Tokul Creek To Cease Producing Early Winter Steelhead

It’s the end of Tokul Creek Hatchery early winter-run production and crossed fingers that federal overseers will eventually approve a new state-tribal broodstock program for the future of consumptive steelheading opportunities on the Snoqualmie River.

A WINTER STEELHEAD SMOLT LEAVES TOKUL CREEK HATCHERY FOLLOWING A LAWSUIT SETTLEMENT IN THE MID-2010S. (DEBI SANCHEZ)

Per a letter signed by WDFW and the Tulalip Tribes yesterday, reviews of the status of winter steelhead in the King County system and performance of the hatchery program led both entities to “(determine) that the best use of the facility will be to terminate the early winter steelhead program and initiate an integrated winter steelhead program.”

In a statement, WDFW pointed to a need “to reduce interbreeding between early winter hatchery and wild steelhead.”

They will now lean on the National Marine Fisheries Service to now “prioritize the ESA review and any necessary NEPA processes” once they submit a hatchery genetic management plan to use wild fish as broodstock for a new production program.

WDFW has raised Chambers Creek-stock early winter steelhead smolts for decades at Tokul Creek, but those being reared for release next spring will instead be put in lakes not connected to the sea, making the roughly 75,000 let loose this past spring the end of the line when they largely come back for anglers in winter 2025-26 and a few straggling three-salts return in 2026-27.

The news will be both a bitter pill – some of the first articles I did for this magazine back in 2008 were about threats to the hatchery both then and faced back in the early 1930s – and a sliver of a glimmer of a hope, as hopefully a second integrated steelhead broodstock program eventually comes online in the Snohomish Basin.

Integrated programs typically use later, more naturally timed wild winter steelhead as their broodstock, but given the state of the Endangered Species Act-listed Puget Sound population, there will be a lot of scrutiny on whatever plan the state and tribes come up with. A new summer-run program on the neighboring Skykomish using, essentially, natural-origin fish returning to a portion of the watershed otherwise cut off by insurmountable falls faced a lawsuit before ultimately being approved by the feds.

“Development of the HGMP could likely be completed within six months,” forecasts Edward Eleazer, WDFW Region 4 Fish Program manager, “but the schedule for NMFS to complete the consultation is highly uncertain.”

There had been rumors of a cut or cessation coming to Tokul Creek in recent weeks, and last Friday morning, Hal Boynton of the Steelhead Trout Club of Washington brought it up before the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission during public comment.

He called for at least one more year of smolt releases along with more comprehensive testing for genetic introgression between hatchery and wild steelhead in the system, and for the commission to review those results before any production changes were implemented.

“In many instances, in other hatcheries like the Green and the Nisqually and on and on, they’ve closed all the major steelhead programs in the state and the wild fish haven’t rebounded. So we ought to be really careful before this one cut out, and it’ll be the death knell for steelhead in our state,” Boynton told the commission.

Gabe Miller, who caught his first steelhead on Tokul Creek while growing up in nearby North Bend and Snoqualmie and is active in Pugetropolis fishery issues, feels it’s “pretty much going to be a wrap” on steelheading on the system.

He says while it would be good to use native fish for any future broodstock program, he questions how collecting them might even be possible given the low returns to the greater Snohomish River watershed.

Instead, Miller says managers should look at converting Tokul into a coho hatchery. The Snoqualmie is known for a very late-returning run of silvers and he recalls fishing for winter steelhead between Plum Landing and Fall City and seeing “firetrucks scooting around.”

“It would be better than nothing,” Miller says.

WILL THE LAST WINTER STEELHEAD SMOLT LEAVING TOKUL PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS? (DEBI SANCHEZ)

WDFW and the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe also notified NMFS that the poorly performing small Chambers Creek program on the Dungeness River, where “(no) eggs were collected last year, and no juvenile steelhead are currently being reared at the facility,” will also be axed with no replacement stated.

The news on both Tokul and the Dungeness comes as WDFW also posted an update on the state of Puget Sound steelheading and its legislatively funded Quicksilver Portfolio, meant to be a bridge from the past management era.

The nine-page report can be found here, but per WDFW, highlights include:

  • Increased monitoring of wild steelhead presence and spawning activity in the Nooksack, Samish, Skagit, Stillaguamish, and Snohomish watersheds to better understand their population status and run timing.
  • Development of hydroacoustic/sonar and video monitoring tools on the Skagit, Samish, and Nooksack rivers to gauge steelhead and salmon returns in real-time.
  • Initiation of a wild summer steelhead broodstock program and fishery on the Skykomish River to replace the prior hatchery program which used out-of-basin Skamania steelhead stock.
  • Conducted catch and release fisheries for wild steelhead on the Skagit and Sauk rivers under a federally approved Resource Management Plan (RMP) valid from March 2023 through April 2032.

All in all, some pretty bad news, a Hail Mary that who knows when will come down, and some progress elsewhere. Lo, the state of steelheading in Puget Sound circa late 2024.