually hatchery fish that escaped the marking process. 

Curiously –  

A small number of unmarked “summer” steelhead show up each year.  I have caught a handful of these unmarked summers in May and June, but these fish are more often seen in the fall – later than we expect Skamania summer fish and before we expect the native winter steelhead.  I have looked closely at these fish.  Some are obviously hatchery fish that eluded the adipose fin-clip.  Their dorsal fins are eroded.  They show a lot of weird scale regeneration patterns, perhaps a symptom of de-scaling in a hatchery environment.  Two of the unmarked steelhead I have seen, however, had perfect fins and perfect scales.  I think that these two fish were born in the gravel. 

Were they offspring of hatchery summer steelhead?  Or were these unmarked steelhead a cross between a hatchery summer and a wild winter?  I suggest that the answer is a solid maybe to both possibilities.  Clearly, however, the hatchery summer steelhead have not established an abundant, self-sustaining run, so our Willamette Valley summer steelhead fishing depends on the annual re-stocking of hatchery smolts.

How abundant are summer steelhead above Willamette Falls?

The run of summer steelhead that passes upstream over Willamette Falls each summer varies – and varies a lot.  At the end of June in 2007, about 10 thousand summer steelhead had been counted at Willamette Falls.  The run at the same time in 2006 was nearly double the 2007 number at about 19 thousand fish.  Summer steelhead runs have been as high as thirty thousand fish. 

Looking at high daily or weekly fish counts at Willamette Falls (posted on the ODFW web site) gives me inspiration, figuring that it might take 7-12 days for s summer steelhead to pass through the fish ladder and migrate upstream to where I will be fishing.  Realistically, though, even mediocre counts don’t keep me from throwing my fly rod in the truck and going fishing anyway.  After all, one good summer steelhead could come to my fly on any given day, and that one fish could create a memory to last a lifetime.  I have had very good summer steelhead fishing on poor run-years, and very poor fishing on very good run-years.  Go figure.

CONTINUE TO PART 2…….