The end of April concludes the 2024-2025 steelhead year on the Deschutes River. Portland General Electric still has not updated their Deschutes fish count spreadsheet on their website, but I had an email exchange with a biologist and manager in their fisheries department and received the info I needed for this post. I have written a little on this topic recently (see here and here), so this post will primarily be updates followed by some related commentary. 968 steelhead were mostly passed into Lake Billy Chinook (some were released directly into a tributary of LBC), smashing the previous record. This is great news, but, as I have mentioned in prior posts, this is not quite as good as it looks on the surface.

The 968 adult steelhead can be broken down into subcategories. Only six were “natural origin” fish (“RM” fish, if you know what that means, search this blog if you want an explanation), meaning they are the offspring of natural adult spawning in one of the tributaries of Lake Billy Chinook. The entire purpose of the reintroduction program is to have a self-sustaining population of natural origin fish. Six Upper Basin “wild” fish is a long way from accomplishing the goal, but it is a record.

679 of the returning adults were spawned in the Round Butte Hatchery, raised at Wizard Falls hatchery for a year to smolt size, trucked to an acclimation pen somewhere in the Upper Basin, released into a stream, and then, hopefully, headed down to Lake Billy Chinook and out to the ocean. 679 is a record return of these “LM” fish.

283 of the adults released into Lake Billy Chinook were excess Round Butte Hatchery stock. These fish were raised in RBH and released directly in the Deschutes. They never saw the Upper Basin prior to being captured in the Pelton Fish Trap and trucked upstream around the dam complex. If memory serves me correctly, this is only the second time that there were enough returning adult RBH fish to have an excess that could be moved above the dam complex.

So, is this all good news? Yes and no. The reintroduction program remains very far off from meeting its goal for creating a self sustaining population of natural origin (“wild”) fish. On the other hand, for the first time enough adults have been passed from the Lower Deschutes into the Upper Basin to have a reasonable chance for meaningful natural spawning. And, in fact, redds have been found in LBC tributaries in far higher numbers than in the past.

On a related note, the Deschutes River Conservancy recently held a seminar on resident fish status in the Upper Deschutes Basin and the reintroduction program. There was little new information for me, but it was a reasonable overview and could provide good background for some readers. I was also happy to hear that good ocean conditions were cited as the primary reason for improved steelhead returns this year. PGE has been doing excellent work to improve their reintroduction program, and these actions certainly played a role, but the massive increase in returns compared to prior years is due to improved ocean conditions. There is no doubt about it. Given that these conditions are likely transitory, I don’t think huge returns are the new normal. PGE is not going to reverse global warming.

I was perplexed when the biologists stated that the “summer” and “spring” designations for chinook and steelhead correspond to when the fish spawn. This is not accurate. It has to do when the fish start leaving the ocean and enter rivers to spawn. Deschutes summer steelhead enter the river in the summer but spawn the following winter and spring. There are no winter steelhead in the Columbia Basin, including the Deschutes, but winter steelhead enter other Oregon winters in the winter and also spawn in the winter and spring. Summer fish typically travel future inland and need much more time to reach their spawning grounds.

Spring chinook enter in the spring and spawn in the fall while fall chinook enter and spawn in the fall. Fall chinook are larger than spring chinook and can travel faster. Spring chinook are prized for their fat content, which they need to live on for their longer stay in fresh water. This detail is not a big deal, but I found it curious that it was not accurately stated in the seminar.

Also, while the numbers of steelhead that have been passed into the Upper Basin this year are phenomenal, no mention was made of last year’s spring chinook returns, which remain terrible. See this post for more on that. Note that the first spring chinook of this season arrived at the Pelton Trap on April 30. At least the spring chinook numbers are better than sockeye returns which no one even bothers to talk about any more.