Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission

EarthFix, through Seattle public radio station KUOW, reported on the latest changes in the Elwha River, including observing juvenile salmon emerging from egg nests in the river’s upper watershed. Two Lower Elwha Klallam natural resources technicians, Virgil Bennett and Gabe Youngman, are featured, who check the fish traps and keep track of the smolts in the watershed.

From the transcript:

Virgil Bennett and Gabe Youngman

…

The Quinault Indian Nation opposes the construction of two dams proposed for the Chehalis River basin and has requested government-to-government consultation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to discuss potential environmental impacts. “We fear that constructing the dams would add to the sad legacy of problems caused by decades of neglect and damage to ecological processes that are vital to the salmon resources protected by …

The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has begun preparing the lower Elwha River’s floodplain for the influx of sediment expected to come down the river after the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams are deconstructed starting in 2011.

“This work in the floodplain will help restore natural habitat forming processes in preparation for the expected release of the 20 million cubic feet of sediment trapped behind the dams,” …

The Seattle Times posted this story about Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe’s steelhead broodstock program efforts recently:

Tribe reviving wild Elwha steelhead

In an effort to keep the wild steelhead in the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula from disappearing forever, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe is hard at work raising them in a hatchery.

The fish being raised at the tribe’s hatchery aren’t hatchery fish, but

…

LOWER ELWHA – The setup looks complicated. Two tables covered with data sheets, laptops, glass slides, a digital scale and instruments for taking blood samples are set up next to the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe’s hatchery ponds. Steelhead are being pulled from the ponds and weighed, measured, sampled and spawned. Each of nearly a dozen people have a specific job in this organized chaos to help …

The Kitsap Sun, Tacoma Daily Index and Tacoma News Tribune reported on the signing of the settlement agreement between Skokomish Tribe and the City of Tacoma on Jan 12.

From the Kitsap Sun:

For 80 years, Tacoma’s Cushman Dam Project in southern Hood Canal has been like an open wound for the Skokomish people, tribal officials say. But an agreement signed Monday could launch a

…

[display_podcast]
PORT ANGELES (October 16, 2008) - There was a sense of urgency when tribal, state and federal biologists recently snorkeled for 5,000 freshwater mussels along the bottom of a 300-foot-long shallow side channel of the Elwha River. A dredge was slated the next day to dig up the side channel as part of construction of the Elwha Water Treatment Facility.

This mussel rescue was part …

The Skagit Valley Herald has an article about PSE’s Baker River project:

The utility hopes the new $40 million fish passage system and $112 million total in other improvements in the works will quadruple current numbers of Baker River sockeye salmon returning to the watershed to spawn.

Seattle Times:

For more than a century, salmon followed Goldsborough Creek as it passed through the grounds of a sawmill, into the middle of Shelton and toward the woods beyond — before bumping smack into a 30-foot-high wall called the Goldsborough Dam.

And for decades, the salmon runs limped along, blocked from prime spawning grounds by the manmade barrier of wood and concrete.

…

It

…

Seattle Times:

Native steelhead in the Elwha River are being closely monitored to ensure they stay out of harm’s way when two fish-blocking dams are torn down in 2009.

In the past two years, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has been developing a broodstock from late-winter steelhead, which is proposed for a “threatened” listing under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The tribe has been gathering

…