Young Tokul Creek Hatchery Steelhead Stocked In Palouse’s Rock Lake

Another Eastern Washington lake is being stocked with Westside steelhead, this time Rock Lake on the Palouse, and they’re expected to provide a good fishery in coming years if the past is any guide.

WDFW released 80,000 young steelhead into the long, narrow, deep, windprone lake earlier this week after deciding last fall to end early winter-timed hatchery production at the Snoqualmie River’s Tokul Creek Hatchery.

Stocked at 10 to the pound, the fish are expected to reach 10 to 11 inches in Rock’s rich waters by late summer, according to the agency, which believes they will add to an “already dynamic fishery” that is home to good seasonal angling for rainbow and brown trout as well as bass, crappie and other species.

It’s the second time in about a decade that steelhead have been put in Rock.

“Those earlier fish created quite the good fishery,” notes state district fisheries biologist Randy Osborne this afternoon. “They lasted, like any rainbow, for about four years or so, which triggered a lot of interest in the fishery. By the time they started getting fished out, people were catching steelhead somewhere in the 18-inch range.”

Rock was again chosen for this latest release because it isn’t well connected to streams where wild steelhead might be present. The lake drains down Rock Creek into the Palouse River and over Palouse Falls into the Snake.

If you’re getting strong deja vu all over again vibes, well, it’s because you are.

Earlier this winter, WDFW released over 90,000 young Washougal River steelhead into Banks Lake following a lawsuit settlement with Wild Fish Conservancy and The Conservation Angler that terminated the program.

And back in the mid-2010s, as a result of a different lawsuit settlement with WFC over early winter hatchery steelhead programs in Pugetropolis, WDFW released 370,000 smolts into Sprague Lake and 255,000 into Rock.

This month’s release at Rock is related to the second of those.

Following that settlement and other paperwork, the National Marine Fisheries Service came out with new biological opinions authorizing releases of early-winter-timed steelhead into Puget Sound rivers. With the Tokul Creek program, NMFS required four straight years of monitoring for what’s known as PEHC, or proportion effective hatchery contribution, in wild fish.

A little gene flow that was also declining over time would have been OK, but sampling showed that allowable limits were being greatly exceeded, so WDFW pulled the plug.

While one local angler has questioned the relatively low number of fish that state biologists sampled, trucking the young steelhead that had been rearing at Tokul over to Rock all but ends the program, since no hatchery adults that return this season, next winter or the following and final one for the stock will be spawned.

At both Tokul and on the Washougal, WDFW does hope to switch to integrated winter steelhead broodstock programs. That will take some work in the form of writing new hatchery genetic management plans to collect wild adults AND getting the busy – and potentially very understaffed – folks at NMFS to sign off on them.

Meanwhile, those Tokul fish should start showing up on Palouse anglers’ lines later this year.

“You can tell the difference between the rainbows and the steelhead in Rock Lake because all the new fish are adipose fin clipped,” says Osborne, the biologist. “So four years down the road if someone catches one missing an adipose fin, they will know it’s this year’s plant.”

According to WDFW spokesman Chase Gunnell, the Tokul fish “were clipped last summer before the decision was made to end the segregated early-winter steelhead program.”  

Osborne says managers expect about the same level of interest and same kind of fishing as back in the late 2010s, though he does point out that fewer steelhead are being stocked this go-around.

A Whitman County Gazette article from 2017 interviewed anglers catching steelhead off the banks near the rough state boat ramp at Rock’s west end.

“Also, a reminder that people do not need a catch record card when fishing for these steelhead,” Osborne adds.