As of two days ago, February 21, roughly 188 steelhead have moved up the Opal Springs fish ladder near the bottom of the Crooked River. 54 of these have also gone back down. I say “roughly” as a few fish have been known to go up the ladder, relatively quickly go back down, and then head back up. So, there could be a little double counting. Others go up, spawn, and then head down. Remember, it is illegal to fish for steelhead above Round Butte Dam.

It is important to understand that almost none of these fish were spawned in the Upper Basin. They are hatchery fish that were planted as smolts in one of the tributaries of Lake Billy Chinook or are excess Round Butte Hatchery fish that never spent any time above LBC. So, these steelhead are confused and typically move around a lot in LBC, head up and down tributaries looking for a place to spawn, or simply die in LBC after not finding a place they like. Hatchery fish are not wild fish and have dramatically lower rates of reproductive success. Steelhead who go up the Crooked can also pass down through the ladder as kelts (fish that have spawned).

Here’s a video of a steelhead moving down through the ladder.

Unfortunately, Portland General Electric has not updated their fish count data since the end of 2024 so I don’t know how many steelhead have been passed into LBC in total but I think the last email I received said it was around 850 as the of end of January. It is typical for these fish to spend a lot of time exploring before they finally decide on a tributary to settle in. I expect the counts in the Crooked to go up significantly before the run is over a few months from now.

Side note: I am so frustrated with Gmail. To the point I may have to find another email solution (other than Yahoo). Not long ago I received an email from PGE with some fish count data as of the end of January. I deleted it as I like to go to their website and see the raw daily fish count data. When I did that this morning I saw that they have not updated their data since the end of 2024. So, I searched Gmail for the sender and the email was gone. In fact, all of the monthly emails were gone since almost a year ago. This is the second time in the recent past where an email that I did not save was permanently deleted sooner than it should have been. So frustrating.