Willamette Winter Steelhead Run Comes In At 20-year High

Following on the heels of a record run of coho past Willamette Falls last fall is a best-in-two-decades return of winter steelhead, a continuation of a remarkable turnaround for a stock that was in dire straits not so long ago.

As fish continue to trickle up the fish ladder at Oregon City, a total of 7,774 winter steelhead (98 percent of which are wild) have been counted there, the most since 2004 – and about nine and a half times as many as the low mark, 2017’s 822.

Army Corps of Engineers biologist Greg Taylor pointed to ocean conditions as “the one biggest thing to explain it,” according to Zach Urness, outdoor reporter for the Salem Statesman-Journal.

Lethal removal of sea lions seen at the falls may also be playing a role in providing “some relief to the fish,” according to a high-ranking ODFW official also quoted in that article.

Through an exemption essentially to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, 45 California and one Stellar sea lions have been euthanized since 2018, the year after as many as 41 of the pinnipeds had gathered there to feed on salmonids, creating an 89 percent chance that at least one of the upper Willamette’s Endangered Species Act-listed steelhead runs would go extinct if nothing were done.

Other factors affecting steelhead survival include river conditions. While this year’s fish likely were headed to the Pacific or out in the ocean during the past two very hot summers, some of their progeny will also rear for an extended period in watersheds scorched in 2020’s Labor Day wildfires.

It’s too early to say if this year’s Willamette summer steelhead, which also have begun ascending the ladder at the falls, will have faired as well at sea as the winters, but there might be something of a positive relationship between the stocks, at least in relatively stronger winter years, past counts suggest. Time will tell.

Yet even as future hatchery summer-run fisheries are threatened with draconian cuts by the Corps of Engineers, winter steelheaders on the Santiam are probably still glowing about a wild fish season that just might have been the best in a quarter century, one fisherman told Urness.

It’s quite a turnaround. As recently as this time in 2020, ODFW was pointing out to North and South Santiam anglers that winter steelhead were closed to angling and should be left alone in favor of spring Chinook and summer steelhead. Fishing resumed in 2021, but earlier this year, the agency did have to remind them that bait is still not allowed till later this month.

Winter-runs return to a number of other streams on both sides of the middle and northern Willamette Valley, according to ODFW. They and spring Chinook were historically the only salmonids above the falls, due to their run timing that brought them upstream when there was enough runoff to ascend the basalt U before fish ladders were installed there.

For the historic record, the most winter steelhead seen at the falls since 1971, which is as far back as ODFW’s posted stats go, is that same year’s 26,647, followed by 1988’s 23,378 and 1972’s 23,257.

Since 2000, the high mark is 16,658 in 2002 and 10,752 the year before.

Still, 2024’s run will go down as exceeding the five-, 10 and 20-year averages by wide margins, and that’s something to cheer about too.

To further encourage their recovery, the National Marine Fisheries Service’s plan places a high priority on reestablishing the fish above the Willamette’s numerous Corps of Engineers dams, protecting the best existing habitat and restoring degraded areas where it makes strategic sense.