Today, the fabulous March and April fishery on my to thrive in both marine and freshwater environments, And unfortunately, a future as cloudy as a glacial river
beloved Sky is gone. The wild steelhead population in wild steelhead carry the ocean’s bounty inland as they after five days of warm rain.
such a downward spiral that even the low-impact catch migrate toward the places of their birth. And, as each Why should we care? If you’re a steelheader, the
and release season was completely shut down after the watershed provides a different set of spawning and rear- reasons are obvious. If you are not, the depleted state of
2000 season. Heartbreaking? I can’t even find words for ing conditions, it creates a unique race of steelhead. In the wild steelhead populations coast wide serves as a pow-
how I feel about it. I moved to Seattle in 1993 to be wild realm, there is no generic steelhead, only a range of erful example of a valuable resource squandered and a
closer to the fabled steelhead waters of Puget Sound. fish with characteristics adapted to their specific rivers. lesson for anglers and fish managers everywhere. On a
A city where I could work, and a great river with big As anglers, we find ourselves seeking the small, free- bigger scale, steelhead are an indicator species, the pro-
fish, less than an hour away—it seemed too good to be rising “A-Run” steelhead of the high-desert Columbia verbial canary in the coalmine of population growth
true. Of course, it was. I had planned on a lifetime of Basin rivers; the “half-pounders” of Northern California and human consumption. In other words, the health of
“A curious thing happens when fish
learning and fishing the Skykomish. Instead, I arrived just and Southern Oregon; the heavy bodied Olympic Penin- wild steelhead is a direct reflection of the health of both
stocks decline: People who aren’t aware
in time to witness the beginning of the end. sula rain forest and coastal Oregon winter fish; the mind- our watersheds and marine environments. Steelhead can
of the old levels accept the new ones
blowingly powerful August steelhead above the falls on clearly survive without us—the question is, can we sur-
as normal. Over generations, societies
Who Cares?
the Dean; the legendary Skeena giants; the high-latitude vive without them?
adjust their expectations downward to
O
kay, so that’s one river among hundreds of steel- chromers of Kamchatka and the Aleutians…
match prevailing conditions.”
head watersheds on the West Coast, right? What’s These fish range from fourteen inches to thirty pounds,
The Crumbs of Puget Sound
KENNEDY WARNE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC,
the big deal? There are still plenty of fish to catch in
APRIL, 2007
from two to nine or more years old, from heavily spotted
other places, aren’t there? And hey, if you aren’t a steel- to nearly unmarked. And yet, they share several distinctive T
he very idea that steelhead are difficult to catch—
the fish of a thousand casts—is a myth. Steelhead
header, why should you get worked up about some river traits: A willingness to come to the swung fly. The speed are actually very easy to catch. They aggressively take
closing way out in Washington? Good questions all. and strength normally associated with saltwater fish. An a variety of baits, lures and flies. The problem is, there
I would start with the fish themselves. Perfectly evolved individual beauty that haunts those who fish for them. just aren’t very many of them. Back on the Skykomish,
the eight years I fished it regularly, from 1993 to 2000,
the average run size for the entire Snohomish system
(Skykomish/Snoqualmie/Pilchuck Rivers and their
tributaries) was around 8,000 fish. Spread out over several
hundred miles of streams, that’s not many. (Compare
that to the 3,000 trout per mile on the Madison, and it’s
amazing we caught anything at all.) But it was enough to
provide challenging yet rewarding fishing, and, accord-
ing to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife,
enough to constitute a sustainable population. A look at
some historical numbers, however, shows that this num-
Photo Tim Pask
ber did not, in fact, sustain itself, and furthermore, we
were fishing for crumbs.
It is estimated that Puget Sound wild winter steel-
head are now at somewhere between 1.6 and 4 percent
of historic run size. Just to the north of the Skykom-
ish lies the famed Stillaguamish River, immortalized by
Roderick Haig-Brown and considered by many to be
Photo Jeff Bright
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